Reviews by jjmhtp

The new edition of the “Artists of the World” database has some improvements compared to the older “Artists of the World Online” edition. Still it is a commercial database locking out most people.

Among the improvements:

• duplicate entry IDs from ‘‘Nürnberger Künstlerlexikon’’ (Nuremberg Artists’ Encyclopaedia) in the old database seem to throw a HTTP 404 if they are requested in the new one (example old, example new) and can be found under the same ID like the AKL/Thieme-Becker articles in the old one (example)
• new entries for groups (example) with a new ID pattern
• buttons for machine translation of sections “VITA” and “LIFE AND WORK” into English
• definitions for many occupations via tooltip/click
• “Name Variations” sources in literature via tooltip/click
• “Places of Activity” map using OpenStreetMap data
• linked GND IDs for some entries (example), some of them are invalid though (example)
• new fields for some entries:
  • “Last edited” (example)
  • “Member of” (example)
  • “Members” (example; clicking “Coellen, Johann von” from there leading to ID 10167252T1 strangely shows the article text for the family instead of the one for the person as opposed to clicking on ID 10167252T1 directly)
    ** “Founded”/“Disbanded” (example)
• renamings:
  • “Geographical data” → “Places of Activity”
  • “Date cited” → more precisely either “Active”: “From”/“Until” or “First mentioned”/“Last mentioned”
  • “Place cited” → “First place mentioned”/“Last place mentioned”
• breakdown of “Sources” into “Thieme-Becker, Vollmer, and AKL”, “Other encyclopedias”, “Printed sources” and “Online sources”
• somewhat arbitrary groups of translations of places of birth and death and places cited in the old database are monolingual German in the new one
• removal of redundant occupations? (at least this case: old/new)
• new layout with left-side navigation and two column tabular biographical data
• changed search including instant results, display of date/place of birth/death in results

One of the not that many kiosks in Münster. They are always very friendly.

I went to the shop to fix a problem with a device for which Gravis told me I’d have to sent it in for at least 60 euros. I was served immediately, the stuff knew the problem and how to fix it and after 2 minutes I walked out of the shop with my problem solved without any charge. They very very friendly, polite, knowledgeable and helpful!

A nice small place to sit on the street and have a view on St. Lamberti church and people strolling by. The staff is very friendly.

A nice cafe with two outdoor seating areas, one with a view to the cathedral. The staff is very friendly. Unfortunately, the food includes muffins only as a vegan option.
The toilets are at the same level, but probably not accessible by wheelchair because of narrow doors.
In principle also a nice place for working, sockets are scarce though.

Not perfect, but best network I’ve come across until now.

The museum is free and houses quite some nice, informative, sometimes beautiful, sometimes disturbing exhibits illustrating the history of the city and its surroundings since Stone Age. Unfortunately, object labels and other descriptive texts are in German only.

I’ve taken a ride on the Cologne to Hamburg line. In comparison to Deutsche Bahn the ticket was pretty cheap. The service is a bit inferior though I feel. I couldn’t succeed to connect to the wifi apart from a short period of less than a minute though trying on three different devices and two different operating systems.
Unfortunately the schedule on the ticket doesn’t give information on the platform. I could find a bitly short URL redirecting to a Deutsche Bahn page with incomplete platform information. That’s complicated and bad for data privacy.
Public loudspeaker announcements in the train very pretty frequent and partly completely irrelevant admonishing behavior of some individual passengers publicly.
Considering the comparatively affordable price anyway a good option.

A very friendly great place to get good vegan Levantine cuisine in Ehrenfeld. Unfortunately, takeaway packaging isn’t very sustainable, comes with quite some aluminum.

The review is based on the freely available extract of El Dik, Dina; Iskander, Emad (2021). Yalla! Let’s Learn Egyptian Colloquial Arabic Verbs. ISBN 978-977-416-909-0 available here.
The approach to give all the Egyptian Arabic verbs and their forms in Arabic script seems to be more or less unusual in the sphere of Egyptian Arabic grammar books. I think it is useful though as it gives morphological information that is harder to derive from romanizations. Moreover, the words can actually be found in real life in written form, so it is useful to learn them in Arabic script. This makes it easier to recognize them in such a context. On the other hand the book uses Arabic spellings adapted to pronunciation that are not found in written texts in the wild. Maybe a combination of Arabic script and transliterations would have been a superior approach.
Sorting the verbs by frequency of their usage looks like a very good order for studying the most common verbs first.
The “Grouping of ECA verbs” (pp. XI–XIV) in the introduction is a nice overview. Unfortunately, it might evoke the impression to list all existing patterns maybe with exception. This is not the case and should have been mentioned clearly I think. Many verbs with defective, hollow or doubled roots and as such their underlying patterns exist for forms where the given list leaves those out.
Quite some smaller mistakes in the introduction (“**Form I” should instead read “*Form II”, p. XIII; I think I’ve seen more that I failed to note down) undermine the trust in the reliability of the book that might appear at more critical content harder to spot).
The price of 25 GBP is sadly quite high.
Given the mentioned drawbacks, the books still looks like a helpful resource for students aiming to improve their understanding of Egyptian Arabic verbs, especially due to the used order by frequency and the use of Arabic script despite its artificial spelling.