Wesley's Tool-Box

In the light of the upcoming Chinese lunar calendar support in iOS 8, I've cross-compared the Korean and Chinese lunar calendar data to see where exactly the two calendars differ. The chart below shows the result.

The difference mostly happens one lunar month at a time, during which the Korean lunar calendar trails the Chinese by one day. 2012 had a special case where the lunar month became different, as the Korean one had a leap third month while the Chinese one had a leap fourth month.

The chart covers all dates between 1901 and 2050 by the Gregorian (regular Western) calendar.

If you want to add this information to your calendar, use the following URL:
Lunar Calendar Difference ICS file

Download the ICS file and open up in your calendar app. If you're using Google Calendar, right-click and copy the URL first. Then on the "Other calendars" menu on the left side of the Google Calendar, click the drop-down button on the right and select "Add by URL". You can paste the URL there to add the calendar.


Calendar data compared were from:
Korean: Korea Astronomy & Space Information
Chinese: Hong Kong Observatory

As noted by Apple on the iOS8 announcement, using lunar calendar on the device will become easier. I'm sure a lot of the Koreans have been waiting for this. Until now, there hadn't been a system-wide support, so a user would have had to use an app that could display and manage this calendar on its own. This hassle should go away when the new iOS version arrives.

Sadly for the Koreans, this lunar calendar is being called "Chinese Calendar" on the system. Of course, if the user knows how to read basic Chinese glyphs, it isn't much of a practical issue. The dates mostly match, and the names of the year based on the sexagenary cycle are identical as well.

But the reason why this can't simply be generalized as "lunar calendar" is because it's based on measurements at Beijing, not Seoul. Because of the differences in latitude and longitude between the two capital cities, the phase measurements of the Moon slightly differ. In fact, the dates were off by a day for about five four months in 2012. Even with these downsides, Koreans end up benefitting from Apple's eager push into the Chinese market.

To use the lunar calendar, go to Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars > Calendars and select "Chinese" from the Alternate Calendars. After that, the lunar date will show in Chinese on the Notification Center below the regular date.

Meanwhile, if someone in your contacts keeps the birthday in lunar date, you can select "add birthday" to designate one. After that, the Calendar app will show that person's "Chinese Birthday" on the lunar birthday. I expect that this will be of much use to many Koreans.

Resizing an image seems to be a straightforward task. You tell the app how small or big the image should be, the app scales accordingly, and the result is saved. So when you want to do this on iOS, you might as well just pick any free image resizing app out on the App Store and be done, right? If quality is of your concern, it's not so simple.

"The Toon-Box" photographic web cartoon on this blog is generated on my iPhone 5S (currently on iOS 7.1b3) and resized to a specific dimension before being uploaded. In choosing the right app for the resizing task, I came across four apps that claimed to do the job:

- Resize Image 4.5 (2013-03-04)
- Resize Photo 1.0 (2011-03-24)
- SimpleResize 2.17 (2013-12-11)
- Crop-Size 1.0.0 (2013-11-21)

The version numbers and release dates are for the latest release as of this writing (2014-01-14), which were used for the testing. So how did they fare? What was the best free iOS image resizing app? Keep reading to find out.

Today marks the return of The Toon-Box, the comic that ran for four years from August 23, 2005 to July 29, 2009 and went into hiatus for more than four years since. With Comic Life software that made the comic possible available on iOS for some time, all it needed was motivation to resurrect the comic.

So yes, now the comic is fully created on my iPhone, and uploaded to the server. No need work on my Mac, since the photos are already on the iPhone anyway. Enjoy!

By default, iOS devices like iPhones and iPads use 4-digit passcodes for the lockscreen. You could also use alphanumeric passcodes that are more secure, but they bring up a keyboard on the lockscreen. This is rather cumbersome compared to a keypad.

What's often overlooked is that there is in fact a nice compromise between the two. You could use a long numeric passcode, and it'll give you a keypad just like when you use a 4-digit passcode, as you can see here. You do need to press a button after entering the digits, but that's because it won't let someone guess how long it is.

I think this is even more useful when coupled with the Touch ID in iPhone 5S. You can still use the fingerprint to conveniently unlock most of the time, and you'll feel more safe in that there is less of a chance someone else could bypass that and unlock using a passcode instead. And the "autofill" of the passcode when you press your finger to unlock doesn't reflect how long the passcode is, either. It just shows nine dots all the time. A perpetrator won't be able to guess the length of the passcode by glancing at your screen.