Debugging

TransLee could already do two separate things well: catch sound from a phone’s own speaker and translate it, or listen to a person talking and speak a translation back. What it couldn’t do was the thing I actually needed for a real meeting: sit in an English-language call as the only Korean speaker, show me Korean for everything everyone else says, and speak English out loud when it’s my turn, without me touching a language dropdown mid-conversation. ...

Late on July 13, TransLee could hear a quiet news broadcast through my phone’s own speaker and translate it live. By the next morning, that exact feature was silent. Nothing had touched the speaker-recognition code overnight. What had changed was a different feature entirely: translated voice playback had just started working for the first time. The Symptoms, in Order 03:40 — Speaker-sound recognition, which worked the night before, stopped picking up anything. 04:36 — Still broken. YouTube audio wasn’t recognized at all, and even the transcript-only fallback wasn’t translating, just showing raw text. 07:41 — Fixed the transcript-and-translation display. Recognition worked again. But the voice-playback feature, the one that had worked the previous evening, was now silent. 07:46 to 08:13 — Every attempt to get both working at once produced the same shape of failure: one sentence would translate and play correctly, then everything stopped, no more translation, no more transcript, sometimes a garbled half-second of audio right before it died. Five hours of this, with the failure mode staying identical no matter which side I patched. That repetition was the actual clue. This wasn’t a bug hiding somewhere in the code. It was two features fighting over the same microphone. ...

Let me tell you about the bug that made me doubt myself more than any other in this series. I’d fix something — say, a misheard word in a transcript. I’d save the corrected file to the server. I’d open the app on my phone to admire the fix. And the old, wrong word would still be sitting there. So I’d fix it again. Save again. Still wrong. I started to wonder if I’d forgotten how to edit a text file. ...

In the post on search I gave you the clean version: type a word, get every place it was said, tap to jump to that moment. That’s true now. But I made it sound smooth, and for a while it wasn’t. The search had a bug that wore me down — and tracking it down taught me one of the more useful lessons in this series. The symptom was maddening. You’d search a word, see a result, tap “play from here” — and the audio would start playing twenty minutes before the word you searched for. The search found the right thing. It just sent you to the wrong place in the recording. Sometimes by seconds, sometimes by twenty whole minutes. ...

My daughter is three. She loves one specific playlist of Korean children’s songs, and she likes it best when it plays from a small JBL Bluetooth speaker tucked under her stroller. We walk the neighborhood for about an hour most evenings. I put on her folder, the first song starts, and we go. Thirty seconds later, my phone screen goes off. One more song plays. Then it stops. I have to unlock the phone, tap the next song, put the phone back in my pocket, and keep walking. A minute later, same thing. ...

My phone has backed up about six thousand photos and videos from 2025 alone. On my PC, I run a local browser tool — pick_yeju.py — that lets me scroll through them, pick the ones worth keeping, and copy them into my daughter’s media library on our NAS. The files are sorted oldest-first. Six thousand of them. That’s about ninety pages at sixty per page. The problem: every time I restarted the tool, it opened at page one. I’d have to scroll back through to wherever I’d left off the previous session. Ten, twenty, thirty pages — just to find my place again. ...