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Standards Leftovers
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Ruben Schade ☛ PSA for web designers: flags have ratios!
I was more than a little interested with flags as a kid. I loved learning about the history of their designs, what they represented, their aesthetics, and how they’re used in different settings. Point out a national flag (and even some supranational and subordinate flags), and I’ll almost certainly be able to tell you the political entity it represents, the symbolism behind specific features, and what flags upon which they’re based (where applicable). Have you ever wondered why the five pointed star seems so ubiquitous, yet doesn’t appear on most European flags? Why the Union Flag is in a whole bunch of stuff? Why Malaysia and the US both have red and white stripes? Oh boy, one day I might answer all these, along with far more information you definitely don’t need in your life.
(That’s not to say I didn’t get this wrong. I had the Artsakh flag on my wall for years as a kid, thinking it was the flag of Armenia. I guess I wasn’t too far off).
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Matt Ehler ☛ John Gruber on Markdown/Plaintext
But the biggest reason for Markdown’s continuing success isn’t Markdown itself. It’s the triumph of plain text files, both for system configuration and for the interchange of human-readable (and thus, LLM-readable) prose. Markdown isn’t really a “syntax”. It’s a set of conventions for formatting plain text. If everyone agrees to the same basic conventions, plain text can be significantly more expressive than a string of unformatted characters.
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Jamie Zawinski ☛ Wifi bukkake
I am trying to control an Internet-of-Shit device that can only speak 2.4GHz wifi. I find that I am unable to operate a 2.4GHz network that anything can connect to on any channel because there is too much interference. (Even when my iPad is sitting directly on top of the AP.) 82% interference, 10% TX retries. Let's take a look at where that's coming from...