secret, ancient seal

You can make one here. I could start using it as an email sig – and flood everyone’s inbox with useless graphics. Excellent.

most useful: dictionary

A very nice dictionary, featured at www.nciku.com – you can even use your mouse to draw and find characters, so long as you can reasonably approximate the stroke order. Combined with pinyin input and autocompletion of terms, it’s at least as useful as the more expensive electronic dictionaries.

It’s also interesting how amazingly simple it is to text using a ten-button input (the numbers on your phone) in Asian languages. There’s got to be a doctoral dissertation out there regarding combinatorics and inputs in different language families – paradoxically, it seems harder to program predictive algorithms for Western languages. In this circumstance there’s a large tradeoff between phonetic complexity given limited signals (Chinese) and average word usage (? English ?). More investigation required.