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RhinoSpike

So aside from my day job and my family, I’ve been keeping myself busy since December working on a project with my friend Thomas that we’ve released to the public just a few weeks ago. That project is RhinoSpike, a web site where people can submit text in a foreign language to be read aloud and recorded by native speakers of that language. In return, people can read and record themselves reading texts submitted in their native language for students of that language. It’s swap meet of mp3 files, only instead of copyrighted music, these mp3 files contain the voice and sound of many languages worldwide! I consider it my small and humble contribution to the goal of bringing peace and goodwill towards men through learning each others language.

This post was originally posted on Babelhut.

Within the last few months, I decided that I am finally going to get some international travel under my belt. I’m going to save my money, and I’m going to Japan. The actual trip probably won’t happen until next year, but it’s going to happen, and I’ve already made good progress in saving up for the trip. Why Japan? Mostly because Thomas, my friend and fellow Babelhut.com writer, lives there with his wife and child. What better way to travel internationally than to get someone you know to show you around?

This post was originally posted on Babelhut.

oír Welcome to the first post of a new series at Babelhut.com, Spanish Verb Highlight. This series will highlight a different Spanish verb in every post, and provide several example sentences showing how the verb is used in different tenses.

This post was originally posted on Babelhut.

Today I received yet another envelope from Time Warner Cable addressed to “Peter Carroll or Current Resident,” which was seconds from being thrown in the trash can when I decided to open it. This is what was inside:

The newest version of Barra de Español, version 1.2, is now available! See details about what’s new in this version in my post on Babelhut.com.

This post was originally posted on Babelhut.

The latest version of Barra de Español is now available from addons.mozilla.org ! Those of you who already have an older version installed should see an update notification in Firefox soon, if you haven’t already.

Last night, I was working on Barra de Español and had spent quite a bit of time on Google looking for how to simulate a keypress in Firefox. It’s as simple as creating an event and dispatching it, though how to do so is not exactly intuitive. I needed to be able to do this because inserting accented characters from Barra de Español was not working in the message body textbox in Gmail and other webmail apps.

So the deadline for the Android Developer Challenge 2 has come and gone, and I did not submit an entry. It wasn’t for a lack of trying though. This was entirely a spare time project and I worked on it 3 to 5 days a week for an hour or more at a time. I’m still not comfortable going into specifics about the project because I think it’s still a viable project. I do still hope to release it to the public at some point.

I got an email today from the Mozilla Add-ons group that my add-on for Firefox, Barra de Español, has been approved to be in the public listing for Firefox add-ons! This means that it’s no longer listed as “experimental” and no longer requires that users check a box in order to install it.

This post was originally posted on Babelhut.

I received an email today from the Mozilla Add-ons group that Barra de Español has been approved to be in the public listing on addons.mozilla.org! This means that it no longer has the “experimental” label and can be installed without the user needing to check a box. For those of you who forgot what Barra de Español is, check out the original announcement . If you haven’t installed it yet, do so today!

This post was originally posted on Babelhut.

Our good friend Ramses has just launched a wonderful database of Spanish-English sentences at sentences.spanish-only.com. I insist that you go there now and bookmark it. I’ll wait.

This post was originally posted on Babelhut.

The bold statement that is the title of this post should really read “Why You Should Be Using the US International Keyboard Layout If You are Studying Languages that Use the Roman Alphabet and Especially If You are a Software Developer,” but that makes a monster of an already long title. So keep in mind this post is not aimed at anyone studying languages that use non-Roman-derived writing systems.