This looks cool: Mozilla has released a translation tool as an add-on for Firefox that can do web page translation locally instead of sending data to the cloud! It’s based on Project Bergamot and implemented in WebAssembly.

IMO translation is one of those things like speech recognition that ideally should have always have been local (for obvious privacy reasons), but the processing and data just wasn’t there yet when Google Translate and similar services launched.

  • Very cool! 175 Photos of Day Taken at Night
  • Humans TXT: We Are People, Not Machines. Cool idea, but I’m not sure how practical it is without (ironically, I know) a machine-readable standard. If we can’t get most people to watch the credits on a movie, who’s going to go looking for a text file that’s referenced in a hidden link?
  • The Android Market is finally viewable on the web! I love being able to look for and download an app directly on my phone, but sometimes the desktop environment is just easier to deal with.
  • What happens when the cloud evaporates? Flickr: Too big to fail (We hope?) at ZDNet. (TL;DR case study: Flickr accidentally deleted a photographer’s entire account with 4,000 photos. He had his own copies of the pictures themselves, but all the account structure: links on his blog and elsewhere, titles, descriptions, labels, etc. were lost until they were able to dredge it up out of system backups.)
  • Webcomic SMBC asks: Where’s the ball?
  • Sad balrog has no one left to play with. 🙁