I’m doing Inkhaven (writing retreat where you have to write a blog post every day), so I’ve spent a while looking at my list of posts to write. Someone else wrote about the posts from their list they won’t write and this is such a good concept I’ll do the same.
Too short
Here are some interesting things that I couldn’t get 500 words out of.
- Everyone uses the wrong MATLAB logo
- The MATLAB logo is non-free, so the Wikipedia article for MATLAB uses an open-source recreation of the function plot for the MATLAB logo. Lots of places use this open-source recreation instead of the real logo.
- Debugging CSS with
outline- Make a bookmark with
javascript:(document.head||document.children[0]).innerHTML+='<style>*{outline:%201px%20solid%20red%20!important}</style>';void%200and click on it to see all of the element bounds on a webpage.
- Make a bookmark with
- Don’t use
font-display: block- This blocks rendering text until the fonts load, which makes me sad :(
- Here’s a bad math poster
- Here’s a poster I saw at a high school I was visiting in 2019 about attendence at math class. Ironically it makes multiple statistical errors (e.g. assuming correlation=causation, having a trendline mostly influenced by a few outliers).
- It’s “Eastern Time” not “Eastern Standard Time”
- People write “Eastern Standard Time” even when they actually mean to use daylight savings time during that part of the year. There’s a name for that, “Eastern Time”. Drop the “Standard”!
DOMMatrixis cool- It’s a pretty cool web API but there’s just not enough content to write a full blog post about.
- How does Google Meet know the current CPU usage in a diagnostic menu?
- There’s no web API to do this, but Google Meet has a diagnostic menu where you can see the current CPU usage when on Chrome. Turns out there’s a hidden built-in hangout_services extension that provides this information.
- How spam text messages know the first 4 digits of your credit card
- The first 4 digits are part of the bank identification number (BIN) so in Canada you can take the most common BIN and you’ll probably luck out often enough.
- Automattic has funny names for their corporate entities
- The names: Ministry of Automattic Limited, Automattoque ULC, Ausomattic Pty Ltd, Bubblestorm Management Pty, Tatu Do Bem Tecnologia Ltda, Aut O’Mattic A8c Ireland Ltd
Misc
- Getting Things GNOME! will be the final task tracking app I use
- This aged poorly - it was not the final tasking app I use, I ended up bouncing around a few other ones and currently I use Todoist
- How does Google Forms locked mode work?
- You need a Google Workspace for Education account to test this; I added my list when I was in high school but I graduated 3.5 years ago so I can’t really test this anymore.
- XSLT is a good idea, actually
- I thought about it more and it’s cool but not actually great.
- How does MMS work?
- I started reading through 3GPP documentation of how MMS is implemented but it’s not that interesting.
- The AI Con review
- I considered reading this book to review it but I don’t actually care it that much.
- Generating art with code-davinci-002
- I really liked talking with this base model (the base model in between GPT-3 and GPT-3.5) when it was released but OpenAI removed it from the API 3 years ago so I can’t generate art with it anymore.
