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! :)

Random stuff I’ve stumbled upon, new and old.
Earlier post: What’s Cool?

• Aira Force 0.9.2
  An intruiging Amiga reverse engineering IDE with an integrated emulator. Those live introspection capabilities of copper, DMA, disk and blitter look promising, as showcased in the demo video running “Another World”. I would love to add something like that to my own Coppenheimer project one day; maybe an interactive tool to analyze tight effect loops. Hmm!
• Robosaurus Spielothek: Another World
  (German) Apropos Another World: Wer Humor mag und liebevoll produzierte Retrospiel-Reviews, muss Robosaurus abonnieren, Punkt! :) Moderne Games, Filme und Event-Berichte gibt es bei Monstershark-Media aber auch. Anspieltipps: Cooking Simulator VR (habe mich eingenässt) und das wahnsinnige Intro zum Amiga 38-Report.
• PTDQ
  A chunky graphics mode for AGA Amigas, based on a clever arrangement of super-hires pixels. Bookmarked for future newschool Amiga endeavours!
• Starpath
  An insightful write-up for one of Hellmood’s latest sizecoding masterpieces. My main insight being this: WTF, I’ll never touch x86 sizecoding. :)
• Amiga-Memory: Ein Computer, der uns geprägt hat
  (German) Als Moderator von zahlreichen Computersendungen hat mich Christian Spanik quasi durch meine Jugend begleitet, ich wusste aber gar nicht, dass der „Digisaurier“ Spanik so viele Fachbücher geschrieben hat und ein riesiger Amiga-Fan war! Beziehungsweise ist – siehe Link. :)