TIL (about the Dark Arts of HTML)
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@anotherusername said in TIL (about the Dark Arts of HTML):
TIL that it's possible to hide a workbook in Excel, and that a workbook so hidden, once saved, will still be hidden next time it's opened. The only way to figure out what the fuck happened to it is to click View > Unhide and go "oh hey, there it is".
Excel would open the workbook, it just wouldn't display it. It even asked if I wanted to save the hidden workbook before I exited...
That's...special.
We hide single Sheets in my magic customer report thingy for the purposes of backing data storage and scratch-space. It's always amused me that the internal constant for that is
xlSheetVeryHidden
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TIL about
cd -
.
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@gąska IDNLT about
cd -
, but you've made me google for a powershell equivalent, so TIL about Push-Location and Pop-Location, already conveniently aliased to pushd and popd.
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@zecc Bonus tip: if you have PSCX installed you get
Set-LocationEx
(by default aliased tocd
) where doing anything withcd
will record your previous locations.You can then just do
cd
to show your stack of previous locations andcd -
/cd +
to navigate .
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@bb36e said in TIL (about the Dark Arts of HTML):
Vodka eyeballing is the practice of consuming vodka by pouring it into the eye sockets, where it is absorbed through the mucous membranes of the region into the bloodstream.
Nope! thread is
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TIL what happens when you have 42 Facebook tabs open in 14 different windows and you get a PM.
Spoiler
Nothing too exciting, really... it just locks up Firefox for about five minutes while it's popping up the chat window on all 42 tabs.
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@anotherusername said in TIL (about the Dark Arts of HTML):
42 Facebook tabs open in 14 different windows
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@anonymous234 said in TIL (about the Dark Arts of HTML):
Microsoft: "....well....I guess we could do something like that..."
I've used hidden sheets to satisfy very particular business requirements in very particular circumstances, it happens.
Oh, workbooks. That's awesome. Someday it will turn out that 90% of actual programming for the past 20 years has actually been Office VBA and no-one knew.
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@stillwater That would be false, though.
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@gribnit said in TIL (about the Dark Arts of HTML):
@anonymous234 said in TIL (about the Dark Arts of HTML):
Microsoft: "....well....I guess we could do something like that..."
I've used hidden sheets to satisfy very particular business requirements in very particular circumstances, it happens.
Oh, workbooks. That's awesome. Someday it will turn out that 90% of actual programming for the past 20 years has actually been Office VBA and no-one knew.
Yeah, I use hidden sheets all the time. But a hidden workbook totally threw me.
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TIL IntelliJ IDEA runs a local web server to host all the Javadocs for the current project, and then links to it from documentation popups. Neat.
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@pie_flavor It'll host your static html there too for you to preview, even.
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TIL that you can make soccer look even more silly:
https://youtu.be/Spjx7L7Jpow?t=15
Or if you want the 8-bit soundtrack:
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TIL how the sostenuto pedal of a grand piano works.
https://youtu.be/6effL4ATZVo?t=129
Here's part 1 if you're interested
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TIL how to open the glass cover of our fireplace to access the 'burn zone' (not sure of the actual term). We had a moth in there and our cats were going nuts.
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TIL about this hack 16-bit windows versions used:
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On December 15, 2015, Ohio state senator Izaha Akins visited the town of Sycamore, about an hour and a half drive north of Columbus. He was there to give a speech to a government class at Mohawk High School. It was an opportunity which was set up weeks beforehand but, due to a last-minute scramble, seemed to just come together in the moment. Akins wasn’t the person the school originally hoped to book; at the time, they had reached out to state senator Dave Burke’s office, scheduling a time in January for him to address the class. But a few days before Akins’ lecture, Akins contacted the school with a change in plan.
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https://emojipedia.org/flag-for-taiwan/
This Taiwanese flag is hidden from the emoji keyboard on iOS devices when the region is set to China. Chinese iPhones will not display this emoji and will instead show a missing character tofu (☒) in place of the flag.
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@bb36e said in TIL (about the Dark Arts of HTML):
and will instead show a missing character tofu (☒)
TIL
https://curiosity.com/topics/a-missing-letters-blank-box-is-called-tofu-curiosity/
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@anonymous234 said in WTF Bites:
I'm glad they specified that both male and female people can apply for the positions. Maybe they're against nonbinary genders?
I noticed that on virtually every job advert on Stack Exchange coming from Germany. You finally motivated me to look it up () and find this Meta.StackExchange answer about it.
TL;DR: Lazy translation from German. German has many gendered nouns, so their ads say "Softwareentwickler (m/w)" instead of "Softwareentwickler/Softwareentwicklerin", and translation to English often gets done without thinking it through.
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@zecc That's neat but I wish he would've explained what happens when the sostenuto pedal is pressed, held, and then a key is pressed and released, while still holding the sostenuto pedal. Does the felt edge push past the sostenuto bar and allow the damper to rise above it and remain up, or is it held below it and fall back down when the key is released?
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@anotherusername One would presume (and a google search seems to confirm) that the bar stops further notes from being sustained. It'd just be another sustain pedal otherwise.
But yeah a visual demonstration of that would have been nice.
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@anotherusername I believe keys pressed after the sostenuto pedal are not sustained (so says Wikipedia), so I think it's the latter.
Aside: I initially pressed the wrong key and typed "beliebe".
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@anotherusername It stays up, if I remember right. Go find a grand piano to play with. Even an upright will work the same, if you don't have a grand handy.
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@coderpatsy said in TIL (about the Dark Arts of HTML):
One would presume (and a google search seems to confirm) that the bar stops further notes from being sustained. It'd just be another sustain pedal otherwise.
@gribnit said in TIL (about the Dark Arts of HTML):
It stays up, if I remember right. Go find a grand piano to play with. Even an upright will work the same, if you don't have a grand handy.
I actually did figure about as much, but seeing it animated would've been nice.
I'm especially curious how it worked, since pressing the key normally lifts the damper. Does the sostenuto bar as it rotates catch the damper and lift it further, so that it doesn't interfere with the rising of other dampers as other notes are played? Or is the rising of the other dampers somehow attenuated so that they can stop when they hit the sostenuto bar?
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@anotherusername I can acquire an entirely correct answer to this question but I am too lazy to do so, and besides, I haven't checked lately whether my dad is dead, although I figure I'd have heard.
Fine. Shut up, I'm on the phone.
Okay. Label states prior to pressing sustain/sostenuto BEFORE, while s/s is pressed DURING and after releasing s/s AFTER, please, with identified transitions INTO and OUT-OF.
BEFORE, notes are damped at release of key. A key being held BEFORE and INTO can be released DURING and still be sustained. Any note struck DURING will be sustained. OUT-OF, it might seem you could re-up a key by sneaking the damper back up with a slow press, but apparently the action will prevent that so if you want to be not damping a note(s) AFTER you would need to re-sound it DURING. AFTER, notes are damped at release of key, it's a lot like BEFORE.
I see that this answers nothing about how the action achieves this. If I had obtained this information, I believe I would still be on the phone.
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@gribnit That's literally incomprehensible.
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@anotherusername Do you, program, anything? Also I didn't claim it would be comprehensible, I said it would be correct.
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@bb36e said in TIL (about the Dark Arts of HTML):
https://emojipedia.org/flag-for-taiwan/
This Taiwanese flag is hidden from the emoji keyboard on iOS devices when the region is set to China. Chinese iPhones will not display this emoji and will instead show a missing character tofu (☒) in place of the flag.
That's the best case scenario.
I didn't read the whole thing, but this caught my attention:
After two+ years of being unable to type 'Taiwan' or being remotely DOS'd anytime her phone received an Taiwanese flag emoji the fix (kudos to my friend Josh S. for the idea!), was simply to toogle the region from US, to China, then back to US.
:O
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@gribnit said in TIL (about the Dark Arts of HTML):
@anotherusername Do you, program, anything? Also I didn't claim it would be comprehensible, I said it would be correct.
Part of my inability to comprehend it is that it doesn't appear to differentiate between the sustain/sostenuto pedals, so I'm not sure which it's describing.
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@anotherusername Well, the piano tuner I asked explained that there's damper, a string shifting pedal that selects whether the hammer hits how many of the strings for the note, and a sustain pedal for which the italian name is sostenuto and the performance direction for which is sostenuto. So they're the same pedal.
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There's, in no particular order:
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The soft pedal, which shifts the hammers so they hit fewer keys and produce a softer sound (some upright pianos cheat by putting a felt curtain between the keys and hammers instead).
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The damper pedal, aka sustain pedal, which prevents all dampers from resting on top of the strings while it is being pressed; therefore indefinitely prolonging any sound produced before and during it being held.
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The sostenuto pedal, which holds the dampers of the keys pressed at the moment it's pressed, and those keys only; therefore prolonging the sound of those keys, while still normally damping the sound of all the other keys.
I don't know what you mean by "they're the same pedal".
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@gribnit The pedal that he called "damper" can be called either the damper pedal or the sustain pedal (I think sustain is the more common term; that's what Wikipedia calls it).
He must be using sustain/sostenuto interchangeably to mean the sostenuto pedal. I don't think they're interchangeable, but at any rate I guess that means he was just describing the working of the sostenuto pedal. But his description does sound more like the sustain pedal, so maybe he got them confused.
edit: this video shows it working, and notes played DURING are not sustained. Only keys played BEFORE and held INTO are sustained by the sostenuto pedal. So his description would fit the sustain/damper pedal, not the sostenuto pedal.
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@gribnit said in TIL (about the Dark Arts of HTML):
@anotherusername Well, the piano tuner I asked explained that there's damper, a string shifting pedal that selects whether the hammer hits how many of the strings for the note, and a sustain pedal for which the italian name is sostenuto and the performance direction for which is sostenuto. So they're the same pedal.
In the video they show at 0:45 that it's not the same.
As far as I understand it, the damper pedal is also called the sustain pedal and raises all dampers. The sostenuto pedal might mean "sustain" in Italian but it only sustains individually pressed keys.
They'll sound differently because pressing the damper pedal will allow the strings of other keys to vibrate in unison with the keys you did press. Since the other pedal raises only the dampers of those last pressed keys you wouldn't get that effect as much.
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@jbert Thanks! I thought my source was correct, but they're not. I'll ask a piano player next time.
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@gribnit said in TIL (about the Dark Arts of HTML):
Even an upright will work the same
Not necessarily. My grandmother's piano, which we had when I was a kid — it was old then; I'd guess it's probably around 100 years old now, if it still exists somewhere — had a damper/sustain pedal, two soft pedals, and no sostenuto pedal. The damper pedal worked as expected — except that, like almost everything on an upright, it relied on springs instead of gravity. Neither of the soft pedals was a true una corda pedal. One worked by lowering a piece of felt between the hammers and the strings, resulting in a very dull, muffled sound. The other lifted the hammers closer to the strings with the intent, I think, that the hammers would not accelerate to full speed before they hit the strings. It didn't really make much difference in the sound, but I did discover that if I pressed the damper pedal and then stomped hard enough on this pedal, I could not merely lift the hammers, but fling all of them at the strings and produce an 88-note tone cluster. No doubt some modernist composer would have made use of this technique if it were available on a normal concert piano.
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TIL that Gimp actually starts up pretty fast, and I'd just been this whole time. I thought it was written so poorly that it has to load all the fonts on startup; turns out my font cache had just been corrupted, and after I deleted it Gimp starts up in three seconds instead of thirty.
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TIL that
$env:Path
isn't just special PowerShell syntax.env:
is a drive, and so isvariable:
,alias:
, andfunction:
.
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@pie_flavor Also
Cert:\
,HKLM:\
, ... the registry ones are especially useful.
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@pie_flavor said in TIL (about the Dark Arts of HTML):
TIL that
$env:Path
isn't just special PowerShell syntax.env:
is a drive, and so isvariable:
,alias:
, andfunction:
.I believe
$env:XXX
is still special, take for example$global:XXX
or$local:XXX
which cannot be accessed like a drive.It's just that there also exists PowerShell "provider" with the name
Env:
which can be accessed like a drive. SeeGet-PSProvider
to list all of them.
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@jbert Huh. "Everything is a drive". That's a lot like a unifying abstraction, that is.
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So why do these ancient structures stand out during times of drought? The henges are actually a series of concentric circles created by placing large posts in the ground. When the henge fell out of disuse or was burned down, the underground portions of the posts rotted away, changing the composition of the soil in the posthole, causing it to retain more moisture. During a drought, while the surrounding crops yellow, the plants over the post holes have a slight advantage.
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TIL reel-to-reel tapes with pre-recorded music are available again.
It'll only set you back $450 if you want some of the high-quality stuff, and that's if you already have a high-end or professional playback device to play it on.
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TIL sneezing can sometimes break ribs.
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@gąska said in TIL (about the Dark Arts of HTML):
TIL sneezing can sometimes break ribs.
Depends on who you sneeze on, I guess.
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Yo Dawg...
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TIL about
"Hey, let's test if our computer systems are secure"
[...]
"Well, here are the results: they're not"
"Should we do something about it?"
"..."
"..."
And 20 years later, here we are.
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TIL about this thing: