Igpay Atinlay

On page 258 of "The Annubis Gates" by Tim Powers, the hero, Brendan Doyle, is leafing through some ancient manuscript  .. when he comes across this message, written in his own handwriting from his future self!

IHAY ENDANBRAY ANCAY OUYAY IGITDAY*

Can you read it?

I had some faint recollection of a child's (or gypsy's) speech code, where everything ends in -AY. After some Google searching I got it: Pig Latin!

There is an urban myth that Google Translate has Pig Latin as one of its languages and I checked: it's not there, but ...

Google in Pig Latin

This site, however, translates from English to Pig Latin - did you know that web becomes ebay? It turns out that translating Pig Latin back into English is hard, and not deterministically possible, as different words in English can map to the same word in Pig Latin (for instance, "oat" and "two" may both translate to "oatway").

Andway ownay erehay isway away ideovay eway ooktay esterdayyay.

Now we live in a glade ...

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* Hi Brendan, can you dig it?
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DuckDuckGo

Following from my previous post on Internet privacy and VPNs, today I've been playing with a search engine which doesn't track your every move: DuckDuckGo. I saved it onto Chrome's bookmarks bar. Guess what? The Google browser deleted it within four seconds. A robust attitude to the competition!

The living room couch, a favourite habitat, is a bit of a wifi dead-zone. So today I installed a NETGEAR Wifi range-extender (pictured below). No more waving the tablet in the air ...

In other news, Clare has celebrated the triumph of the people of Greece by wallpapering our hall with a Birch tree motif ... go Syriza! I wonder how the Germans will take to having their feeding hand bitten?

A rather spectral NETGEAR N300 WiFi range extender