VNR: Visual Novel Reader, a hooking tool that grabs text from visual novels and immediately translates and displays it. Granted, I haven’t touched it in ages, but VNR is still my go-to recommendation for anyone who wants to learn Japanese and play visual novels in the original language. Recently someone told me the thing doesn’t work anymore. VNR hasn’t been updated in years, but it always kept working. And the only translation engine in it that actually works is Baidu Translate — its Japanese output is the most reliable; the rest of the features don’t matter. Problem is, the Baidu Translate engine is dead now. Looked around online, and apparently the reason is: Baidu Translate’s API switched from an http URL to https! Holy shit, Baidu actually uses https now.