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  4. 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.

  5. 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 :/

  6. that Cebuano-speaking Wikipedians are vastly more thorough in cataloguing the world’s various “Goat Islands” than their English-speaking counterparts, although they neglect the more artistic uses of the phrase. Compare: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goat_Island vs https://ceb.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goat_Island

    English-speaking wikipedians would have you believe that Canada only boasts a measly two Goat Islands, but the admirable Cebuano-speaking wikipedians reveal that the true number is sixteen times greater, coming second only to the US, which clocks in at almost one hundred.

    The map of Chilean Goat Islands is possibly my new favourite wikipedia graphic:

  8. about Rat Park addiction research via Jules Porter and this comic by Stuart Mcmillen.

    “What if the difference between not being addicted and being addicted was the difference between seeing the world as your park and seeing the world as your cage?”

    I can’t help but think this applies to so many more issues than just substance addiction — depression, for example. Perhaps understanding other things which fit this pattern as forms of addiction is a good world-understanding lens.

  10. about Songlines, an indigenous Australian belief which serves as a communication and navigation tool. Songlines, as well as much other aboriginal culture, seems to be fascinating supporting evidence for the thesis of The Singing Neanderthals — that proto-language was made up of holistic (no grammar), multi-modal communications utilising metaphor and mimickry.

  11. that “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” was appropriated by Pete Seeger (and then further sanitized by George Weiss) from a song written by Solomon Linda, who died in poverty. His family only received royalties for the song’s widespread Disney use after a lawsuit in 2006 — 44 years later.

    There’s an archive of the in-depth three part write-up of the whole thing from Rolling Stone by Rian Malan here.

  14. IE doesn’t upload csv files with text/* media type. Content-type cannot be trusted, the only way of telling if data is of a particular type is to see if it parses successfully.