Loony Tunes: "(Blooper) Bunny" (1991)

While looking for something completely unrelated, I ran across this great cartoon that I had never before seen. Enjoy:

Read more about this cartoon on Wikipedia.

XKCD: Circuit Symbols

Ow. This is particularly painful.

Explanation for those who need it

National Pulse: Native Americans Demand DC Football Team Reinstate 'Redskins' Moniker.

Native Americans Demand DC Football Team Reinstate 'Redskins' Moniker.
10-August-2023. Jake Welch

The non-profit Native American Guardians Association (NAGA) has threatened the newly renamed "Washington Commanders" with a boycott similar to that of Bud Light's parent company Anheuser-Busch unless the American Football team reverts to its historic name, the 'Washington Redskins.'

The organization has written a letter to the team's new ownership demanding the opportunity to discuss reinstating the team's name in a face-to-face meeting, citing lawsuits, polls, and general sentiment to suggest that Native Americans are not offended by the name, 'Redskin.' The organization has also launched a "Reclaim The Name" online petition that has attracted over 70,000 signatories so far. However, it has been routinely ignored.

I don't think I need to comment about this one. But I'm both laughing and not (very) surprised.

SMBC Theology: Why the universe is 4-dimensional

Names for those funny icon-based menus

Just in case you were curious, those funny-shaped menus, consisting of lines and dots, that are used in apps (both mobile and desktop) these days have actual names.

• If the menu is three horizontal lines, it is called a hamburger menu.
• If the menu is three dots in a horizontal row, it is called a meatballs menu.
• If the menu is three dots in a vertical column, it is called a kebab menu.

And now you will know what to call these menus when talking about them with your friends.

iPhone tip: Watch out for "Time to Leave" calendar notifications

This weekend, I was traveling out of state. While away, my phone started alarming at 4:00am. Which is very strange because I hadn't set any alarm for that hour, nor is there any event scheduled for that time.

After a bit of investigation, I discovered that it was because an event later that day (a simple reminder, scheduled for 9:00am) accidentally had its alert time set to "Time to Leave". See the image (right) for an example.

In case you're unaware, the "Time to Leave" alert is a feature meant to let you know when you need to start traveling in order to arrive at the location for the event. For instance, if you have a doctor's appointment, and the doctor's office is 15 minutes away from home, it will alert you 15 minutes before the appointment when you're home. But if you happen to be somewhere else, it will alert you based on the estimated travel time from your actual location (based on a computed route, traffic conditions, etc.)

You can probably figure out what happened. My reminder was scheduled for 9:00am, with a location set to my home. And the alert time was "Time to Leave". So when I was out of state (a 5 hour drive away from home), it dutifully alerted me 5 hours before the reminder's time - at 4:00am.

Let this be a friendly reminder to double-check your alert settings when creating events, especially if they are daily/weekly reminders.

Some of my favorite scripts

I've been writing small little scripts and utilities for myself to use for many years.

Today, I decided to release them (with a GPLv3 license) and have uploaded some of my favorites to GitHub. The link is: GitHub: Shamino0/scriptsandtools.

Enjoy.

Quick tip: Use SHIFT-refresh in your web browser

This is a tip you may already know about, because browsers have supported the feature for many years.

If you hold down the SHIFT key while refreshing a page (e.g. type CTRL-SHIFT-R or hold SHIFT when clicking the Refresh button in the tool-bar), it will tell the browser to ignore cached content when reloading the page.

This is a great way to resolve problems when something doesn't seem to have loaded correctly. Web site managers will frequently tell you to clear your cache to solve problems, but that's a pain in the neck. You need to dig through various screens in your browser's preferences in order to find the button to do this, and when you do, all web pages will need to reload everything, slowing down their load times until the cache gets re-populated.

Simply holding down SHIFT while reloading is much better. It's immediately available, so it won't distract you from what you were doing. And it only reloads the cached content used by that page.

This feature is known to be available with Firefox (source), Chrome (source) and Microsoft Edge (source).

On Apple Safari, use the OPTION key instead of SHIFT. (CMD-SHIFT-R opens the page in Reader view). (source).

I suspect most other browsers will also support this feature.