The part where I talk briefly about my life

I suppose less happened this week. I’m currently on an extended week-end as schools here take “the long week-end” which basically means that I have an extra day off in addition to the bank holiday and the week-end. It feels strange to still be in school when university students are already on holidays, and this, for 4 months.

Slightly more interesting things

UTF-16 and Caret Notation

Have you ever tried to upload a php file to a server, only to find out that when you download it, and open it in vim it shows some ^@ in blue between every character ?

Well that’s because you somehow encoded your file in UTF-16 where each “code point” (aka character) is is encoded in 2 bytes. It so happens that every character from ASCII is encoded with its first byte being 0x00 for compatibility. (The question of which of the two bytes is the first one is dealt with, by the byte order mark)

This doesn’t explain why it’s represented by a caret followed by an at sign (there’s no proper word for it in English…).
Well, you guessed it, that’s caret notation.

You can explain it two ways :

  1. The control character is represented by a caret followed by n’th letter of the alphabet with n being the character’s value.
  2. The control character is represented by a caret followed by the character shifted by 64 in the ascii table :

In the end, it worked out. The file in question was ip.php btw.

Privacy and BitTorrent

While being bored in computer class, with the teacher writing esoteric code without explaining much (that day’s topic was the algorithm to find the longest increasing subsequence and the change-making problem), I stumbled upon this website : privacytools.io. It’s about privacy and all, very thorough. In short, a good read.

That also made me buy a VPN for torrenting… Here’s a dead idea (since 2010 ?) to make it safer : Anomos It’s something like Tor + Bittorrent, and relies on trusting the tracker.
Remember, when it comes to tracking, correlation is a bitch.

On that note, I came across installgentoo’s guide to private trackers.

Minor tech issue lookups

My computer is great at breaking for no reason. And HP is terrible at delivering driver updates. Last time I tried to install the audio driver, I got a freaking BSOD for no reason. And now just pressing the d key mutes the computer. (Could it be related to the “debug” function left in the driver!?)
Anyways, it got solved with this update…

Did you know that you could comment out text in posts for Jekyll to ignore ? There’s actually two ways to do it, using Liquid…

{% comment %}
	...
{% endcomment %}

…or Kramdown’s extension :

{::comment}
	...
{:/comment}

Knowing where to mount the always attached external storage is a headache if you want to be consistent with the FSH (Note that, that website is strangely not linked to by their wiki).

I don’t think there’s a definitive answer to centering images in markdown… (Had to hardcode it)

Remember when I talked about comments in Liquid ? That was a pain to escape… (You use {% raw %} and {% endraw %})

In GIMP, press C-S-l C-S-n to create a new layer from selection. (Maybe there’s a better way ? thinking). That’s Emacs Key Notation btw.

Anime stuff

So, I finally watched the New Game OVA (yay), and finished Hanayamata.
I somehow love its OP, Hana wa Odore ya Iroha ni ho :

Lyrics by Lyrical Nonsense.

And… Youmu memes :

And lastly, some pretty pictures

Short age progression comic from ibenz009.

Naoki Miki from Gakkou Gurashi by いかみです.

I really want to have the nice mini website icons for outgoing links…

Wrapping up

That’s it for this week ! There actually was stuff to write about 0_o

See you next time ! waves