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 amount -t cifs
SMB1 client pointed at Samba 4.3. - Linux: You can use the undocumented
cifs
mount optionnomapposix
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
') byconvert_to_sfm_char
infs/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
andstrict
, defaulting tostrict
, 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 theperf-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.