@da-Doctah said in Fun with maps:
Ooh, I hope the new kid grows up and becomes a priest: Father Brother!
Major Major Major Major, anyone?
@da-Doctah said in Fun with maps:
Ooh, I hope the new kid grows up and becomes a priest: Father Brother!
Major Major Major Major, anyone?
very occasionally by the user to allow hyphenating a long word if the software does not know the rules, or does not know them for that word.
It’s a common enough character in DTP that InDesign has an easy keyboard shortcut for it:
But this is the kind of program that gets used by people who (should) know when to use a soft hyphen, and do so on purpose, like you say. Compared to the world’s most popular word processor:
@BernieTheBernie My immediate thought when I saw the name was that her parents had aimed for “Belle” and missed. IRL, they probably meant for her to be called Bo and, as this was in Holland, are ignorant of foreign languages.
@LaoC said in Fun with maps:
completely puzzled by his kids' gender issues
I remember some years ago, I saw a news report about something or other on Dutch TV, in which was a young woman named (according to the title) Beau
Autocarrot fixing your hyphens for you.
I was wondering if that was what you were thinking of, but it seems unlikely because why would it do this?
@Zerosquare said in WTF Bites:
helpfully assume that, when the user entered a soft hyphen, they actually intended to type a real hyphen
Why? How many people do they think accidentally type a soft hyphen when they mean a regular one? My assumption would be that anyone who enters a soft hyphen, means for it to be there.
@topspin said in The Belt Onion club:
@PleegWat same here, we took the bus.
I walked, and I don’t think my mother ever brought me to school after I turned five or so. But then, I lived something like 2 minutes’ walk away from school. At the end of the morning or afternoon, there were also hardly ever any parents waiting to pick up their kids — everybody just walked home, or rode bikes if they lived on or beyond the outskirts of the village.
These days, though, if I make the mistake of walking past the school around the time it finishes, I have to weave my way through the crowd of parents who stand there talking. Apparently, a lot of kids go home on their own even if their parents are there waiting for them because some parents seem to do this more to chat to each other than to pick up their children. At least most of them don’t seem to come by car, though.
Oh, yeah, this thread. Last week in Rotterdam:
British 250-pounder, buried eight metres deep. It had been discovered in 2016 already, but at the time it was decided to leave it alone because at that depth there was no risk. But now, new houses are to be built there, whose foundations could/would disturb it, so they dug it out after evacuating nearby residents and closing the local airspace.
@ixvedeusi said in WTF Bites:
accidentally hit the
SpongeBobCaps Lock key without noticing.
Which is why macOS requires a slightly longer press on the Caps Lock key than most people normally do when typing, to turn it on. Turning it off works with a normal-length keypress, though.
@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF Bites:
What version of Windows are you using?
None, happily.
I've never had the Shift key act as a toggle (aka Caps Lock)
See above: on Windows, Shift inverts the state of the Caps Lock key for as long as Shift is pressed. This has its uses, of course, but on the whole I’ve found it to get in my way more than it was useful.
(Unlike Windows, both iPadOS and macOS do the right thing and don’t toggle the case when Shift is pressed.)
The right thing meaning forcing you to type in caps and look for a shitty workaround?
The right thing meaning: not suddenly make me tYPE lIKE tHIS if I press Shift out of habit when I want all-caps and therefore have Caps Lock on.
@ixvedeusi said in WTF Bites:
I hate all these programs "automagically" trying to be "helpful" instead of just allowing me to clearly tell them what I want.
On that note: I bought a new iPad recently, because my old one was getting rather long in the tooth. This time, I also bought a hardware keyboard with it, as I’ve found myself doing a lot more typing on the iPad in recent years than I did before.
Now, iPadOS automatically turns on capital letters if it thinks you’re starting a sentence. Fine for most people, I guess, but if I want to type something like “This, that, the other, etc. are all words.” it will want to capitalise the first letter after etc.
. With the on-screen keyboard, all you need to do is hit the caps key to turn it off before typing the a
in are
, which is a minor nuisance but not something you can't get used to. With the hardware keyboard, though, there is no bloody way to do that! The caps lock light doesn't come on, so pressing that physical key doesn’t work, and holding Shift pressed just means you will be guaranteed to type a capital letter. (Unlike Windows, both iPadOS and macOS do the right thing and don’t toggle the case when Shift is pressed.)
The obvious fix, going back with the cursor keys and deleting the A
, turns caps back on so that typing an a
at this point means you get an A
again. The only way I found so far is to type etc.a
and then go back and insert a space after the .
.
Maybe I should instead dive into the system prefs and disable this automatic capitalisation and other forms of autocorrect entirely, like I have it set on my desktop computer.
@HardwareGeek I’m not a psychologist either, but AFAIK bipolar disorder generally has much longer cycles — a week or more of (over-)happiness and a similar time of depression, with more or less normal in between? He’s been diagnosed with some form of autism long ago already, but I forget the name, and currently lives in sheltered accommodation (basically a normal house with multiple people with varying mental problems, plus some staff) because last year, things were on the verge of being too bad for him to live on his own any longer.
Had a not-fun Shadowrun session today. It started out well enough with tying up the loose ends of the adventure that finished last time we played (healing up, getting back home from Amazonia, getting paid — that sort of stuff), but things broke down OOC when the PCs were about to be hired for the next shadowrun. Basically, their prospective employer tells them, “Racists killed my sister, I want you to make them pay.” We didn’t even get to the point where she tells them she wants the PCs to blow up their meeting hall with the racists inside, because the dwarf rigger immediately interrupts and demands — not just asks for — proof that these people are responsible, else he’s not going to do it.
Okay, OOC I can understand that, because basically the employer is asking them to commit cold-blooded murder. But when the ork street samurai IC tries to calm things down a bit in an OOC effort to keep the adventure going, the rigger pulls a pistol on him and tells him to be quiet, all the while demanding the lady gives them proof to back up her allegation. She says she can’t, not here and now, anyway (OOC: she doesn’t have any proof because 1. she has no sister, and 2. the folks she wants to blow up aren’t the racist conspiracy she’s making them out to be — that’s all just bullshit to try and get the runners to sympathise and do this for her) so eventually the rigger puts away his gun and walks out of the room, saying he’s not going to do this.
The player then went outside to smoke a cigarette, leaving the rest of us to wonder a bit about what just happened here. Because this is not the first time he’s done stuff like this: the last run to Amazonia (Brazil and surrounding areas), he strongly objected to having to traipse through the jungle and walked out too. Only to decide to come along after all a few minutes later.
Anyway, when he came back in, we asked him a bit about what he was trying to do here, which seems to have perplexed him a little. After some back and forth, pointing out among other thingsthat we are here to play a game together, which is kind of hard when one PC refuses to come along, he suddenly went back on the decision and said he’d do the run after all … sigh There followed more OOC discussion about this, because it makes playing very difficult OOC and working together very difficult IC.
In the end, things got heated enough that he basically told us to leave (we were playing at his place). Needless to say, once outside we had a fairly lengthy conversation about what just happened and what to do about it. But we didn’t arrive at any solution we feel happy with.
As I’ve mentioned before, the player in question has some mental health issues, and those seem to manifest in him alternating, over maybe 30 minutes to an hour or so, between being passive or even almost lethargic, and becoming very active, impulsive, and not listening at all to others. The episode I just described happened in the latter state, and this is far from the first time. When talking it over outside, we figure another issue is that he seems to play RPGs mostly for roleplaying his character — he’s quite good at that, coming up with all kinds of stuff his character is doing, inventing places, people, situations and so on. But we also worked out that the other two players play RPGs mainly for the fun of solving problems, and roleplaying in-depth is much further down on the list of what they want to do. Though I’m the GM, I’m in the latter camp too — I’m not a great roleplayer or storyteller, but I do like solving problems, and setting them for the other players. Someone impulsively making rash decisions to “solve” problems does not fit well with that style of play, though. (Read some way back up for the story about the bus station, another good example of this.)
We’re now really at the point where we’re wondering: Will he quit the group? Do we want to play with him still? Will we have to tell him that we don’t want to play with him anymore?
@Gurth I'm not sure what pedantically-correct point you're trying to make here.
The point I’m trying to make is that it’s not pretending that a PNG is an SVG — it’s using an SVG that happens to have a PNG image inside of it. Which, I agree, is pretty pointless if that’s the only thing it does, like here.
Why? Why would you take a png image and pretend its an svg?
It’s not, though, is it? It’s a perfectly acceptable SVG. One with embedded PNG data, sure, but that doesn’t make it not-an-SVG.
I grant you that it would probably be better to just use the PNG directly instead of embedding it in an SVG, though.
@Parody said in Spyware as a service:
Is pressing Print Screen every so often against the GDPR?
That would depend on who takes those screenshots and what they’re used for. If you’re taking them yourself for your own purposes, then there is obviously nothing illegal about it. If somebody else is doing it to keep tabs on you, though, I wouldn’t be so sure it isn’t illegal.
Yesterday’s Shadowrun game was a learning moment for the player who bought WP grenades a while ago, but had never actually used any yet.
The three PCs are loading stuff onto a boat, which their NPC guide is getting ready to move, when four guys walk towards them down the pier the boat is moored at. The PCs realise these guys are probably up to no good, so they start getting their weapons out; the guys do the same in response and start shooting while they’re closing the distance. Rather than going for one of his guns, though, the street samurai decides that four bad guys on a narrow pier is a good target for a grenade. Which he wasn’t really wrong about. What he did do wrong, was aim the grenade only about ten metres away. He was lucky that it scattered three metres directly away from him, ending up slightly behind the attackers.
One of the bad guys had already been swept off the pier by the river spirit that the PC shaman summoned before the grenade was thrown. The remaining three took very bad wounds from the explosion, but …
WP grenades in SR have a blast radius of 14 metres — putting the street sam a metre inside of that. And since the shaman was right next to him (but crouched down behind part of the boat), he also took damage from the grenade. The third PC and the NPC guide were further back and so out of harm’s way. The sam is so big and tough that he didn’t take any damage from the blast at all. The shaman, being decidedly less tough, did take damage but not too badly.
However, WP grenades in SR have the side effect that if you were hit by them, you take a small amount of damage for the next fifteen turns, to represent the burning phosphorus …
The shaman almost got killed by this, and was only saved by extreme effort by all the other characters around, while the sam bought himself some time by jumping into the river before the others could put effort into getting the WP particles off him as well.
@Arantor said in Unit of Measurement WTF:
Now the Brits are at it too in the “anything but metric” camp
Well, yes, the metric system originated in what is now an EU country, so obviously that system needs to be replaced now by something people can relate to, in order to prevent the blue line from continuing its current trend:
@sockpuppet7 I’ve also seen at least one that had a picture of a tricycle in it, which as I recall, I needed to click else it didn’t think I had clicked on enough bicycles.
@BernieTheBernie said in I hate printers, with a passion:
@Gurth Um, "reliable" ... You can be sure that it won't report higher ink level than it is, but the other way round....
Exactly. It’s the part that the manufacturer really wants to have working as designed. Everything else … who cares?
@Arantor The only thing in a printer that’s reliable by the standards of other technology, is the gadget that checks ink levels.
@DogsB So, two pieces of technology in the house?
@dcon What’s confusing about it? If you’re ever lost there, just keep heading north and you will get to the nearest sea.
@BernieTheBernie said in “iPad doesn’t recognise fingerprint anymore, and the code also doesn’t work!”:
That may have some effects.
I would be a bit surprised if it did, as I don’t think I’ve ever seen either of my parents drinking wine.
@BernieTheBernie said in UI Bites:
create an error, e.g. with
NA()
.
Of course, that failed. And you can guess the reason, can't you?
It is localized, too.
In German Excel, I have to useNV()
instead.
And Excel gives you no indication that what you’ve typed isn’t recognised as a keyword as you entered it?
@boomzilla said in The Belt Onion club:
That looks like somebody had been recently playing Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards when they came up with that verification system. I wonder if pressing Ctrl+Alt+X will get you past the questions.
@Arantor said in Fun with maps:
“mh” being a v sound is only weird because you’re used to seeing those letters and associating different sounds to them than what the Irish did long ago.
Well, yes — all spelling is essentially the assigning of arbitrary symbols to the sounds that people make. The problem with Irish is that they seem to have gone for entirely different (combinations of) symbols for many sounds than the rest of Europe that uses the same alphabet. Which would be understandable if there’s a shift in pronunciation but not in spelling, like with English vowels — but what I’m saying is that I don’t quite see how /mh/ or /mʰ/ would shift to /v/, given the very different ways in which those sounds are actually produced.
@Bulb said in Fun with maps:
That's kinda weird, this was outskirts of the medieval Europe and everybody who'd learn to read and write would almost certainly also learn some liturgy in Latin to associate some sounds to the letters
That’s what I would expect too. But somehow, they seem to have gotten the idea that you need more letters than Latin to transcribe the same sounds … Irish words all seem to start out fairly normally (<n> for /n/, etc.), but by the time you get to the end, their spelling usually bears no relationship at all anymore to normal European pronunciation of the letters. It’s consistent in Irish, I guess, but WTF would you write things like <mh> for /v/? I can’t find any way in which /mh/ shifts to /v/ when trying to say them.
Welsh has a far more logical spelling. Sure, it has a few oddities, but every language does to some degree or other. Few come close to Irish, though, not even English.
though sounds quite different from what English used.
English has the problem that its modern spelling reflects vowel pronunciation of about 300–500 years ago — which is to say, from back when they pronounced vowels like the rest of Europe does. <a> being the /a/ and /ɑ/ sounds, <e> for /e/ or /ɛ/, etc. rather than <a> being /e/, <e> being /i/, and so on (except when they’re not).
@Bulb said in Fun with maps:
@Gurth Who the eF created the orthography for Welsh‽
Largely William Salesbury and William Morgan, I gather. But if you mean to ask about those names, they’re Irish, not Welsh ;)
Trying to decipher those names got me thinking about Irish spelling the other day, and it gave me the thought that Irish has similarities to the Cherokee syllabary. The latter was invented by a man who had heard about writing and knew some Latin letters but not the sounds associated with them, so he basically invented a writing system from scratch. Whoever came up with Irish spelling must have been in a comparable situation, but have the added disadvantage of having the idea that using more letters makes words better.
@Arantor said in Fun with maps:
People used to names like "Meadhbh", "Caoilfhionn" or "Tadhg" will faithfully copy any string of printable characters no questions asked.
For bonus points how we are pronouncing those?
Meadhbh: /miːjvʲ/
Caoilfhionn: /kiːlʲʊnʲ/
Tadhg: /bɔb/
@CodeJunkie said in I hate printers, with a passion:
You should be able to. I bought a roller replacement kit for $20 for my HP LaserJet 4100n off Amazon about a year ago. That thing just keeps on working.
Yep, those had already been replaced a few years earlier, when they stopped working properly. I don’t remember the reason for getting rid of the printer eventually, but it was some other paper-feed problem that wasn’t the rollers but something more involved.
@topspin My first thought is to wonder whether that USB stick is still good.
@ixvedeusi said in Fun with maps:
I have perfect confidence that someone will correct me if I'm wrong
Doesn’t look like you did, except for calling them “surnames” which implies a family name. Something like 90% of people from Iceland don’t have that at all; IIRC the ones that do are all descended from immigrants, who get to keep their family names when they become Icelandic citizens.
Not really related to the above at all, but Iceland apparently also issues passports on request in which the father’s “surname” appears for all members of a family, to avoid foreign immigration officials thinking that they might be dealing with kidnappers or something (“Man called Jónsson, woman called Porsdóttir, a supposed child of theirs called Bjørnsson …? Time to call in reinforcements.”)
It’s graphics software. Every layer has an alpha channel, always. Why would it not?
Because it’s the background.
No idea (anymore) if GIMP works that way too, but Photoshop does for reasons I’ve never been able to fathom. It makes for slightly smaller files, though, perhaps that was originally a good reason to have a background “layer”?
@Carnage Could be just a case of Jón being the most common men’s name in Iceland, and that by some fluke, men called Jón on average have more daughters than sons. Even if there’s only one more Jónsdóttir than Jónsson, it makes Jónsdóttir the name to appear on this map.
@Zerosquare One problem I spot there: Iceland. Few or very few people will have Jónsdóttir as an actual last name there. Iceland is also somehow coloured blue for the name “signifying patronage” instead of red for “Patronymic, matronymic, or ancestral” when you can’t get more patronymic than names like this.
@Arantor I’ve purchased exactly one thing off eBay in my life, and yes, I think it was a good idea. However, I do realise this experience may not be completely typical.
@dkf said in Quotes Out of Context:
Why run them inside? Remember, the UK has a climate that is generally mild enough that waste pipes freezing aren't a big problem.
The Netherlands has a milder climate than the UK (you get the occasional blizzard every couple of years, the last one in this country was in the 1970s) yet nobody here would put anything except a drainpipe from the gutter on the outside of the wall.
Maybe it makes sense if you live with people who take their time washing their hair every day.
Yeah, that’s about the only semi-reasonable scenario I can come up with too — but even then: you can also just wait for each other to finish.
- Asphalt roads in a residential area already feels wrong
I think I'll mark that as "@Gurth being weird". Asphalt is pretty good for residential areas; low maintenance and fairly cheap to install if you don't need a roadbed for heavy loads.
Not weird, cultural differences. Asphalt in this country is for roads that see a good deal of traffic — I can’t think of ever having seen a residential area with asphalt on the street, except when I was on holiday in the UK. Pretty much every street is paved with bricks in this country.
@dkf said in Quotes Out of Context:
@Gurth You might want to take a little time to explain why these are such heinous crimes against humanity.
@ixvedeusi said in Quotes Out of Context:
@Gurth has a dim view of the current state of UK housing:
I have watched a fair number of British TV programmes about houses, so yes, you are exactly right. They’re mostly bland, even many modern ones have the waste water/sewage pipes on the outsides of the walls, they frequently have too few toilets but too many bathrooms, and people insist on putting asphalt up to the front wall.
My parents went on holiday the other day, and just now I got a chat message from my father saying that my mother’s iPad doesn’t recognise her fingerprint anymore (“she’s got a cut on her thumb”), and also refuses her access code. Not great when they’re halfway through France.
Of course, I respond by asking questions to see what might have gone wrong (are they sure they’re remembering the code correctly?) as well as warning them not to keep trying because the iPad will erase itself if they enter a wrong code too many times. Yes, he says, he already got a warning that he had to wait five minutes before he could try again.
After some minutes back and forth about this, my father suddenly says:—
Mistake found, really stupid, your mother had my iPad and I didn’t notice that either …
I mean, hers has a lavender cover and a black bezel, his has a multi-coloured cover and a white bezel … I’m starting to think they really are getting old.
@boomzilla said in Error'd Bites:
Those look like new-built houses in the UK, judging by the drainpipes. What surprises me most about that photo is that there still isn’t a fire escape. Nobody wants to give up a metre or so of their garden so they don’t need to bring everything in through the house, and incidentally also have a way to get out of the back garden should their house be on fire?
@PleegWat said in Fun with maps:
@loopback0 And then they'd been in Edinburgh/Geneva (Cross out what is not appropriate). Why would they do that to themselves?
To lay down at your door, of course.
It made me wonder if you could still get toner for a LaserJet III, and apparently, yes, you can, though everywhere I found it, it said supplies were limited.