today's howtos
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Day 46: ordering layers
By default, cascade layers are stacked in the order they are defined, but you don’t have to rely on it. You can determine the order in one place.
In the following example, the border color of the paragraph is first red, then blue, then rebeccapurple, and finally green.
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Autonomy, packet size, friction, fanout, and velocity
Nostalgia is a dangerous drug and it’s always risky to wallow in it. So those of us who fondly remember the early blogosphere, and now want to draw parallels to the fediverse, should do so carefully. But we do want to learn from history.
Here’s one way to compare five generations of social software along the five dimensions named in the title of this post.
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CSS For URLs and HTTP Headers
How do we get the DOM? The browser knows how to create it from an HTTP request consisting of a URL, some headers, and some HTML. For example, this is a simplified representation of (the beginnings of) the webpage for www.jim-nielsen.com.
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Illegal Hashes
To understand this blog post, you need to know two things.
01. There exists a class of numbers which are illegal in some jurisdictions. For example, a number may be copyrighted content, a decryption key, or other text considered illegal.
02. There exists a class of algorithms which will take any arbitrary data and produce a fixed length text from it. This process is known as "hashing". These algorithms are deterministic - that is, entering the same data will always produce the same hash.
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Getting my unit size 'prefixes' (really suffixes) straight, sort of
In theory, the official metric (power of ten) prefixes are written as 'T', 'G', 'M', and 'k'. This isn't in accordance with customary computer use, which upper-cases the 'k' to 'K'. According to Wikipedia, binary prefixes are written as 'Ti', 'Gi', 'Mi', and 'Ki', although Wikipedia also notes that there's plenty of usage (my phrasing) of plain 'T', 'G', and so on to mean the binary versions. However, both usage leave it ambiguous whether you're writing about bytes or bits.
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Taking a good picture of a PCB
So to create a great picture I've decided to make a better setup. I've used several components for this. The most important one is two external flashes controlled with a wireless transmitter. I've added softboxes to the flashers to minimize the sharp shadows usually created when using a flash. This produces quite nice board pictures with even lighting.