rnd

joined 2 years ago
[–] rnd 3 points 9 months ago

If you're using Linux (or macOS or MinGW or CygWin or MSYS), you can do something like this in the terminal:

xxd -r -ps | base64

The first command will read the standard input and decode hex strings back into raw data, and the second one will do base64 to the output.

If I pass the hex string mentioned in your original post through this command, I get:

Z3nFNDK4ut8Em7nYkkpXhd2IckM=
[–] rnd 31 points 9 months ago

So, hexadecimal uses 16 characters. Each character stores 4 bits of data (2⁴ = 16).

If you use the 10 digits and 26 letters of the Latin alphabet, the resulting encoding is called Base36.

It is a rather impractical format for storing data, though, because for purposes of simple conversion, the number of possibilities should be a power of 2 -- that way a program can do (quick) bit shifts instead of (difficult, especially on big numbers) division to determine which character to use. That's why it's mostly used to encode numbers, and not large sequences of data.

Base32 is a slightly-smaller variant that can fit 5 bits of data into one character. (2⁵ = 32)

If you add up digits, uppercase and lowercase characters together (differentiating between upper and lower case), you get 62. This is also an impractical number for computer purposes. But add two extra characters and you get 64, which is another nice power of two (2⁶ = 64), letting one character store 6 bits. And Base64 is a common encoding scheme for data.


And when you know how many bits a character can fit, you can calculate how "efficient" the encoding will be and how many characters will be needed to store data. A Base32 encoding will need 20% fewer characters than hexadecimal, and Base64 needs 33.3% fewer.

[–] rnd 3 points 11 months ago

You can use notification settings to "Minimize" any unwanted permanent notifications -- in that way they'll not show an icon in the tray area. (You can also just disable any notification type, but Android is more likely to stop any background task that doesn't display a notification.)

[–] rnd 3 points 11 months ago

If you're learning Japanese, then "10ten" is very good. It adds a little "puck" you can use to hover over words and phrases to see their dictionary definitions, readings, etc.

(On desktop, it instead works whenever yoy hover your mouse cursor over a word, but on mobile, that's not a thing. Either way, it's easy to turn on/off based on your need.)

[–] rnd 2 points 1 year ago

I guess this is an interesting contrast to Windows, where not only certain characters (like ? or * or |) are banned, but also entire filenames that used to refer to device files in DOS (con, prn, lpt1, etc.)

[–] rnd 18 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Not really. . and .. are the only standard directory entries that are added by the system.

Some shells may extrapolate from that by adding ... to go two directories up, but ... can just as well be the name of an actual file or directory.

[–] rnd 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thers also the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive version of the soundtrack, which I personally prefer.

[–] rnd 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

La indeksa skribmaŝino de ĉi tiu artikolo rememorigis ~~min~~ al mi pri ĉi tiu tajpilo por la japana lingvo.

[–] rnd 4 points 1 year ago

Looks very impressive!

[–] rnd 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Seems like more of a human mistake -- like one of the designers used a stock image of a clock spiral that was AI-generated...

[–] rnd 1 points 1 year ago

Browser integration works on my machine, which also uses Wayland, so unless you're, say, running Firefox from a flatpak or something, I don't see why it shouldn't work.

[–] rnd 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Think you misunderstand me. Long before texting was a thing, landline phones (with rotary dials!) also had letters associated with digits. This layout was later transferred to keypads, which in turn became the SMS layout.

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