The form and reason for exchange in archaic societies.x

Quickly copy and paste Unicode whitespace characters — and learn how and when to use them.

This is a note to call ideal fence

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Everyone keeps telling you that you need to practice your fundamentals. What the hell does that mean, and how do you do it? This subreddit's all about concrete exercises that you can do to improve your fundamentals. We'll give you homework and we'll tell you where you're going right and wrong.

A mix of best practices and personal preferences that help build better interfaces.

• When nesting elements, make their border radius concentric. The outer radius equals the inner radius plus the padding between the elements.

• A button with text and an icon gets slightly smaller padding on the side of the icon.

• Use a layered box-shadow to give elements depth instead of using borders.

• Give images a 1px outline, offset by -1px: black at 8% opacity in light mode, white at 8% in dark mode.

• Use font-variant-numeric: tabular-nums in timers, counters, prices and tables.

• Keep long words, links and IDs inside their container with overflow-wrap: break-word. Use white-space: nowrap to prevent labels and badges from wrapping.

• Keep underlines from crossing the tails of letters like g and y. Use text-underline-position: from-font with text-decoration-skip-ink: auto.

• Start button labels with a verb: “Save draft” or “Delete project”, never “OK!” or a bare “Yes”.

• Make confirmation buttons say what will happen: “Delete project” next to “Cancel”.

• Label toggles with what happens when they’re on: “Send read receipts”, not “Disable read receipts”.

This article is a tangible, intuitive intro to quantum mechanics – the way I wish it had been explained to me.

Probabilities can cancel

If you roll each die individually, they’ll both come up with 1’s and 2’s normally. 12% and -12% look the same when you’re not required to add them together. But if you need to add the probabilities together – as you do when one event can happen in multiple ways – then some strange stuff happens.

here’s a hack for understanding QM: if you ever hear about a weird quantum result, simply rephrase it in terms of what doesn’t happen, and then rephrase what doesn’t happen in terms of the multiple ways that it could happen adding to 0.

Convert PDF to markdown + JSON quickly with high accuracy - datalab-to/marker

Nine Principles of Better Stories: A free resource to help business leaders tell better stories.

Details of two critical PHP vulnerabilities, CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619, leaked on 20 October 2026, before PHP had released a fix. PHP’s security team…

Most common oil leak repair under for 10 dollars and 20 minutes of your time.

Beck/Arnley BEC039-6558 Engine Semi-Circular Plug

Limited-time deal: Permatex 82180 Ultra Black Maximum Oil Resistance RTV Silicone Gasket Maker, Sensor Safe And Non-Corrosive, For High Flex And Oil Resistant Applications 3 oz

FEL-PRO 70978 EGR/Exhaust Air Supply Gasket

LWP::ConsoleLogger::Everywhere lets you debug LWP and Mojo UserAgents you don't even know about. Now we also have support for HTTP::Tiny.

You can either add UserAgent debugging to your code directly or, through the magic of perl’s -M you can invoke it on the command line without touching a single line of code.

The guts of this module are stolen from Plack::Middleware::DebugLogging,

AI is not a substitute for divergent thinking, and the false certainty it gives will never save you from having to iterate.

Just like an airplane’s time on the runway is still part of the flight, discovery is part of design and must give creative work momentum and direction.

The Waterfall way of “big design up front” is implied to be practiced by some other people, outside the room. Inside the room are only innovators, who are above that kind of thing.

To the people in charge of calendars, there is nothing more alluring than the idea that you can simply know the right thing to do up front, and then do that thing exactly once, never having to budget time for testing or rework.

Modern CSS features that replace Sass, PostCSS plugins and JavaScript hacks: nesting, :has(), container queries, subgrid and more, checked in September 2026.

Big stylesheets used to get their order from a folder structure and a build tool. Reset first, then base styles, then components, then utilities, plus a rule that nobody adds !important before the third code review.

@layer writes that order into the CSS itself:

A rule in a later layer beats any rule in an earlier layer, whatever its specificity. .p-0 wins over .card .button because utilities comes after components, and the order of the files no longer matters.

Despite broad browser support, container queries remain surprisingly underused and frequently misunderstood.

A very interesting way to distinguish @media and @container queries is the layout type.

Media queries are for the “macro” layout; they look outward. Stuff like page structure, the header that spans the window, footers, main grid layout, system preferences (prefers-color-scheme), device capabilities (touch screens). You know, anything that is majorly true to the entire page structure.

Container queries, I’d say, are for “micro” layouts, i.e., most things that live inside the “macro” layout. We use them when any content needs to responsively fit whatever space it is allocated. Components that come to mind are things like cards, widgets, forms, navigation, and so on.

In other words, think “page layout” vs. “component layout”.

wallhop is a free paywall bypass. Paste any article link to read it without paywall popups, ads or clutter. No signup, no extension. A simple 12ft.io alternative.

The tips and tricks below originally appeared as one of Google's "T esting on the Toilet" (TOTT) episodes. 

I start every bash script with the following prolog:

#!/bin/bash
set -o nounset
set -o errexit

Use functions

• Favor $() over backticks (`)
• Favor [[]] (double brackets) over []
• Avoiding Temporary Files with <()

This video is meant for new stamp collectors who struggle to identify the difference between flat plate press and rotary press printed stamps. We go over how to identify the two different printing styles using a couple of methods! First the millimeter measurements of the stamp design and then the classic method using a easily identifiable flat plate stamp with cut-outs to lay on top of your stamp in question. I hope this helps someone!

Thanks for watching! Feel free to like and subscribe if you enjoy my content!

0:00 Method 1 - Millimeter Measurements of Frame
11:00 Method 2 - Simple & Easy Stamp Cut-Out Overlay

Go to Ebay and run through fifty or so better US commemoratives that are offered for sale from the 1893-1930 period. This was the era in which the United States produced our stamps through a printing process known as flat press printing. In flat press printing most of these issues were printed in large sheets of 200 stamps which were later perforated and cut into sheets of fifty for shipment to Post Offices for sale. The details for each issue varies slightly, but for the US Columbian Exposition issue there were no perforations along the outer edges of the sheet of two hundred. This left each pane of 50 (that is a quarter sheet of the 200 pane that had been printed and then separated) with ten stamps in one row with a straight edge and five stamps in the the other row straight edge with one stamp being the corner stamp and having a straight edge on two sides.

This meant that on the Columbian Exposition issue that fourteen out of every fifty stamps (or 28%) were straight edge. So go to Ebay-bet you can't find 5% straight edges or stamps described as being reperforated. Collectors in the earlier period didn't like straight edges so unscrupulous dealers obliged them by reperfing the offending edges to make them appear perforated on all four sides. Some time reperfing is easy to see (the $5 Columbian above is reperforated on the left hand side). But most of the time it is not so easy. But most of all, collectors have, for the most part, stopped caring. Very quality conscious collectors still care and certifying boards still point out reperfing on certificates (when they can tell), but mainstream Ebay buyers don't seem to care much because they grew up in an all sides perforated environment and don't think to question whether the perforations are real or not. This same phenomonon is happening (and will continue to happen) with gum. Collectors only want NH stamps, so that is what is being supplied. Eventually regumming will be so ubiquitous that only a small set of highly motivated, condition conscious collectors will know the difference or even care. This is not good, but is part of the satisfaction with mediocrity that seems to happen with so many things.

I am passionately convinced that design isn’t what happens after you understand the problem. Design is how you understand the problem. Every rough sketch or clumsy prototype is an investigation into the shape of it.

And yet I see so many designers who seem afraid or reluctant to put the proverbial pen to paper. Afraid of having a point of view. Afraid that someone will point out what they haven’t thought of, or that something doesn’t quite make sense. But surely that’s the whole point! Putting an idea out there is how the gaps get found.

This chapter of the Stamp Smarter "How To" series covers the process of digitally comparing stamp perforations (also known as the Srail method).
For more stamp collecting resources visit stampsmarter.com'

Srail method of detecting reperforations