#TodayILearned that there was a Minangkabau (Sumatra, Indonesia) tradition of playing the “kalason”—musical car horns.

As migrant workers travelled far up and down the huge island of Sumatra, a musician on the bus would play an array of tuned horns using a dash-mounted, one-handed keyboard, sending traditional music out into the roads.

Here’s one of the last kalason players playing a homesick tune on a kalason retrofitted onto a hot-rodded Chevy truck.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqPFGKuLjJM

More info here:

https://www.auralarchipelago.com/auralarchipelago/kalason

#TodayILearned that the US word “dollar” derives from the German word Taler, which refers to silver coins used in the Holy Roman Empire. Taler, in turn, was named after Joachimsthal, a valley in Bohemia where the earliest silver coins were minted. The coins were called “Joachimsthalers”, and shortened to “Talers”.

Incidentally, “Thal” or “Tal” literally means “valley”, so “Neanderthal” literally means “Neander Valley”.

#english #etymology.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thaler

I was today years old when I learned that polish (the thing that makes your floors all shiny) is not pronounced the same way as Polish (the language spoken by people from Poland)

I was looking into vertical writing systems and found this nice resource:

https://www.omniglot.com/writing/direction.htm

#TodayILearned that the English word “gun” likely came from a woman’s name, Gunilda (a Norse name, from the words gunnr and hildr, both meaning “war”).

The first “gun” in written history was a specific ballista (giant crossbow) mentioned in a 1330 munitions inventory of Windsor Castle; the weapon was named Domina Gunilda: “Una magna balista de cornu quæ vocatur Domina Gunilda”—“a great ballista of horn named Domina Gunilda.”

In the written records following that time, the name Gunilda was often shortened to “gun” (and various versions like gon, gonn, etc) to refer to any weapon that shoots projectiles, like cannons and other artillery. The name was then transferred to portable firearms when they were invented.

#english #etymology

https://www.etymonline.com/word/gun

Today I learned about the micro8 Apple ][ emulator… going to give it a try!
#TIL #TodayILearned #emulation #retrocomputing #AppleII #AppleIIe
https://paleotronic.com/software/microm8/download/

Today I (re-)learned about the “418 I’m a Teapot” [1] error code, which was first codified in the April’s fools issue of Internet request for comments for 1998. RFC2324 [2] describes the Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol (HTCPCP/1.0), and has 418 as that particular error code.

I think it might be useful, as part of the combined measures against unauthorized AI scraping, to start returning that HTTP 418 I’m a teapot error… or even mess with them with different ludicrous non-coffee things to be, such as a mate bowl, or I’m a spaceship…

After all, that’s what Internet of Things shitposting should be about, right?

/ht @osma

[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Reference/Status/418
[2]: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2324

Today I learned that a) the author of the sci-fi novel “Planet of the Apes” [1], Pierre Boyle [2], was French and not from the US as I thought (which shows how internal biases work, many times without you knowing it); and b) that he was also the author of the book “The Bridge over the River Kwai” [3], that was adapted into the movie of the same name… and whose music [4] you now have in your head

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Boulle
[2]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_of_the_Apes_(novel)
[3]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bridge_over_the_River_Kwai
[4]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_River_Kwai_March

#TIL #TodayILearned #PlanetOfTheApes #TheBridgeOverRiverKwai #PierreBoule #MoviesOfBooks
https://mastodon.social/@vicgrinberg/115235561685135861

#TodayILearned people were still writing #cuneiform until at least 79 AD (as far as we know based on what we've found)

Not sure why, but I started looking for what was John Byrne up to lately… and just Today I Learned that he pencilled a few volumes worth of _fan fiction_† in the form of an _alternative timeline_ for X-Men, called _X-Men: Elsewhen_. And if you want to read it for yourself, you can just go and register into his forum, ByrneRobotics.com, and once registered then use this link that compiles links to all published entries for his Elsewhen publications, in issue order…

https://m.byrnerobotics.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=58810

† For as much as someone with John Byrne’s career can be classified as just a fan…

Today I Learned about text fragments, which allows the author of a link to a web page, regardless of annotations or anchors present on a particular web page, to indicate exactly on the web page where to link to. For instance, highlight a quote in a page like this: (add http:// or https:// at the start to convert into a working link):

example.com#:~:text=for%20use

I learned this on the Mozilla Development Network, but thanks to links from @drdrang and @lapcatsoftware for the tips in the right direction!

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/URI/Reference/Fragment/Text_fragments

#TodayILearned one of Hugh Grant"s middle names is Mungo. Hugh... Mungo

(Not exactly) today I Learned that Inkscape can open (and hence convert!) Windows MetaFile (.wmf) format files!

If you have a bunch of WMF files in the current directly, you can convert all of them into PDF with the following command line inchantation:

```bash
for file in *.[Ww][Mm][Ff] # Sometimes WMF files are capitalized in their extension
do
echo "Processing file: $file"
command="inkscape --export-filename=\"$file.pdf\" \"$file\""
echo "Command: $command"
inkscape --export-filename="$file.pdf" "$file"
done
```

The extension for the PDF files is appended, so that we can find the converted files with `ls *.[Ww][Mm][Ff].pdf`.

Hope that helps!

Today I Learned that the `=COUNTIF` function in Excel can use "?" as a placeholder for a single character… I had written `=COUNTIF(named_range,"x")+COUNTIF(named_range,"?")` because some of the cells could be an "x" or a question mark, and getting double counting… changed it to `=COUNTIF(named_range,"?")` and worked like a charm… If one of the cells in the range is empty, or has more than one character, it does not count it! And it is also case insensitive.

Just checked in LibreOffice Calc, and Apple Numbers, and it also works there!

#TodayILearned that the company Cloudflare generates random numbers for security purposes by digitizing the semi-random movements of a wall of lava lamps in their company's lobby, which they call the Lavarand.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavarand

Huh. #TodayILearned that there are petrol-free PVC records available now:
https://www.optimal-media.com/en/press/biovinyl/

Jimi Hendrix was a big fan of the long running soap opera Coronation Street, and specifically the character Ena Sharples.
#TodayiLearned
#TrueFacts

#TodayILearned about Ann Smith Franklin, the First Lady Of Rhode Island Journalism. https://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2025/Items/Aug29-6.html

#TIL that in both UK and US shoe sizes, the difference between one shoe size and the next is precisely one “barleycorn” which is 1/3rd of an inch. #facts #TodayILearned

(Source: https://youtu.be/pM3c328VifA?si=I1dWwHbXnGrxSHB0)

#TodayILearned #TIL

That the department of homeland security recruitment branch is literally run by a bunch of neo-Nazis. They even use World War II era German fonts.

Source: Religion Dispatches

https://religiondispatches.org/latest-ice-recruitment-materials-include-overt-neo-nazi-reference-and-nazi-nazi-script/