A friend of mine is doing his maths masters and nearly all the research in his area is in French. He asked around if anyone knew a good tool for translating PDFs with LaTeX into English. Turns out the options are surprisingly bad. Google Translate completely mangles the math notation, AIs still struggle to read PDFs properly, and the most popular open source tool for this on GitHub doesn't even take PDFs directly. You need the original LaTeX source, which you usually don't have, so you're stuck paying for Mathpix to convert your PDF to LaTeX first, then running a command line tool, then compiling the output back to PDF. My friend doesn't know how to clone a repo or use the command line. And honestly, he shouldn't have to. What does work pretty well is screenshotting rendered LaTeX and feeding it to ChatGPT (or your LLM of choice), which can generally reproduce the LaTeX and translate it, but that's extremely cumbersome and inefficient for an entire document. Why is there no simple, easy-to-use online tool for this? I was genuinely surprised there was a gap here at all, so I just went and built a LaTeX PDF Translator. Upload a PDF, pick a language, get a translated version where all the equations stay perfectly intact. Fair warning: it's slow because it's making sequential Google Translate API calls, and it's running on a free Render server. But hey, it's free. It's also a bit buggy for now, but the more PDFs people send me the more I can work on fixing it.

As I work on my master thesis all day, I've started thinking about how nice it would be to have a larger display than just my MacBook. I typically have an IDE, a terminal, Overleaf, Spotify, and a dozen other things open simultaneously. I got lucky and found a Samsung SyncMaster SA850 on the street in Zurich for free. But once I started looking into a proper upgrade, I got a little overwhelmed by the sheer number of specs to compare (resolution, PPI, aspect ratio, diagonal size, panel type), so I did what any reasonable person would do and built an interactive monitor comparison tool. It plots monitors on a scatter chart with configurable axes and lets you filter by any property.

I recently saw this Mood Meter on Instagram and thought it was super funny. I recreated it here in HTML/CSS. There's something weirdly validating about being able to pinpoint exactly where I am on it at any given moment.