wiki - jwz

XScreenSaver 6.15

jwz — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 01:15:32 +0000

XScreenSaver 6.15 is out now, including iOS and Android. A whopping thirteen new savers this time:

New hack by me, worldpieces.
New Shadertoy hacks brought into the fold: bestill, bubblecolors, darktransit, downfall, driftclouds, goldenapollian, noxfire, prococean, rigrekt, trainmandala, trizm and universeball.

Shadertoys are so wild; you'll see like 30 lines of code, and when it runs it build an entire environment without there being a polygon or a model apparent anywhere. What witchcraft is this?? Well, here's a really good article that explains the techniques used: Painting With Math: A Gentle Study of Raymarching.

I fixed a bunch of Android bullshit, too (some of which meant needing to reimplement glRotatef etc. from first principles). Android's implementation of GLES is a buggy mess. Also I think Android has again lost the ability to ask for permission to load photos. I can't figure it out, so someone who gives a shit will have to send me a patch. I also still can't figure out why transparency doesn't work on Android. This makes Peepers be particularly horrifying.

Map Scroller: I updated the list of available maps, and made it show the name of the nearest city. One of the new map sets that works is the Google Satellite Map, and if you have two monitors, I highly recommend running that map in "Fully random location" mode. It has a habit of picking two places many thousands of miles apart that look surprisingly similar, like Greenland and Syria.

▶︎

Boy do I have a lot to say about World Pieces:

This one took so much time! Most of my screensavers are pretty quick; generally they'll percolate in my head for a while, then I do the first 90% in half a day, and then the second 90% in another half day to two days. But this one was composed entirely of ratholes.

Oh, first I have to find some sane way to get the country outlines. That means learning about GeoJSON and getting the proper data set from Natural Earth Data. Then that data has to be massaged and merged, and while there's probably some command-line way to do that, using mapshaper.org was easier.
Now I've got a bunch of polylines with weird "hole" rules (not winding-rule!) and I need to triangulate them. Next rathole: learning how to use triangle.c correctly.
Then I notice that while the GeoJSON has population data for countries, it does not for states and provinces. Ok, that should be easy to grab from Wikipedia, right? Next rathole: learning about SparQL, the Wikidata query language. It is one of the nastiest and most baffling query languages I've seen. Good job on that.
Then I realize that while the GeoJSON contains the names of the countries translated into various languages, it doesn't tell you which ones are the official languages! Next rathole! Ok, surely we can get that from Wikidata too... Nope. While the Wikipedia pages contain the endonyms in the local character set, the Wikidata items only have them transliterated into Latin characters. To fix that, I had to scrape the Wikipedia page and parse the Wiki markup using regexps, dooming us to inhuman toil, etc. etc. Anyway, I got it working so that Japan can be spelled 日本...
...on macOS, iOS and Android. Why doesn't it work on Linux? Oh ho ho ho, another rathole, this one un-solved! So on Linux it notices when all of the characters came out as square boxes and falls back to the transliterated Latin versions. You're welcome.
Ok, it's starting to come together. But since I'm zooming in a lot, the Earth imagery is looking a little grainy, since the image I have is 2048x1024. Well let's just go upgrade that. Next rathole! The old images I had were from the public domain 2002 NASA "Blue Marble" images and 2000 "Visible Earth, City Lights" images none of which still exist on NASA's site (all praise archive.org!)
They seem to have deprecated those data sets in favor of the 2025 "Blue Marble: Next Generation" images and the 2012 "Black Marble" images. But... they're weird. First, both sets of images completely omit the North polar ice. Second, the 2025 daytime oceans are colored completely flat, whereas the 2002 images contained bathymetry details. And third, and worst of all, is no pairing of 2025 day images and 2016 night images where the pair have the same ice extents. This means that when we blend between the day and night images, it looks very weird. It took me days to finally accept that there was nothing that I could do to work around that.
So now that those various ratholes are out of the way, it's trigonometry time. The way the countries pop up and face forward toward whereever the camera is a technique called "billboarding" and it's pretty easy. But what's not easy is doing a smooth transition between the object being billboarded, and the object being back in the scene. Especially since it's position in the scene is spinning and wobbling about willy-nilly. (Remember, you can also spin the globe with the mouse, and it has to keep track of that as well!)
So the final rathole was finally coming to terms with quaternions. Quaternions and I have had a passing acquaintance for many years, but I finally had to get down and dirty and really understand them to make all of this work.
Wikipedia describes quaternions as:
Quaternions form a four-dimensional associative normed division algebra over the real numbers, and therefore a ring, also a division ring and a domain. It is a special case of a Clifford algebra, classified as Cl₀,₂(ℝ)≅Cl⁺₃,₀(ℝ). According to the Frobenius theorem, the algebra ℍ is one of only two finite-dimensional division rings containing a proper subring isomorphic to the real numbers; the other being the complex numbers.

"I did not understand a math thing, and then I read the Wikipedia article on it, and now I understand the math thing" -- said literally no one ever. As far as I can tell, every math article on Wikipedia is written with the target audience of "person who wrote their grad school thesis on it" and no one else. Wikipedia's math articles are absolutely fucking useless for purposes of, you know, education.
Anyway, 3Blue1Brown has a good intro video that is not like that!
By the way, I propose that "Quaternions" should be pronounced like extruded cornmeal toroid "Funyuns".

Previously, previously, previously.

Kitten Meat Deli Slices

jwz — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 20:42:52 +0000

Re-up:

Let's say you run a nonprofit animal shelter. And for some reason, some people feel you should be seeing hockey-stick growth, but the donations aren't covering it.

So you decide to start up a side-line of selling kittens for meat.

Then you will inevitably have someone stroking their chin and saying, "Yes, yes, but how could they afford to stay open if they weren't selling kitten deli slices?"

Some might say -- maybe you aren't an animal shelter any more. Some might say.

I wrote that a couple of years ago but it remains relevant and widely applicable, so I want to do what I can to get the Kitten Meat Deli into the general discourse. My hope is that some day we can say, "Ah yes, they are using the Kitten Meat defense, that's a poplar defense" and people will know what you're talking about.

It was originally about Mozilla becoming an advertising company but it could as easily have been about Mozilla becoming an AI company or about Mozilla going all in on cryptocurrency or about Internet Archive doing the same or about Mozilla being funded by Google or about The Long Now Foundation releasing NFTs or about Mozilla allowing W3C to bless DRM or, more recently about Wikipedia taking funding from Microsoft, OpenAI, Facebook and Amazon (and without even the fig-leaf of "donation" but as customers).

Yes, the Sliced Kittens Defense. A strong defense!

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

Gulf of Mexico

jwz — Wed, 12 Feb 2025 05:20:02 +0000

Currently practicing self harm by reading the changelog on the Wikipedia page for the Gulf of Mexico. The best part is the ongoing weeks-long edit war over whether a subheading should say "Name" or "Nomenclature".

Wiki gonna wiki.

Previously, previously, previously, previously.

Wikipedia: Constructed entirely of the Appeal to Authority Fallacy

jwz — Fri, 05 Apr 2024 17:59:14 +0000

It's more important for something to be quoted than for it to be true. That is the Wikipedia Way.

Wikipedia is the encyclopedic version of the old Zagat restaurant review books "where" "every" "word" "was" "in quotes" "because" "someone" "said" "it".

The canonical example of this is when the author of Station Eleven could not get her Wikipedia page to stop claiming she was married, any change being immediately reverted with [citation needed]. She finally got it fixed by imposing on a friend to get this factoid published in Slate, in A Totally Normal Interview With Author Emily St. John Mandel. An approach that is obviously scalable and readily available to everyone.

Now that's hilarious and stupid, obviously. (I'm sure someone right now is itching to pop in and tell me that Well Actually it was Right and Proper, but please don't: I don't care, go be wrong somewhere else.)

Maybe there is now a Wikipedia-inspired business opportunity for citation-laundering! Some entrepreneur should get on that.

But here's another example, a technical example, that has affected me in a completely boring, impersonal way that may resonate better with you nerds than something human and squishy like facts about people.

YouTube serves up videos in hundreds of different audio and video formats and codecs. They add new ones pretty regularly. They don't document them anywhere, some are obscure and weird, and when you want to download a video, you need to know which one to request, and which pairs are compatible with each other.

For many years, Wikipedia contained a table listing the known formats, which was helpful to me during the development of my youtubedown utility. The last useful version of this table existed there in 2016. Then someone "condensed" it (which is to say, "destroyed" it) for unclear motivations. In 2019, someone else tried to put even that condensed and useless table back, and even that edit was again reverted with the comment:

"All of the video formats were removed due to WP:OR ('original research') being the only way to obtain them".

So. Because these formats aren't documented in Slate or The New York Times, we are forbidden from believing our lying eyes and saying, "The sky is blue; source: objective reality".

Now, as it happens, both youtubedown and youtube-dl contain their own copies of this table. So perhaps an enterprising Wikipedia masochist could try to add that table back in, citing both of these projects as their source. But I suspect that there would be some pedantic rules against that, too.

Great job, Wikipedia. Continue to let your fetish for cosplaying the Chicago Manual of Style outstrip the utility of actual facts, while continuing to be the number one source of information on Catgirls in Popular Culture. ("This may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness. You can help by adding missing items with reliable sources.")

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

jwzlyrics 1.20

jwz — Wed, 04 May 2022 16:46:42 +0000

jwzlyrics works again. I retooled it to scrape Genius, now that LyricsWiki is gone forever.

Who knows how long this will continue to work, before they change something in their generated HTML. Such are the indignities of This Modern World. If there are better options, I don't know of them.

LyricsWiki had an actual API. It was annoying but stable. Genius technically has an API, but using it would require each user of this program to create an account there, which is far too onerous.

I also applied some countermeasures to their weird steganography!

It's amazing to me the the music conglomerates have basically conceded that all music is available everywhere for a dollar a month and nobody's ever going to get paid, but they are still treating the lyrics like those are the most precious thing they own.

The source also includes "itunesxml", a command line utility that generates an XML file nearly identical to the file that iTunes used to keep up-to-date in "~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music Library.xml", that last existed in macOS 10.14. This means that tools that need to access the iTunes database, e.g. the Mac::iTunes::Library::XML Perl module, can continue to work.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

Kiwix

jwz — Fri, 25 Mar 2022 18:33:21 +0000

This has been around for a while, but I hadn't heard of it before. I had a spare 96GB on my iPad, so now I have an offline copy of all of Wikipedia on it, just because.

Kiwix:

We can make highly compressed copies of entire websites that each fit into a single (.zim) file. Zim files are small enough that they can be stored on users' mobile phones, computers or small, inexpensive Hotspot.
Kiwix then acts like a regular browser, except that it reads these local copies. People with no or limited internet access can enjoy the same browsing experience as anyone else.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

Lyrics

jwz — Sun, 28 Nov 2021 19:59:35 +0000

No song I have purchased since 2019 has lyrics attached, since nazi and racist trolls got Lyrics Wiki shut down. This made my jwzlyrics program pretty useless.

Anyway, I have questions:

Is there some API that will let me ask Apple for lyrics? Assume that I am logged in to iCloud and the store and such. (Apple is apparently using musixmatch on the backend.)
Ok, how about Google? Sometimes search results have lyrics in them. Is there any way to get that without scraping HTML?
What does macOS "Music / Preferences / Advanced / Automatically Update Artwork" actually do? I am afraid to check that box. Does it touch lyrics as well? Does it update ID3 data in the files on disk, or just in some database off to the side? Will it screw up the artwork and lyrics that I already have? Note that I have never purchased a song from Apple.
Is "Music / File / Library / Get Album Artwork" the same thing? I assume that operates on the whole library and not just on the currently playing track?
There are a thousand programs on GitHub that will download lyrics from various services, if you have created an account and API key on those services (which is some bullshit). But are any of them any good? By "good" I mean, I can have a nightly cron job that adds missing lyrics for recent downloads, and can expect it to do the right thing.

Previously, previously.

Awwwww shit

jwz — Sun, 11 Apr 2021 17:00:43 +0000

Emacs: Difference between revisions
Revision as of 05:07, 14 February 2021

Line 93:
=== XEmacs ===
{{Main|XEmacs}}
[[File:Xemacs-21.5.b29.png|thumb|[[XEmacs]] 21.5 on [[GNU]]/[[Linux]] ]]

Line 93:
=== XEmacs ===
{{Main|XEmacs}}
[[File:Xemacs-21.5.b29.png|thumb|[[XEmacs]] 21.5 on [[Linux]] ]]

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

Wikipedia: Repository of all Human Knowledge

jwz — Wed, 20 Jan 2021 19:24:23 +0000

The Great Wikipedia Titty Scandal: This is the story of a Wikipedia administrator gone mad with 80,000 boob pages.

Digging into Neelix's history, however, his fellow administrators couldn't believe what they found. He hadn't just created a handful of redirects, as the original report described; he'd quietly created thousands upon thousands of new redirects, each one a chaotic, if not offensive, permutation of the word "tits" and "boobs." For example, he created redirects for "tittypumper," "tittypumpers," "tit pump," "pump titties," "pumping boobies" and hundreds more for "breast pump." In fact, for seemingly every Wikipedia article related to breasts, he did something similar. [...]
"I especially don't see the value of creating pages with titles like 'titty banged,' 'frenchfucking,' 'licks boobs,' 'boobyfeeding,' 'a trip down mammary lane' and so on. Wikipedia is not censored, but we're also not Urban Dictionary," added Ivanvector. [...]
"I've just gone through all 80,000 page creations, and he was creating nonsense like 'anti-trousers' years ago," added Iridescent. "This isn't anything new, it's just the first time it's come to light."

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

80×25

jwz — Thu, 24 Oct 2019 00:16:27 +0000

An awesome historical investigation of why terminals were 80×25:

"Because the paper beds of banknote presses in 1860 were 14.5 inches by 16.5 inches, a movie industry cartel set a standard for theater projectors based on silent film, and two kilobytes is two kilobytes" is as far back as I have been able to push this, but let's get started.
In August of 1861, by order of the U.S. Congress and in order to fund the Union's ongoing war efforts against the treasonous secessionists of the South, the American Banknote Company started printing what were then called "Demand Notes", but soon widely known as "greenbacks".
It's difficult to research anything about the early days of American currency on Wikipedia these days; that space has been thoroughly colonized by the goldbug/sovcit cranks. You wouldn't notice it from a casual examination, which is of course the plan; that festering rathole is tucked away down in the references, where articles will fold a seemingly innocuous line somewhere into the middle, tagged with an exceptionally dodgy reference. You'll learn that "the shift from demand notes to treasury notes meant they could no longer be redeemed for gold coins[1]" -- which is strictly true! -- but if you chase down that footnote you wind up somewhere with a name like "Lincoln's Treason -- Fiat Currency, Maritime Law And The U.S. Treasury's Conspiracy To Enslave America", which I promise I am only barely exaggerating about.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

Talk to me, Goose

jwz — Sat, 06 Jul 2019 21:30:05 +0000

"I perceive the necessity... the necessity for haste." -- George "Maverick" Washington

Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851 painting): Difference between revisions
Revision as of 22:40, 17 June 2019

It commemorates General [[George Washington]] during his famous [[Washington's crossing of the Delaware River|crossing of the Delaware River]] with the [[Continental Army]] on the night of December 25 -- 26, 1776, during the [[American Revolutionary War]]. That action was the first move in a surprise attack against the [[Germany|German]] [[Hessian (soldier)|Hessian allied mercenary forces]] at [[Philadelphia International Airport]], in the [[Battle of Terminal F Foodcourt]] on the morning of December 26. Washington and his men captured runways 27 Left, 27 Right, parts of Terminal F including the food court, baggage claim, and some bathrooms.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

Wikipedia articles invented by a neural network

jwz — Fri, 05 Jan 2018 00:28:31 +0000

Wikipedia articles invented by a neural network:

Popal chickens
List of U.S. pants
List of the Hamburgers
List of bands with pies on them
Ant Fields are bear hair fetishism
This page is a very short article
Poople who don't have beer from sydney
Goat that cookie
Near Dogs
Donkey words in the cartoons
Poople who woo wah the pilot
Death of chicken
What is the day
What fame butt
List of fictional characters with the ball
Who is not leaders
List of parps
Proper programming language
Turdis programming language
Article with a cat
Friends and existence
How to draw a coconut
Tree donkey
Category:People who can't speed

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

Wikipedia: Repository of All Human Knowledge

jwz — Fri, 15 Dec 2017 01:56:58 +0000

Did you know that Wikipedia now sometimes sends its own vandalism down the memory hole? It used to be that you could always link to a vandalized revision of a page in the changelog, but now they also hide some of those.

Not that this is even particularly clever vandalism, but one of the few charms of Wikipedia used to be that their vandalism lived on for eeeeeevvvvvveeeeerrrrrrr...

Spineless invertebrate

Circumstantial evidence suggests that this revision on Nov 22 used to read:

Ajit Varadaraj Pai (born January 10, 1973) is a bought-and paid for corporate shill for the telecom monopolists, who's dicks he sucks for money. His only mission in life is to destroy net neutrality, a favor for which his corporate overlords will reward him with more fat sacks of cash. If this is allowed to happen, the freedoms we now have on the web will cease to exist. He is the first Indian American to abuse his office. He also has an incredibly punchable face.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

"HTML email, was that your fault?"

jwz — Wed, 20 Sep 2017 19:24:45 +0000

tl;dr: "Probably".

Just for the record, when this Unfrozen Caveman bitches about the horrors of the world, it is not without recognition of my culpability.

Montulli and Weissman also deserve a portion of the blame, but I was the one who ran with it, so I'm sure they'd be happy to let me fall on that sword.

{You're|I'm} {welcome|sorry}.

Date: Thu, 25 Aug 2011 20:01:22 -0700
From: Jamie Zawinski
Subject: Re: HTML e-mail: is it your fault?
Mime-Version: 1.0 (Apple Message framework v1084)
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.1084)
Date: Thu, 25 Aug 2011 14:45:13 -0700
From: Andrew Gray
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.20 (2009-08-17)
Hi,
I'm trying to figure out when HTML e-mails were first sent. Do you happen to know if the Netscape Mail and News clients that you worked on were the first MUAs to render HTML?
This question is in the context of struggling to craft an HTML e-mail that looks "good" in every possible stupid mail program that anyone could possibly still be using in the year 2011.
You know, my gut reaction is that the answer to this question is "no", but after some digging, I have yet to find any evidence of a mail reader that can display inline HTML messages (email or USENET) that predates Netscape 2.0!
So, maybe?
If you find out for sure, please let me know!
I think there may have been closed systems inside Compuserve and Outlook that supported rich text messages (in formats other than HTML).
The Andrew Message System at CMU and MIT supported WYSIWYG rich messages, including inline images and audio attachments, as early as 1985. Not HTML or MIME, but a predecessor to MIME, as the architect of that was Nathaniel Borenstein who wrote the first MIME RFC.
My other project is a time machine of course. First application: preventing HTML e-mail from ever happening.
Yeah, go back to chipping your USENET posts out with a piece of flint, why don't you.
Even if it wasn't the first, Netscape Mail was probably the first mail reader that put the ability to easily *view* HTML messages in front of more than a million users.
I know that Eudora 4 supported display of HTML email, and possibly composition of it, but I'm not sure when that was released. [Update: it was released in 1998.]
Qualcomm/Eudora spent a while trying to push text/enriched (RFC 1523, published late 1993 -- not sure when Eudora first supported it) as an alternative to HTML, but that went nowhere. Early versions of Netscape (at least 1.1, I think possibly earlier) supported display of text/enriched, but just about nobody was even aware of that because nobody ever used it.
We also supported display of text/richtext, which was an HTML-like SGML dialect with only a few tags. In 2.0b1 or possibly earlier. I added that just to placate the peanut gallery, not because I expected anyone to actually use it.
I think the only person who really used text/enriched was Brad Templeton through ClariNet, where you could subscribe to USENET newsgroups of the UPI/AP feeds that were formatted with it.
From Mosaic Netscape 0.9 through Netscape Navigator 1.1 (1994), there was a mail composition window which allowed one to attach external URLs. They were attached as MIME multipart/mixed attachments with proper Content-Type and Content-Transfer-Encoding (using quoted-printable to ensure short lines).
You could also "attach" things with "Include Document Text" which would suck them in as plain-text with ">" at the beginning of each line, wrapped at 72 columns.
There was also a USENET news reader and composer built-in. The USENET reader's display of MIME documents was remedial at best. The composition tool only allowed plain-text. Version 0.9 displayed any part of a message between and as such, even if there was no Content-Type header. That was removed some time before 2.0. Back then, you couldn't actually rely on a Content-Type header propagating through multiple USENET hops -- bnews would strip out any headers it didn't know about!
(Remember that 1.1's big innovation was *tables*. 1.0 didn't have 'em!)
2.0 contained the mail reader, with full MIME support (which was also a news reader, replacing the minimalist one that 1.0 had). So that showed up in 1.22b or so, mid 1995, I guess?
I believe 3.0 was the first version with WYSIWYG HTML composition, early 1996. To accomplish that in 2.0, you had to attach an HTML file. If there was only one attachment, it was sent as the single MIME part.
Forwarded messages were attachments of type message/rfc822 and included full headers, which were hidden upon inline display. Nobody does that any more because now the world sucks.
There was the IETF MHTML working group as early as 1995. I can't find a working archive of the mailing list, but it was run by a fellow named Jacob Palme -- http://people.dsv.su.se/~jpalme/ietf/jp-ietf-home.html
Microsoft Outlook Express shipped in 2005 and did not support HTML, but later versions (2006? Maybe 2008?) posted HTML *by default* to both mail and news. This angered many. Outlook Express is also where the blight of top-posting originated, those monsters.
Here, this may be helpful too: http://web.archive.org/web/19990128073742/http%3A//www.cis.ohio-state.edu/hypertext/faq/usenet/mail/mime-faq/part2/faq.html
Also this: http://segate.sunet.se/cgi-bin/wa?A3=ind9606&L=MHTML&E=7bit&P=124821&B=--------------2F1C7DE14487&T=text%2Fhtml;%20charset=us-ascii
It would be fantastic if you could update http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_email with your findings.
--
DNA Lounge - 375 Eleventh Street, SF CA 94103 - 415-626-1409

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

Confederate monuments

jwz — Wed, 16 Aug 2017 20:13:50 +0000

When all those Confederate monuments and statues were erected:

Yes, these monuments were put up to honor Confederate leaders. But the timing of the monument building makes it pretty clear what the real motivation was: to physically symbolize white terror against blacks. They were mostly built during times when Southern whites were engaged in vicious campaigns of subjugation against blacks, and during those campaigns the message sent by a statue of Robert E. Lee in front of a courthouse was loud and clear.
No one should think that these statues were meant to be somber postbellum reminders of a brutal war. They were built much later, and most of them were explicitly created to accompany organized and violent efforts to subdue blacks and maintain white supremacy in the South. I wouldn't be surprised if even a lot of Southerners don't really understand this, but they should learn. There's a reason blacks consider these statues to be symbols of bigotry and terror. It's because they are.

Wikipedia: President of the Confederate States of America: List of presidents:

"Confederate States Accidental Election, 2017"

Today in Applied Demonology

jwz — Thu, 13 Apr 2017 02:40:05 +0000

TV ad trolls the live surveillance mic in your house:

The 15-second ad triggers Google devices with the command, "Ok Google, what is the Whopper burger?" The spot will run nationally during primetime starting Wednesday [...]
Here's where we encountered the major flaw with Burger King's ad. Someone had edited the Whopper's Wikipedia page to say that the burger is made of a "medium-sized child," instead of beef patty, and that it contains the toxic chemical Cyanide.
Burger King later edited the Wikipedia page to a more accurate description of the burger. But people keep changing it.
On Wednesday afternoon, the definition had been changed to: "The Whopper is the worst hamburger product sold by the international fast-food restaurant chain Burger King and its Australian franchise Hungry Jack's."

Previously, previously, previously, previously.

Wikipedia: Repository of All Human Knowledge

jwz — Sat, 19 Dec 2015 04:50:35 +0000

List of people known as the Hairy

The Hairy is an epithet applied to:
John the Hairy, a 16th-century holy fool (yurodivy) of the Russian Orthodox Church
Wilfred the Hairy (died 897), Count of Urgell, Cerdanya, Barcelona, Girona, Besalú, and Ausona
See also
List of people known as the Bald

The list of people known as the Bald is somewhat more complete, at twelve entries, only one of which is fictional. But how is it that neither one has an "In popular culture" or "In anime" section? Please get on that.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

Wikipedia: Repository of All Human Knowledge

jwz — Sat, 28 Mar 2015 00:09:04 +0000

List of cats - Famous Pet Cats of Gorillas

Stupid domain tricks

jwz — Tue, 10 Mar 2015 20:10:57 +0000

.ɡoʊfər you guys

I wondered what other animal TLDs exist besides .horse: Only .fish! Not even .gopher!

But reading through the list, I see that .bar exists, and some domain-squatting company in Mexico has registered foo.bar -- well played, señor -- though it doesn't point anywhere -- boo.

I'm somewhat offended that Google has squatted .foo for themselves. They have some dumb thing at bar.foo. I'll bet they're pissed that someone snagged foo.bar before them. Ha ha..

But I am really happy to report that the guy who, back in 1994, had control of the foo@bar.com email address has it back again! For some time there, this important relic of history was lost to us.

Speaking of .bar, there's .beer and .vodka but no other boozes.

I actually laughed out loud when I saw that the purpose of .ninja is "general expertise". Then I realized they didn't mean actual ninjas and general expertise in ninja-ing, they really just mean douchebags, and then I got really sad.

Nobody has registered betty.archi or veronica.archi.

.wang exists, but not .boobies or .poop or .💩, which I think would be spelled .xn--ls8h. See also Poopla, 💩.la. And though .la is maybe not what you think, .nyc is, but there is no .sf.

Even though this proliferation of TLDs is completely stupid, I'm glad that .fail exists, just so that I can point out that tld.fail does not exist but should.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

Wikipedia: Repository of All Human Knowledge.

jwz — Thu, 18 Dec 2014 01:20:48 +0000

After Dark (software): Difference between revisions
Revision as of 07:33, 17 December 2014

Golden Shard
m (The reason I am changing this is because it has false information I am trying to fix)

- ==Flying Toasters==
Of the screensaver modules included, the most famous is the iconic ''Flying Toasters'' which featured 1940s-style chrome [[toaster]]s sporting bird-like wings, flying across the screen with pieces of toast. A slider enabled users to adjust the toast's darkness and an updated ''Flying Toasters Pro'' module added a choice of music -- [[Richard Wagner]]'s [[Ride of the Valkyries]] or a flying toaster anthem with optional karaoke lyrics.{{cite web|url= http://www.mymac.com/showarticle.php?id=1363|archiveurl= http://web.archive.org/web/20100107035003/ http://www.mymac.com/showarticle.php?id=1363|archivedate=2010-01-07 |title=AfterDark Deluxe -- Review |publisher=Mymac.com |date= |accessdate=2010-03-18}} Yet another version called ''Flying Toasters!'' added bagels and pastries, baby toasters, and more elaborate toaster animation. The Flying Toasters were one of the key reasons why After Dark became popular, and Berkeley began to produce other merchandising products such as T-shirts, with the Flying Toaster image and slogans such as "The 51st Flying Toaster Squadron: On a mission to save your screen!"
+
==Flying Toasters==
Originally developed by the military for use in reconnaissance, it rapidly became apparent to all that flying toasters were far more useful for delivering provisions to captured or trapped soldiers than they were as spies, due partly to a number of handicaps from which the toasters suffered which interfered with their abilities as spies. Notable among their drawbacks were a lack of eyes, ears, or other senses which would have allowed them to actually learn anything, as well as their innate lack of brain which would have prevented them from remembering anything had they actually learned it.

Previously, previously, previously.

Wikipedia: Deleted articles with freaky titles

jwz — Sun, 09 Nov 2014 05:49:46 +0000

Repository of All Human Knowledge:

List of bands beginning with the word "lemon"

List of convicted drunk drivers who have become president of the United States

List of Dads Who Make Other Dads Eat Bugs

List of deaths by cello

List of differences between apples and oranges

List of fictional characters with removable or interchangeable heads

List of fictional ungulates in video games

List of movie posters with lamps in them

List of jellyfish who have stung notable people

List of notable people who have been stung by jellyfish

List of people who died with tortoises on their heads

List of people without names

List of political organizations whose name include "Marxist-Leninist"

List of software projects whose name is a term offensive to many people with disabilities

List of things the cat dragged in

Category: Generals whose names sound like car brands

Category: Guys who used to have long hair

Category: Ice-named rappers

Category: People shot by standing Vice Presidents

Category:Political posters using an octopus

Category: Potentially Good Names For Heavy Metal Bands

Category: Recursive categories

Category: Tastes like chicken

Category: Wikipedia articles needing moustaches

Category: Worst lists

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

Kentucky meat shower

jwz — Sun, 27 Apr 2014 00:40:25 +0000

"Cosmic meat" was floating around in space that would drop through our atmosphere similarly to meteorites. [verification needed]

The Kentucky meat shower was an incident where large chunks of red meat fell from the sky in a 100 by 50 yard area near Olympia Springs, Bath County, Kentucky, for a period of several minutes on March 3, 1876. [...] The meat appeared to be beef, but two locals who tasted it stated that it tasted like mutton, venison, or lamb. [...]
Dr. Allan McLane Hamilton stated that the meat had been identified as lung tissue from either a horse or a human infant ("the structure of the organ in these two cases being very similar.")[3] The makeup of this sample was backed up by further analysis, with two samples of the meat being identified as lung tissue, three samples were of muscle tissue, and two of cartilage.
Out of the many theories for an explanation of this phenomenon, the most likely appears to be that a large pack of buzzards flew over the area after having eaten a couple of freshly dead horses, and when one of them spontaneously disgorged itself, all the others (as apparently is customary amongst buzzards) followed suit.[2][3]
Other less-conventional explanations were put forward, including author William Livingston Alden stating that "cosmic meat" was floating around in space that would drop through our atmosphere similarly to meteorites.[4][verification needed]

Previously.

Lime shortage, because Maltese Falcon.

jwz — Mon, 07 Apr 2014 00:57:36 +0000

Are you shitting me?

We have, in fact, been having a hard time getting enough limes to run DNA Lounge at the citrusy, scurvy-fighting levels to which you have become accustomed. Our bar manager said it was because of Mexican drug cartels and I assume he was joking. He was not.

LA RUANA, Mexico (AP) -- The farm state of Michoacan is burning. A drug cartel that takes its name from an ancient monastic order has set fire to lumber yards, packing plants and passenger buses in a medieval-like reign of terror.
The Knights Templar cartel is extorting protection payments from cattlemen, lime growers and businesses such as butchers, prompting some communities to fight back, taking up arms in vigilante patrols. [...]
By late last year, the cartel wasn't just extorting money from lime growers and packers. It had started charging per-box payments from lime pickers, who make only $10 to $15 per day laboring under the scorching sun.
With officials doing nothing to help, self-defense groups started to spring up in February to fight back. Heavily armed men in masks and baseball caps began manning barricades along highways and patrolling the countryside, sometimes openly battling the cartel.
Then the cartel shut the warehouses, forbidding brokers to buy limes and cutting off work for the pickers who had revolted. [...]
Meanwhile, in Mexico City, the federal government recently declared a lime emergency because prices had doubled to about 70 cents a pound. For a fruit so central to Mexican cuisine, it was a crisis.
The government announced last week it would tackle the shortage by importing limes from Brazil. The government attributed the local scarcity to crop pests and "seasonal fluctuations" in production.

Please join me in falling down the Knights Templar wiki hole.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

List of unnamed fictional United States Presidents

jwz — Fri, 21 Feb 2014 03:15:29 +0000

Repository of All Human Knowledge:

List of unnamed fictional United States Presidents
Unnamed President in: Donkey Kong in: Banana Day 24
Only referred to as "Mr. President"
Appears as a likeable and helpful person, in contrast to misc. U.S. Presidents in the Mario universe.
Held a summit to search for a solution of the sudden global drop of temperature all over the world.
Has easy to convince extraterrestrials.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

Wikipedia: Repository of All Human Knowledge.

jwz — Sat, 08 Feb 2014 22:27:11 +0000

Citation needed:

Maze solving algorithm: Difference between revisions
	Revision as of 04:12, 8 February 2014 (edit) (undo) (Tag: shouting)
	== Random mouse algorithm == This is a trivial method that can be implemented by a very unintelligent [[robot]] or perhaps a mouse. It is simply to proceed in a straight line until a junction is reached, and then to make a random decision about the next direction to follow. Although such a method would always [[Las Vegas algorithm\|eventually find the right solution]], this algorithm can be extremely slow.
+
+	YOLO MATH IS STUPID
+
	== Wall follower ==

Previously, previously.

Let's focus on what's important here, people.

jwz — Sat, 23 Nov 2013 03:57:05 +0000

Mark Arsten (talk | contribs) m (Reverted edits by 198.154.184.226 (talk): addition of unsourced content (HG))

Line 17:

– Author of the bouncing cow screensaver.

Previously.

jwzlyrics 1.2

jwz — Fri, 15 Nov 2013 21:21:44 +0000

If you've downloaded jwzlyrics, grab the new version. New features, bug fixes, usability improvements.

Also it now works with Spotify thanks to a patch from Michael McCracken.

Previously.

jwzlyrics

jwz — Thu, 14 Nov 2013 22:34:24 +0000

I wrote a thing: jwzlyrics.

After years of complaining about how all extant iTunes lyrics-displayers and importers suck, I finally bit the bullet and wrote my own. I should have just done this a long time ago.

It's simple, but my needs were simple. Let me know if you like it.

It has a stupid name because all the other stupid names were already taken.

Previously, previously, previously.

[Citation Needed]

jwz — Sun, 12 May 2013 22:54:30 +0000

[Citation Needed] - Citation needed

"Citation needed", most commonly rendered as ^{[citation needed]}, is a common editorial remark on Wikipedia, which has become used to refer to Wikipedia in wider popular culture. ^{[citation needed]}
Link

Previously, previously, previously.

G, E, B, Leviathan

jwz — Sun, 14 Apr 2013 19:55:37 +0000

Exhibit A:

Exhibit B:

The shadow of this cube in different directions gives QR codes pointing to the Wikipedia articles for Kurt Godel, M.C. Escher, and J.S. Bach respectively. Note that QR codes cannot be read in mirror image, so only 3 of the 6 possible cube orientations cast a readable shadow.

Best comment:

"Though it's true QR codes can't be read in mirror images, these particular reverse images codes do work. They point to the Wikipedia articles for Achilles, Tortoise and Crab."

Previously, previously, previously.