How to know if Homeplus or E-mart is open today

If you want to know exactly when Homeplus or E-mart is going to be closed, a very simple Naver search will tell you precisely, and you really don't even need to know Korean to do it. Seriously, it is SUPER simple, and it's what all the Koreans I know do. Don't bother trying to count which Sunday it is today. Ain't nobody got time for that. 

Here's what you do, so simple a monkey could do it.

1. On your phone go to the Naver homepage. You can do it on your computer too, but in that case I really recommend going to Naver's mobile site (http://m.naver.com). Otherwise you might not get the convenient "card" info. 
2. Type in the store name (홈플러스 for Homeplus or 이마트 for E-Mart), followed by your branch. It's more reliable to include 점 ("branch") afterward. 
3. Look at the red text next to 휴무 ("closed"). Those are the upcoming dates it's closed. 

For example, if you want to know when the E-mart in Yeoksam will be closed, just search 이마트 역삼점. 

For the Homeplus in Gangseo, search 홈플러스 강서점.

etc etc etc...

In other words, just replace the XX with your location in this link:

http://m.search.naver.com/search.naver?query=이마트+XX점

Here are some screenshots I took on my phone. Notice the red text for holidays, and you'll also see that it's not always Sundays that the place is closed. You know the days of the week in Korean, right? 

월(Mon) 화(Tues) 수(Wed) 목(Thurs) 금(Fri) 토(Sat) 일(Sun)

A search for the Paju-Munsan branch of Homeplus shows it's closed June 9 (Mon) and June 24 (Tues) 

A search for the Daegu branch of Homeplus shows it's closed June 8 (Sun) and June 22 (Sun)

A search for the Yeoksam branch of E-Mart shows it's closed June 8 (Sun) and June 22 (Sun)

I see a lot of people asking about this on Waygook and Reddit and Facebook, so hopefully this post has helped you. Remember after you've searched it once and got it working, be sure to bookmark the results page. Then you will NEVER AGAIN have to freak out about whether or not you can buy your adorable Tesco Penguin Frosted Flakes today. 

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How to save people's KakaoTalk profile photos

To save friends' KakaoTalk profile pictures, you don't have to rely on taking screen-shots. There are actually several apps that can save the photo files to your phone's storage, and they all work basically the same way.

What's the best app for this?

 

My vote goes to ProfileAlbum.

Yes, I blurred out my friends' beautiful faces

There are several apps that do this, but my favourite is "ProfileAlbum" because it is super simple, very minimal, and works with a variety of messenger apps:

• KakaoTalk, 
• KakaoStory, (and, theoretically though I've never tried them)  
• TicToc,  
• myPeople (how much longer will this remain a separate service?), and  
• Naver Line

How It Works

When you view your friends' profile photos, the file gets saved in Kakao's cache folder. You could, in theory, go snooping through these folders with a File Explorer, but it would be annoying because they are stored in weird folder hierarchies with weird file names. ProfileAlbum consolidates them in a clean list, and let's you check-box the ones you want to save to a folder that your Gallery app can see.

So here is the key thing to note: YOU MUST VIEW THE PHOTO AS BIG AS YOU CAN FIRST. The apps don't "download" anything; they just grab what is in your cache already. Thus, you should be sure to view the person's full-size photo FIRST, THEN run the app to save it. Got it? So you can't use it to snoop on people you blocked (unless you unblock them real quick, view their profile photo fully, then block them again before they notice Bob's your uncle)

Note that for best results in KakaoStory, don't just view the picture in its "story"-- click it to get it individual and full-screen, so that the version with the largest possible resolution will be downloaded to your cache.

Usefulness 

I find this a great way to set Android Contact photos that are then utilized across all my Google-sync services. Note that there are apps that will better automate this process, but I feel uneasy giving apps access to my Contacts.

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Set Naver as your browser's default search engine

To set your browser to use Naver as its default search engine (i.e. it will bring you to a Naver search results page when you type search terms in the URL link bar aka "omnibox"), simply add a custom search engine in your browser's settings using this string:

http://search.naver.com/search.naver?where=nexearch&sm=osp_hty&ie={inputEncoding}&query=%s

For example, I've recently converted some of my friends over to using Chrome instead of IE, but they want as "Korean" an experience as possible. Thus, in Chrome:
Menu -> Settings -> Search -> Manage Search Engines -> Other search engines
In the box for "Add new search Engine" just enter "NAVER" and in the box for "URL with %s instead of query" just enter the URL link from above. Then click to set it to "Default" and you're done.
In Firefox there are various ways, but I prefer:
Enter about:config in the URL bar -> find the entry for Keyword.url -> replace the string with the the URL above.

I personally also prefer setting the Chrome homepage to Naver's mobile site. That way you get the benefit of a Naver homepage with Korean news and predictive search while you type, but minus so much gaudy Flash clutter.

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The eeriness of the Sewol ferry's name (세월)

The ferry that recently sunk in Korea was named Sewol, or 세월 in Korean. I had not thought much about this until a Korean friend pointed out how creepy a name it is, given the circumstances.

세월 literally means "time" but with a connotation of its movement; i.e. the passing of time. I've tried to come up with a good translation. Let's look at some examples from Naver and Google:

From Naver:

세월 (歲月)- Time

• 세월이 가는지 오는지도 모르다 (무사태평하다) be unaware of the passing of time
• 세월 참 빠르다 Time flies
• 세월 가는 줄 모르고 바쁘게 살았다 I've been so busy I didn't even notice the years go by. 
• 그녀의 병이 회복되는 데 오랜 세월이 걸렸다 It took her ages to get over her illness
• 세월이 약이다 Time heals all wounds / Time will take care of this.

Google translates 세월 as Years, Time, The Years, Ages


My friend and I decided that one of the best ways to translate the sentiment of nostalgia or reflective longing of 세월 would be something like "As time goes by".

You can see why this would be a suitable name for a slow-paced, relaxing, easy, reflective, sentimental journey to Jeju. I imagine the old people, celebrating their 60th birthdays, sitting on the deck at sunrise and sunset, reflecting on their long, happy lives.

It also becomes a horribly apt and disgusting name, when you consider the children trapped, floating in their cabins, awaiting rescue as the crucial moments of the "golden hour" slip by.

-------------------------------------------------

Author's commentary:

I'm sorry to write something so morbid about this. During this discussion of 세월, I realized the depth of my own uneasy feelings about this event. Perhaps that is why something so trivial as the name of the boat, and its tenuous connection to the event, blew up in my mind. It seems a horrible microcosm of what happened. I don't like to add much opinion to this blog, but all those kids, scared, not knowing what to do, looking to the adults for help. It's too much. I apologize for any discomfort this post causes. 

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Naver's English <> Korean Translator now available

Naver has released a Translation program that appears very similar to Google Translate. It operates, much as Naver Dictionary, as a mobile-friendly website at this link:

http://m.translate.naver.com

Here's what it looks like on my phone:

Here it is in operation:

You can see that it translates in the "card" style Google now uses. It can pronounce the words, has a "conversational" feature where the translation is displayed full-screen (again, much like Google Translate). It also lists several sample usage sentences displayed in both Korean and English.

 Once you've translated something, you can then "Share" the translation through a variety of apps, though this sharing feature utilizes short-links (via me2.do) as a share medium:

 It also features a row of emoticons, though I don't understand what they're for. They are apprently for feedback: Press them, and you are asked to submit your comments and feedback, so I guess the emoticons are to indicate your overall satisfaction with the translation?

Anyway, I'm very pleased to see Naver continuing to come out with English-language interfaces for their services. Naver has a wide variety of great features and services; wider, I'd say, than Google ever since Google's streamlining efforts. Google's main advantage, like Facebook's over CyWorld, was multilingual (thus international) support. Here's hoping that Naver continues to provide services in English (Naver Maps, perhaps?)

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Find the Korean names of foreign / English / American movies

PROBLEM: 
You are chatting with your Korean coworkers at the bar after work. Everyone is going around the table talking about their favorite movie. It comes to your turn. You confidently say "Ernest Goes to Camp" but they have no idea what you're talking about. What was this called in Korean?

Nowadays "western" movies tend to carry their titles directly over into hangul. Thus, Robocop is 로보캅, not 로봇 경찰관. But others have had their titles translated into Korean. Frozen, for example, is 겨울왕국 (Winter Kingdom). This is especially true with (1.) children's movies, and (2.) movies released prior to 2000. What's the easiest way to find these Korean titles?

SOLUTION:
Simple. Use the Naver Movies site. Just type in the film's name in English, and the results page will list the name it goes by in Korea. Thus you can do a quick check on your phone and explain that your favorite film is called 어니스트 1 - 캠핑 가다 and take in the spray of comically/exaggeratedly spit beer as the shock of someone liking this movie overwhelms them.

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VICE "Motherboard" says Baidu top in Korea?

On principle, I don't support tourist travel to North Korea, when its a useless quirky luxury that does nothing to help the impoverished people there and only lines the pockets of a corrupt regime. Nonetheless, the videos shot by VICE while there was fascinating, even if their condescending neo-colonialist attitudes were not. Seriously guys, if you're going to play along with that whole facade, then don't act like you're above their whole game. When you're there, financing that corrupt system; you're not whistleblowers, you're their temporary pawns; especially when you dress like hippie bums and speak/act with arrogance, providing fodder (like Dennis Rodman does) for their propagandic notions of WhiteMen™. Yet at the same time, I feel there's a certain value in engagement, if it's done right. The people of NK should see that they are not forgotten, not fighting for survival on their own: that the world is watching and encouraging. That's why I'd much rather spend my time/money (were I as generous away from the keyboard as I am in front of it) on efforts like these. 
 
But anyway, back to the point. VICE's magazine feed "Motherboard" a few months ago ran a piece on the dominant websites in countries around the globe. It's a fairly interesting piece, with one glaring misstatement, easily spotted to anyone with the remotest familiarity with Korea (emphasis mine):

A second map shows the same data but the countries are drawn according to population instead of geographic size. Viewed through that lens, it’s clear that Baidu, which dominates super-dense China and South Korea, shouldn’t be discounted

Since when does Baidu have any but a negligible presence in Korea? South Korea is dominated by its homegrown search portal Naver, a simple fact discovered by any web search. Some estimates place Naver's dominance at between 70~80%. This, in addition to the presumably obvious fact that the article's author, Meghan Neal, seems to have overlooked: Koreans speak Korean, not Chinese. Granted, international behemoths like Google provide localized language versions, but Baidu has only limited resources available in English (notably, a blog in English and a developer-only site), and as far as this author can tell, does not provide any Korean language option.

Now, the Motherboard article is essentially a puff piece, reprinting the results of a study apparently undertaken by Information Geographies at the Oxford Internet Institute.These guys (smarty pants Oxford scholars that they are) were awake enough to catch-on to this, and offer this caveat:

The situation is more complex in Asia, as local competitors have been able to resist the two large American empires. Baidu is well known as the most used search engine in China, which is currently home to the world’s largest Internet population at over half a billion users. At the same time, we see a puzzling fact that Baidu is also listed as the most visited website in South Korea (ahead of the popular South Korean search engine, Naver). We speculate that the raw data that we are using here are skewed. However, we may also be seeing the Baidu empire in the process of expanding beyond its traditional home territory.

I for one indeed suspect the data to be skewed. Unless Korea's population of 조선족 has somehow overwhelmed the internet savvy native Koreans, there's obviously something amiss. Perhaps data is being misinterpreted from undersea cable lines between China-Korea? I'm certainly no data network analyser, but as a longtime resident of Korea, I do know that Baidu's "dominance" of South Korea is a highly questionable claim.

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Use Naver Maps offline on your iPod Touch / etc.

Problem:
You don't want to be lost around Seoul, or anywhere in Korea for that matter, but you don't have a smartphone. You do have an iPod Touch (or iPhone) or other wifi-only device, but what if no wifi signal is available?

Solution:
Use the offline cache feature of Naver Maps. Here's how:

Download the Naver Maps app at the Apple App Store or Android Market
(this tutorial uses the Android version)

1. Press the Menu button
2. Select the 저장 ("Storage") button on the bottom-left
3. A pop-up menu appears, with two options: 지도 저장 (Save Map Info) and 저장 목록보기 (View Stored Map)
4. Choose 지도 저장
5. The map appears with a centered circle. That circle will be the downloaded map area. Choose the size of the area you want saved (250m, 500m, 750m, 1km, or 3km)
6. Click 완료 (Done).
7. Wait as the app downloads the map data
8. A confirmation will pop-up when complete. Choose 듣기 (Done)

To view your cached map data offline, repeat steps 1-3, but choose 저장 목록보기 to view a list of your saved maps. Note that you can save multiple map areas (I like to keep offline map areas of my local area as well as of Itaewon / Hongdae / central Seoul, just in case...)

You can use GPS or wifi-location-matching to find your current location on your downloaded map. You can zoom in/out as usual. Note, however, that you will be unable to search or get transit directions.

EDIT 2012-06:

The interface is slightly different now. New instructions are:

1. Press the Menu button
2. Select the 다운로드 ("Download") button on the bottom-center
3. A pop-up menu appears, with two options: 내 기기에 지도 다운로드하기 (Download Map to my Device) and 다운로드한 지도 목록보기  (View Downloaded Map List)
4. Choose 내 기기에 지도 다운로드하기
5. The map appears with a centered circle. That circle will be the downloaded map area. Choose the size of the area you want saved (250m, 500m, 750m, 1km, or 3km)
6. Click the download icon (arrow pointing downward).
7. Wait as the app downloads the map data
8. When 100% is reached, Choose 완료 (OK)

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Use Naver's English Dictionary in English!

Problem:
You want to translate a word/phrase between Korean/English, but Google Translate sucks (doesn't have a translation, or the wrong translation) and your phone dictionary doesn't have it.

Solution:
Koreans invariably use Naver's English Dictionary, which now boasts an English-language version to help you navigate. Check it out; it's (usually) much more accurate than Google.

Source:
http://endic.naver.com/?isEngVer=Y

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