Today I learned

2017-10-04

Hedonometer shows a multi-year "happiness" sentiment cycle on Twitter.
Adding margins to PDF files is an effective workaround for iPad PDF viewers being too stupid to let you stay zoomed out.
Wireless charging: "my phone may get a notification buzz and as a result will move off the sweet spot and then stop charging"
Wireless charging: "The Panasonic Qi charging pad has coils that move to where your phone is (Panasonic QE-TM101-K)"
Google Photos library sharing will also share your hidden "Auto Backup" albums.

2017-09-30

Thunderbird's mbox format splits on any \nFrom instead of \n\nFrom. (bug comment)

2017-09-28

disable-downloads-bar is a handy Chrome extension that disables the downloads bar without clearing the downloads list.
Jhanas are positive feedback loops.

2017-09-27

iOS apps with access to your photo library can figure out where you've been over time. (source)
"according to a recent court filing, Waymo also turns its secret lidar circuit boards into jewelry and gives them away to employees leaving to work for rivals."
dril has a Wikipedia article.

2017-09-26

Intel's SGX-enabled processors have two unique keys stored in fuses. (source, "2.2 Root Keys")
Electron has a bug that can wedge the event loop. (bug)
You still can't stop Chrome from automatically adding useless search engines. (source)
There is an open-source speed reading extension/bookmarklet inspired by Spritz: jetzt

2017-09-25

18 U.S. Code § 227 - Wrongfully influencing a private entity’s employment decisions by a Member of Congress or an officer or employee of the legislative or executive branch
The Netherlands is the world's number two exporter of food with the help of high-yield precision farming. (article)
Linux: nfs-ganesha has a baroque configuration format (read source code for help) and is hard or impossible to start as non-root on a xenial machine with IPv6 disabled.
Linux: A mount -t 9p client on xenial pointed at diod is about 2.5x slower at copying a large file than a mount -t cifs SMB1 client pointed at Samba 4.3.
Linux: You can use the undocumented cifs mount option nomapposix to read/write files with colons in the filename hosted by a Samba server. Without this option, colon (":") gets mapped to U+F022 (UTF-8 '\xef\x80\xa2') by convert_to_sfm_char in fs/cifs/cifs_unicode.c in xenial's 4.4 kernel.
High Sierra has bugs in the new Metal-driven window server.
This is a cool optical illusion. ("find the circles"; yes, they really are there)

2017-09-24

Baby shrews will sometimes form a chain to avoid getting lost in the dark.

git has a dumb limitation that might require you to git remote prune origin to fix a problem like this when pulling:

error: cannot lock ref 'refs/remotes/origin/debian/jessie-backports': 'refs/remotes/origin/debian' exists; cannot create 'refs/remotes/origin/debian/jessie-backports'
 ! [new branch]        debian/jessie-backports  -> origin/debian/jessie-backports  (unable to update local ref)

There is a good introduction video from 2011 for the notmuch mail indexer.
iOS: you can type a capital letter by swiping from the Shift key to the letter. (source)
iOS: you can type a number by swiping from the "123" key to the number. (source)
iOS: iPads lack 3D Touch so you cannot 3D Touch-on-keyboard to move the cursor, but you can instead swipe on the keyboard with two fingers. (source)
SMB was originally designed at IBM, not Microsoft. (source)
WebNFS

2017-09-23

The SameSite cookie attribute is unsupported in Edge, Firefox, or Safari and is a P5 (lowest-priority) issue in Firefox.
The SameSite cookie attribute has two modes, lax and strict, defaulting to strict, which "will prevent the cookie from being sent by the browser to the target site in all cross-site browsing context, even when following a regular link" (source)
On Linux, execsnoop can be used to monitor (system-wide) which executables are started along with their arguments. On Ubuntu xenial, available in the perf-tools-unstable package.
On Linux, cachestat can be used to monitor page cache hits/misses.
Email was at one point FTP-based (after a MAIL command was added).
Shoehorns exist and are the secret to getting your foot in your shoe. (I'm the Lucky 10000.)
Saran wrap and aluminum wrap often have flaps on the side that you're supposed to punch in to hold the roll in place. (via comments)
A commitment to being honest with everyone may warp your perception.
Google Translate still can't translate Lojban.

2017-09-22

HEIST is still scary and was mostly swept under the rug because there is no easy fix. (via)
Signal-Desktop will break horribly if you copy a Chrome profile with a paired Signal-Desktop and run it on two computers simultaneously. (issue comment)
Katamari Forever lets you play as a cousin who stands on his ears (or apparently "his hands and his legs are opposite")
Alt-F2 goes into Ansel capture mode in Redout and several other games (incomplete list)
There may have been a market for garden landmines in Cape Town in the 90s.

2017-09-18

On Linux you can start Firefox with MOZ_USE_XINPUT2=1 firefox to get support for high-resolution touchpad scrolling.