Tribute to Jo O-ryeon

You may know about "Marine Boy" Park Tae-hwan, the darling South Korean Olympic swimmer. But you probably haven't heard of the godfather of Korean swimming, the "Asian Seal," Jo O-ryeon. Tribute to Jo O-ryeon (1952 – 2009) So I got curious after typing up an off hand comment in my last post , and did some quick googling abou…

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How big is Korea? Maps of South Korea on top of other countries

Tonight, instead of catching up on sleep, I was playing around on  The True Size Of ...  which lets you drag outlines of countries on a world map to see how they compare. All the sizes are apparently accurate and whatever and it gives you a pretty good idea of how these places stack up relatively. The takeaway of course isn't how small Korea is,…

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Simple fix for natural (reverse) scrolling in Lubuntu 18.04

Here is a simple fix for enabling natural (reverse) scrolling in Lubuntu 18.04 Background The default trackpad scrolling behavior in Lubuntu was driving me crazy. When I scroll my fingers up, I want the content to move upward, i.e. I want to scroll down the page. The default on Lubuntu, even in 18.04 is still the opposite. I feel like a fighter pi…

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Naver reveals cleaner new home screen, with voice assistant access and content reorganization

It looks like the Naver homepage refresh is almost done. Naver released a promo video showing how the app will look. Nice and clean. Here's a more upclose view: Here's the short video. Watch for yourself. [Direct link  or embedded below] You can see in the video that in addition to quick access to all basic Naver services, that cute little …

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Google Maps Street View car schedule in Korea

Google has a page that shows current worldwide street view coverage . Here's the map for Korea. It's interactive, so you can zoom all around the country to see if your area has been covered. Here's an upclose shot of the capital area. You can see little dots of coverage elsewhere even out in the sea, usually where special collections we…

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Seoullo 7017 to get major 7-leg expansion

This is pretty amazing. The elevated pedestrian walkway over the Seoul Station area is due to be massively expanded, with 7 new legs branching off into neighboring areas off from the main original portion. Soon you'll be able to walk up in the sky around a huge portion of downtown Seoul. Here are the details from a Seoul City press release: Th…

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Naver and Google logo doodles for Chuseok 2018

As usual, Naver's homepage will feature some cute doodles to celebrate Chuseok. This year (2018) they'll be from an artist that goes by "Kimi & 12" (pronounced "Kimmy and ill-ee"). They're all cute and of course the good old rabbit and moon trope shows up again. Here's a preview of this year's logo doodl…

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Naver Blogs get fresh new default theme skins for 2018

Naver is releasing a whole set of new updated and responsive blog templates for their service Naver Blog. This is hot on the heels of their refreshed Google Blogger-style theme updating  from 3 months ago. They use the same sort of minimalist and clear style. Here's how some of them look: They look pretty nice. I like this design style that Nav…

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Lookalikes 4: Na Ah-reum and Lee Mi-Do

Asian games gold medalist in cycling Na Ah-reum looks a little like actress  Lee Mi-Do. I think it's the eyes and eyebrows. And as far as I know they're both Jeollado people so maybe that has something to do with it. Congratulations to both on their recent achievements: Cyclist wins monumental gold; baseball team reaches final Actress Lee Mi…

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Warning: KakaoTalk 8.0 update kills Groups feature

KakaoTalk recently got a big update to version 8.0 which is supposed to include the "delete sent messages" feature and a big revision of the UI (mainly by placing the menus at the bottom now). However some guy on Reddit pointed out , and I just confirmed on my own phone, that the Friends Group feature has been removed from this update wit…

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