Twitter ups character limit to 280 but not for Korean

Interesting post from the official Twitter blog today . They crunched the numbers and scientifically came to the same conclusion anybody who tweets in Korean had already known: you can say a lot more in 140 characters of Korean than English. Twitter's character limit counts one Korean character, which is really a whole syllable, as one "le…

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Daum Mail app gets major update to v.3.0

The Daum Mail app got a major overhaul this month. It's updated to version 3.0 and basically looks and works a lot more like the Google Inbox app now. Here are a few promo screenshots from the official Daum blog to get a look. Among the new features are: Cleaner, sleeker style Attachment previews Set reminders Quick replies Kakao Friends emoji So, …

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Find Starbucks in Kakao Map, get a free drink coupon

If you've opened KakaoMap recently, you've probably seen this pop up: KakaoMap 1st Anniversary Event Just like they did back in July to celebrate the launch of KakaoNavi, Kakao is now celebrating their first anniversary with a free Starbucks drink .  What you'll need You'll need both the KakaoMap app, and the Starbucks app . You'l…

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Howdy Mr Trump! Funny Korean banner supports US action against NK

I found this amusing banner over on Reddit  this morning: It reads: 양아치는 정치인 개잡놈들! 한넘도 믿을넘없다 북핵 공포로부터 보호 받을 수 있는 길은 미국뿐이다. Hi Mr. Trump! 머하노? Just bomb North Korea. We Korean believe you. - 구국 동지회 / 부산 애국 연합 Just for fun, let's go through it piece by piece. 양아치는 정치인 개잡놈들! 양아치 is a great word. It's usually used to refer to bullies, gangsters, th…

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Incheon airport real-time arriving passengers location display kisok

Incheon International Airport has installed screens in the arrivals lobby that display, in real time, the location of arriving passengers, to give you a more accurate idea of how long until your party will be walking out the gate. Think of it like Harry Potter's  Marauder's Map . Background: I just now noticed it For some background, I was o…

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Korean news site pop-up advertisements getting out of hand

Tonight I was reading some of the Korean news top stories, and saw an article about another teenage girl assult, this time in Cheonan . What struck me most of all about the story wasn't the news itself, but the absolute barrage of ads when I clicked through to it.  It's my fault. I was accidentally still using an Incognito tab from working …

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Replace the "Location" tag in Blogger Dynamic Templates

Here's a very easy way to replace the "Location" text in the location geotag of your Dynamic Views post. Blogger ignores what you specify in the Layout section and reverts to a plain " Location: " label. But a few lines if CSS can fix that and make it look better. In this example I'll change it to a push-pin location poin…

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Links for Aug-Sept 2017

It's time for another link round-up. Stuff I was interested in this month. Techie stuff From Uganda to Korea—teaching English, one chat at a time  - App puts Korean students on videochat with African English speakers. VR play fails to meet expectations-INSIDE Korea JoongAng Daily  - More "360" than "VR" Naver's online map se…

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Naver Cloud worldwide location map

Naver Cloud Platform has recently opened a new data center in Germany. Naver's own global services like Line and V Live can run through these centers, plus CDN business customers can utilize it, and normal Naver users can store their own files in it . Anyway I just thought the map was cool. It gives a clearer picture of how Naver isn't just…

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Naver Disco app and Chrome extension

Disco is a new content discovery app by Naver released a couple months ago that's sort of like Pinterest but includes news and blog items. Basically you upvote/downvote stuff in your feed, but it then becomes more customized over time, and your interests will help connect you to similar-minded people. And build a huge potential advertise profi…

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Kakao Map shows bicycle routes with elevation, calories, and route preferences

Kakao Map keeps getting better and better. The app interface was already released in English , and now they have added some nice customizations to the bicycle directions feature. It can route your bike ride one of three ways: Bike path priority (자전거도로 우선) - route your ride so that it makes most use of actual bike paths Shortest distance (최단거리) Most co…

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Papago translations connect to Naver dictionary

Real quick, a nice recent update to Naver's translator app Papago now lets you click on translated words that will open the page on Naver Dictionary so you can compare the nuance. I like this idea. One thing I dislike about the Google Translate app is that it doesn't always do a great job of indicating the actual meaning of the translated …

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Altools site hacked

Oh boy. If you were already suspicious about that bloated software suite called " Altools " which you often find installed on most Korean computers still running IE10 and Windows 7, then you're going to love this. Their company homepage (ESTsoft, 이스트소프트, so really "East Soft") got hacked and hackers made off with a huge list …

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Korean guy impersonating subway announcements

Since I'm sharing dumb videos today, here's another I thought was impressive. This guy mimics the voices of the subway announcements at Hongdae Station, in all four languages. Well, he clearly doesn't exactly speak all four languages, but that just adds to the humor. Pretty impressive. Ignore the belly jiggle at the beginning. I mistim…

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Ma Dong-Seok parody bleach commercial

This was too funny not to share. One of my favorite actors, Ma Dong-seok (마동석), was in a commercial promoting a bleach product. The shtick is that the product is as powerful as Ma, who is a bulky guy and typically plays a gangster role. As a result of his typical genre, there is a lot of dialog out there of him threatening, abusing, and generally …

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Whale browser theme store open

In addition to their extension store , Naver's Whale browser now has opened a Whale theme store . Applying the themes basically just changes the wallpaper on your new tab page, so it's also referred to as their Wallpaper store. Remember that you can "skin" the browser with a variety of themes by default, plus you could always just …

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