There is (or at least used to be) a debug command to write-protect a hard drive. No idea what it’s for or why such a thing exists, but you flip a certain bit from 0 to 1 and drive no write. I won $100 once at work with this knowledge. We had a training course about how much better the new version of windows at the time was and how much harder it was to break - so hard they’d pay $100 (in early 2000s money) to anyone who could unrecoverably break their demo windows install during the 10 minute presentation. The instructor (who worked for Microsoft) said he’d been doing this for 6 months and they’d never had to pay out that prize before, much less 30 seconds in.

Reign of Kings, a medieval online PvE survival game had a bug where the 360 rotation camera could be used in 3rd person mode to look inside of walls of other players. You could even access their chests if they built them against the wall (which they all did).

This meant that you could loot everyone’s bases without even breaking in. The game went through several major updates with this bug still in place. My brother and I used it extensively.

One day there is a major update and the release notes mention about how they have now finally fixed the “glitch where players items disappear from chests when placed near walls”.

Real G’s move in silence like lasagna.

“Bizarre” is the only word from the Basque language that is regularly used in the English language

(Can’t wait to be proven wrong in 5… 4… 3…)

The SR-71 used an Astroinertial Navigation System that used stars to keep the navigation information accurate as the plane flew over long distances. Normally an inertial navigation system degrades in accuracy over time and distance due to small errors building up and something called gyro drift. The NAS-14V2 used a catalog of known stars and a gimballed telescope to identify specific stars (even during a cloudy day) and determine the position of the stars in relation to the aircraft. Using this information the position of the aircraft can be used to revise the inertial navigation system’s data every so often so the accuracy is much better.

There are two types of color E-ink displays:

One that uses a color filter on top of a regular black and white particle display, like in their Kaleido screens. This has a faster refresh rate like black and white displays, but the colors are muted and the screen’s “pure white” is much more gray than other displays.

One that uses four colored particles, cyan, magenta, yellow, and reflective white, like in their Gallery screens. This has a much slower refresh rate, but the colors are vivid and the screen’s “pure white” is just as good as a non-color screen.

There are also color transflective LCD screens from other companies that are sometimes marketed as “e-paper” or “paper like” that are fairly uninteresting.

And there are just straight up backlit LCD screens marketed as “e-paper” or “paper like” that are just not. XPPen just made one. I personally think this should be considered false advertising.

Hermeticism is the origin of most conspiracy theories if you dig deep enough. Truly the OG brainworm

deleted by creator

The great opera singer Enrico Caruso was the 18th of 21 children, only 3 of whom survived infancy.

Johann Sebastian Bach wrote an opera about coffee addiction.

The Russian composer Tchaikovsky was afraid his head would come off while conducting, so he would hold his chin with one hand while doing so.

The girlfriend of composer Erik Satie wore a corsage made of carrots, and she was a painter and liked to feed the paintings she made. Satie once threw her out the window but she survived.

Wsl uses the 9p protocol from plan 9 to interact with windows and vice versa

The most efficient base for a number system is e.

We use base 10 with 0-9 digits and each position is a ten’s place, and the efficiency being measured is the product of the number of digits and the length of digits needed to represent a number in a given range of values. So if we used base 2 binary instead of base 10 decimal we only need to remember 2 digits 0-1, but to represent most numbers we’ll need more digits, 11 in base 10 is 1011 in base 2. On the other side we could use hexadecimal to write shorter numbers like 11 is B, but need to use more digits, 0-F digits where A-F are the 10-15 digits.

If you try to plot a function that minimizes the efficiency the minimum is at e. So you’d have digits 0-2 and e would be written as 10 since each position is an e’s place.

My ICQ number…

Crime novelist Jim Thompson [Pop.1,280] wrote a novelization of the TV show Ironside.

If that’s not esoteric, I don’t know what is.

There is only one model structure that can be put on the category of small categories for which the weak equivalences coincide with honest equivalences of categories. It’s called the Joyal-Tierney model structure. You can define the suspension of an object in any model category as the homotopy pushout to two terminals, then define an abstract notion of a sphere in any model category by setting the 0-sphere as the coproduct of two terminals and the (n+1)-sphere as the suspension of the n-sphere.

A small category is a CW-complex if and only if it is a groupoid.

If you stare at the elbow of someone you are high-fiving, you’ll never miss the high five.

deleted by creator