TIL the proof-of-work system Hashcash to battle spam predated Bitcoin by 11 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash
#bitcoin #hashcash #todayilearned #TIL #history #it #internet #email

#todayilearned it is not normally allowed to have red or salmon pink cables in Australian data centres, as they are reserved for secret data

Control: ISM-0926; Revision: 11; Updated: Dec-24; Applicability: NC, OS, P; Essential Eight: N/A
Non-classified, OFFICIAL: Sensitive and PROTECTED cables are coloured neither salmon pink nor red.

Control: ISM-1718; Revision: 1; Updated: Mar-23; Applicability: S; Essential Eight: N/A
SECRET cables are coloured salmon pink.

Control: ISM-1719; Revision: 1; Updated: Mar-23; Applicability: TS; Essential Eight: N/A
TOP SECRET cables are coloured red.

One thing I really enjoy; discovering a word I’ve never seen before and finding its definition hits that “oh, that's cool" portion of my brain.

I've been making good progress clearing up my Pocket (AKA ReadItLater) queue lately.

Found this while reading: https://alexcabal.com/posts/standard-ebooks-and-classic-web-tech

#TodayILearned that Warner Brothers originally created the #LooneyTunes cartoons because they had just acquired five popular music publishers at the beginning of the Great Depression, and wanted to heavily promote the songs they now owned so to encourage the sale of sheet music. For example, the very first Looney Tunes cartoon was called "Sinkin' in the Bathtub," created specifically to promote the 1929 song "Singin' in the Bathtub."

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

After years of running `ls` commands to figure out where a symlink was pointing, today I found out about the readlink1 command:

https://man.openbsd.org/readlink

#TodayILearned
#CommandLineWizardry
#TechnicalJiggeryPokery

TIL about an incredible bird called the Arctic Tern, every year it flies from one side of the planet to the other and back again:

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

"Recent studies have shown average annual round-trip lengths of about 70,900 km (44,100 mi)"

A bird species that migrates 70,000 kilometres every year!

#TodayILearned that the oldest English-language description of card game rules was written in 1655 by John Cotgrave in his "Wit's Interpreter," and that the four games featured in the gaming section included the very first English mentions of chess and cribbage (along with a game called Ombre and another called Piquet, both once massively popular and played by millions, but now only by obscure game aficionados).

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

Today I learned that inkjet printers literally dry out if you don't use them for a while.

I'm shocked! #TodayILearned that #Python sets don't de-duplicate NaN values! (I guess it is because NaN has this crazy property that it is not equal to itself... NaN != NaN is True...)

>>> set((float('nan'), float('nan'), float('nan'))) 
{nan, nan, nan}

#TodayILearned that "stogie," meaning a cheap cigar, goes all the way back to 1835 and is derived from "Conestoga" as in the covered wagon. https://www.etymonline.com/word/stogie#22110

I learned far too late that you can unpack Iterables in #Python with “yield from”. Really handy!

TIL, że istnieje coś takiego jak "furia drogowa"

#TodayILearned that if archaeologists are unable to fully excavate a site they will often sprinkle metal washers when putting the turf back to disappoint metal detectors and discourage them from disturbing what's left before they get funding to come back. Which makes me wonder if they can't, whether future archaeologists will stumble across these sites in 1000 years and assume washers were ways of venerating the ancient dead in our culture.

#TIL que cabotiner se dit "to be a ham" en anglais

#TodayILearned this is how you append the content of a file to another file in Linux

```
cat file1 >> file2
```