Weird: Google has notified me that search hits for “joys of feeling stupid” have gone through the roof! 250 search result clicks in a month is a lot, at least for this humble website.
I mean, it was nice blog post, but it is hardly what people are looking for when googling that, I suppose?! Even weirder: “joys of feeling stupid” doesn’t seem to be a comtemporary viral video, song, or article. What gives?
I don’t really know, but that’s okay. Fitting, even – the mystery of “joys of feeling stupid” making me feel… you know. :)
Hacker News featured a link to developer.chrome.com: “Select fields can now be styled” Interesting, let’s click this link! This is what I got:
Yes, that’s the whole page. Somewhat cool, just: Das Element and nothing else. Maybe the start of a Rammstein song? :) But I did expect to read more on the topic…
That “switch to English” button already gives a hint who’s at fault. The original English version of the page looks intact:
So, a “helpful” auto-translate service strikes again! This time, it’s not focused on mis-translating technical terms, though, but rather messing up the HTML markup… Danke! :)
Totally stealing eager to take inspiration from this quilt design I saw on
TikTok…
Apparently, it’s the winning entry – “Light Me Up” by Lindsey Berres – for the “American Patchwork & Quilting Transparency 2025 Quilting Challenge” at QuiltCon, held by the Modern Quilt Guild.
QuiltCon, quilting challenge, Quilt Guild! I love that all these things exist.
PS: Now to figure out the construction rules…
If you’re not from Germany and weren’t witness to the the 1999 Moorhuhn craze, probably not. :) Otherwise…
Yesterday I was browsing a PDF issue of the German magazine “Stern” on the train and I noticed a lot of peculiar, prominent typos:
“Tecāik” instead of “Technik”, “Soā” instead of “Sohn”, etc. Is this some kind of font encoding mishap? Oddly enough, when copying and pasting affected text blocks, the letters would come out correct.
The train had an unscheduled stop in the middle of nowhere, and I began investigating a bit. My best guess was that this is related to an ancient InDesign bug where certain letter combinations would falsely be treated as ligatures with a seemingly random replacement glyph (in this case, inserting “ā” as a ligature for “hn”). This would explain how the copied text remains intact.
- Weird ligature issues (Feb 2011)
- InDesign false ligatures bug (Jun 2018)
- Variable data problem (Sep 2020)
Here comes the kicker: This wasn’t just an issue with the PDF version! I bought a physical copy of the magazine today, and it seems these typos are all over the print edition as well! That’s a lot of misprints, Stern has a circulation of about 250,000 copies.
Makes you wonder how a mistake like this can happen without anyone noticing… There are at least 30 instances of this throughout the issue!
Bonus guessing: When looking at the codepoints of the contracted letters, we see that they are close to letter pairs that do have a proper ligature. “fi” and “fl” usually have ligatures, and if we modify each letter by +2, we end up at “hk” and “hn”.
| Letters | ASCII | Ligature |
|---|---|---|
| f i | 66 69 | U+FB01 = fi |
| f l | 66 6c | U+FB02 = fl |
| h k | 68 6b | U+0100 = Ā (incorrect) |
| h n | 68 6e | U+0101 = ā (incorrect) |
Coincidence? I think… maybe! :)
