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  2. Riddle me this, bible scholars: reading through Genesis 1, it seems like god singles out whales as being particularly significant. They’re the first animals to get created (1:21), other sea creatures get created afterwards, and then when mankind shows up we get dominion over, specifically: the “fish of the sea”, birds, and “creeping things that creepeth” (1:26).

    But NOT whales. They are the only animals created by god which get to escape the dominion of mankind. Is that why one ate Jonah later on? Was this supposed to be a major plot point, but which became less relevant after most of the action moved onto the land?

    Please tell me that this isn’t like the “whoever finds a treetop, he will get the master magic” line at the beginning of the Kalevala which nobody ever mentions again. I read the entire thing, patiently waiting for someone to find a treetop but it never happened. What is the master magic? Is it different from the complete knowledge of the universe Väinämöinen gained from Vipunen to finish his boat? CHECKOV’S GUN, PEOPLE

  3. the direction of a pcbnew (KiCAD) selection changes its behaviour. LtoR only selects completely surrounded parts, RtoL selects partially selected parts.

    I can’t find this feature documented anywhere, but the selection colours are different so I assume it’s supposed to be like this.

    EDIT: apparently it’s something of a de-facto UI standard in CAD apps, probably started by AutoCAD.

  4. ↪ Quinn "kind of here" Norton: I've never liked gendered they/them because it introduces ambiguity in plurality. So I have an idea, hear me out. We already use single sound vowel pronouns with no problem, I & (kinda) You, so they're already natural in English. So just take they and them and strip the TH...

    although I’m not convinced that the singular/plural ambiguity is a big problem. “you” already has ambiguous quantity, and both “you” and “we” are inherently ambiguous and context-dependent

  5. ↪ Quinn "kind of here" Norton: I've never liked gendered they/them because it introduces ambiguity in plurality. So I have an idea, hear me out. We already use single sound vowel pronouns with no problem, I & (kinda) You, so they're already natural in English. So just take they and them and strip the TH...

    as a staunch “they” proponent, I’d say it’s not a bad idea. I’d type ey/em/eir and pronounce [eɪ] [ɛm] [eə]. Possible use singular verb conjugation too for reduced ambiguity e.g. “ey wants to be referred to using “ey””

  6. ↪ Brian Suda: came home to a solicitation for apartment cleaning tapped to the front door window. Firstly, don’t use crap tape to secure your notice to the window. Now it needs a good cleaning after removing it! Secondly, good luck, but no thanks if this is how you leave your notes.pic.twitter.com/TpKezu6d2b

    Maybe the idea is “pay me to clean up the mess I made on your window”…

  7. ↪ Brian Suda: could argue that form input is what made the modern Web more than any other development. The first browsers had no forms (only global search). Thought of releasing a working app based on old code that works today, but without forms we lose so much functionality more than JS/CSS.

    I can think of ways of doing it, but they’re not pretty — e.g. onscreen keyboard made of <a> elements, each keypress is a full screen refresh which stores the new contents of the fake textbox server side (either cookies or URL param to identify session). Makes me wonder… did anyone do something like this at the time, before HTML forms were invented?

  8. It just took me about 30 mins to figure it out, so here’s how to install python plugins in KiCad 5.0 on a Mac.

    1. Make sure your build of KiCad has scripting enabled. It looks like fresh downloads have it by default, but it doesn’t hurt to check. Go KiCad → About KiCad → Show Version Info and make sure that all of the KICAD_SCRIPTING_ flags are set to ON.
    2. Find pcbnew’s plugin search path list. Open pcbnew, and open Tools → Scripting Console. Run import pcbnew; print pcbnew.PLUGIN_DIRECTORIES_SEARCH and you’ll see a list of folders which pcbnew will search for plugins
    3. Move your plugin files/folders to one of these locations
    4. In pcbnew, Tools → External Plugins… → Refresh Plugins. Your Tools → External Plugins menu should fill up with plugins.
  9. ↪ bex edmondson: my (girls) high school's highest computer-related qualification was HALF a GCSE, a qualification taken aged 16 - i had about 12 of them, and ONE HALF was computer-related. half my grade was a POWERPOINT. i asked for them to start an a level - they said no IT WAS 2010!!!!!!!!!!!!https://twitter.com/alicegoldfuss/status/1096142571837960192

    I feel the pain :/ I was already freelancing when I took my GCSEs and was forced to do the ICT BTEC you’re probably talking about. It ended up being my worst grade overall because I got so angry with it halfway through and tried (but sadly failed) to fail it on purpose. Plan was that if a job interviewer asked why IT was my lowest grade I would take great pleasure in ripping the course content to shreds.

  10. “Lord, what a thoughtless wretch was I,
    To mourn, murmur and repine,
    To see the wicked placed on high,
    In pride and robes of honour shine.

    But oh their end, their dreadful end,
    Thy sanctuary taught me so,
    On slippery rocks I see them stand,
    And fiery billows roll below.”

    — Isaac Watts, 1719, still relevant 300 years later :/

    It’s number 183 in the 1991 Sacred Harp, if you feel like singing it to suitably epic music.

  11. ↪ Brian Suda: digs around in an old NeXT box used by CERN to build the first graphical browser. Looking through the source code, this really was a grand experiment.pic.twitter.com/KpDDz3h1FI

    Please tell me that’s the original “this is a server, do not turn off” sticker?!

  12. ↪ Aitor García Rey: Today I Learned the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 provided £20M for compensation payments to British Empire slave-owners. British government financed this massive amount (~5% GPD) w/ a £15M loan (banker Rothschild). It was not fully paid back until 2015! Bankers, we always win

    just imagine how long it would have taken if they had compensated the slaves :/

  15. about tcpdump, a very handy little command line utility for looking at network traffic. Not as fully featured as Wireshark, but nice if you want to e.g. pipe network traffic into another process. It’s also not >300MB :/

  17. When using the python2.7 gzip module with StringIO, it’s extremely important to call GzipFile.close() after you’ve finished writing to it. If you don’t, the archive will probably not be readable as the CRC record will not be appended, and you’ll get a bunch of IOErrors despite everything looking fine.