Cool things I do#
- Preparing for and taking the IELTS for the first time
- I took one week of online classes with foreign teachers on the italki App, and the results were pretty good. The teacher I booked is called Nick, a British person who used to be an IELTS speaking examiner and currently resides in Thailand (it seems that Westerners really like to live in Thailand and India, where the cost of living is low and they can live happily).
- After one week of preparation, I took the IELTS exam and scored 6 (6/6.5/6/5.5), which basically met my expectations. Although I said I prepared for one week, I actually spent that week procrastinating. I took one hour of online classes with a foreign teacher every day, wrote a few essays, and didn't do any practice tests from the Cambridge IELTS series this week (I did a couple of practice tests a month ago).
- I am taking the IELTS not for the purpose of studying abroad, but mainly to quantitatively evaluate the effectiveness of my English learning. After studying for a while, I plan to take the test again to see how my learning has progressed.
- Playing Midjourney
- I have already paid for a month of Midjourney, the cheapest plan. However, this plan has a monthly usage limit, and I used up the limit a long time ago. I use Midjourney to generate my app icons, image materials, and article images, and now I'm a bit dependent on it.
- After using up the limit last month, I had some usage again after it automatically renewed a few days ago, so I spent some time playing with Midjourney and submitted some photos to the Tesla photography contest using the images generated by it. It's just for fun, and I guess the AIGC photos will be rejected.
Blogs I wrote#
- I posted some text on Zhihu to promote my Linggua Vocabulary
- I started working hard to promote and market my Linggua, I'm really going all out for it.
- I kindly ask you in front of the screen to help me by clicking the Zhihu link below and giving me a like. 🙏🙏🙏
- https://www.zhihu.com/question/441194596/answer/3002432982
Videos I Watched#
- I watched a lot of videos by the Canadian immigration consultant Yu Pang. I feel that what he says is very informative and well-organized, without any unnecessary talk. If you have the idea of immigrating to Canada, I recommend watching his videos, especially the recorded videos of his recent live broadcasts. They have a lot of valuable information.
- I suddenly came across videos from a blogger I followed two years ago who was immigrating to New Zealand. He started working in house construction in New Zealand after being a graphic designer. He, his spouse, their child, and their dog live a peaceful and happy life. Their child is already two years old. I admire Harold from Northeast China. He has been consistently posting vlogs on YouTube, and he is about to reach 1000 videos.
Cool stuff I discovered#
- About NAT traversal
- This is a translation of the article How NAT traversal works by Tailscale, and the translation is well done. The illustrations in the article are also well done and provide a clear visualization of some networking concepts.
- https://arthurchiao.art/blog/how-nat-traversal-works-zh/
- GPA calculator
- When preparing my wife's transcript, I looked for various GPA calculators and finally found this one to be the best. I can enter the grades in Excel, export them in CSV format, and then upload them to this website to quickly calculate various standard GPAs. Another reason why I don't want to use many other websites is that they require me to enter the grades one by one on the website, whereas with Excel, I can organize the grades once and reuse them.
- http://blog.zhimind.com/gpa_calculator.html
- How to generate beautiful images for AIGC for free
- If you can't use Midjourney due to the Great Firewall or don't want to spend money on Midjourney, I recommend an alternative: https://app.leonardo.ai
- Features:
- As of now, it is accessible within the Great Firewall.
- Free tokens are distributed every day.
- The results are also very good and slightly inferior to Midjourney in certain scenarios.