www.johndbritton.com

The tagline of this project is to live in as many different neighborhoods as possible so I wouldn’t blame someone for wondering why I moved from 34th between 9th and 10th to 35th between 9th and 10th.  And yes, while that isn’t quite how I envision my different neighborhoods, there is a shift in perspective with a move just one block north and different people make for different experiences.  It was actually very nice to have such an easy move at such an early stage in the project.  And to be honest, I had not really committed to this idea until my experience staying with John and Paul last week.  It was the first true “couchsurfing” experience as I had stayed with friends the previous two weeks.  I needed to see what it would be like to stay with people I didn’t know.  

John wasn’t a complete stranger.  I was connected to John through Sid, whom I met while couchsurfing in Hong Kong for a week during my travels a few years ago. Sid is a fascinating guy — he started Life Unlimited, for which I’ve been helping out with the selection of candidates for the past few years.  Sid told me John was a high powered ideas guy.  He is just that.  Check his web site out athttp://www.johndbritton.com.  Some of the things he is into are P2PU, an open source university for which he taught a class on web development.  He is very well connected with Couchsurfing hooked me up with some of the meetups that go on throughout the city.  He also gave me an awesome t shirt he designed and helped me get this blog in better shape.

I arrived a day earlier than John, but his roommate Paul was there to welcome me. Paul and I went to Lezzete which is one of the few restaurants in that neighborhood that seemed like it was worth going to.  One of the few words I learned while living in Turkey was lezzette (tasty) and I figured they were Turkish. They were, and had the quality pistachio baklava to prove it.  

John arrived back on Tuesday from San Francisco where he had a job interview for a unique startup called Twilio.  Twilio provides a platform to make voice applications — in fact, John built one that allows you to call a phone number, speak some text, and have the text translated into Dutch and sent in the form of a text message back to your phone.  Twilio also happens to be backed by the same investors as the company I am working for.  John got the job and we celebrated with some Chinese Hot Pot in Chinatown.  

I spent the weekend there before heading to Park Slope on Sunday.  We were able to check out the Affordable Art Fair (nothing over $10K so still not that affordable) and I liked http://www.claysinclair.com/.  We wondered down to the West Village on the kind of day when you fall into the wind and it holds you up.  In the West Village, we met up with a friend for Vietnamese sandwiches (which seem to be all the rage these days).  We also briefly checked out the Shepard Fairey exhibit.

We did a few other things, but I’m trying to keep these posts relatively short.  I did try unicycling for which I failed miserably, but learned there is a unicycling club (of course there is) that meets right near where I used to live.  If only I had known!

A few photos will be posted until the recap from Park Slope.

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Posted by Michael Davidson, Software Engineer

Recently, we launched a feature that allows you to drag an attachment from your computer right onto Gmail.

I've always been a fan of the inserting image lab, so I naturally wondered if it would be possible to combine the two.

Today we're launching a feature that allows you to drag images from your computer into a message. You don't have to have the insert image lab enabled for it to work. Just drag the image in, resize it if you want, and send.


Currently, this feature only works in Google Chrome, but will be coming soon to other browsers.

(Cross-posted from the Google Translate Blog)

One of the popular features of Google Translate is the ability to hear translations spoken out loud (”text-to-speech”) by clicking the speaker icon beside some translations, like the one below.

We rolled this feature out for English and Haitian Creole translations a few months ago and added French, Italian, German, Hindi and Spanish a couple of weeks ago. Now we’re bringing text-to-speech to even more languages with the open source speech synthesizer, eSpeak.

By integrating eSpeak we’re adding text-to-speech functionality for Afrikaans, Albanian, Catalan, Chinese (Mandarin), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Greek, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Latvian, Macedonian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Swahili, Swedish, Turkish, Vietnamese and Welsh.

You may notice that the audio quality of these languages isn’t at the same level as the previously released languages. Clear and accurate speech technology is difficult to perfect, but we will continue to improve the performance and number of languages that are supported.

So go ahead and give it a try! Click the on the speaker icon for any of these translations: “airport” in Greek, “lightning” in Chinese or “smile” in Swahili.

Posted by Fergus Henderson, Software Engineer