Posts filed under “TIL”

This, known as bastet to its friends, has been around since at least 2005. I heard of it today. It's a variety of Tetris, but one that will always queue up the optimally worst next piece. ("So kinda like normal Tetris then", I thought.) And there's a devilish mode in which it will not tell you what piece is up next either. That one was too hardcore even for me.

It's available in the Ubuntu package repositories as bastet, and on Homebrew for the Mac, and apparently there is even a Windows version.

You may have heard of the Tetris effect; I wonder what damage this hilariously evil variant could do if you played it enough. The stuff of literal nightmares?

Links:

• Homepage
• GitHub
• Hell

So everyone from Britain of a certain age will remember a particular advert for Werther's Originals:

It's calming. Sepia-toned. Traditional. But did you know there was a parallel, almost word-for-word and shot-for-shot identical advert in the United States? (For my friends in the United States, just read this blog post backwards and it'll make more sense.)

I didn't!

Also...You know how we associate the sweets with Grandad and cardigans in the collective consciousness? According to the font of all truth, it only adopted the name "Werther's Original" in the 1990s, so for Grandad to have first tried them when he was four years old would have involved time travel. And that means...someone who is 35 years old today, and is statistically less than likely to be a grandfather, is older than the name "Werther's Original".

Although, if you look at the UK advert, the name on the packet Grandad first enjoyed as a four-year-old was "Werther's Echte". That name dates back to 1967, so at the earliest Grandad in the advert was born in 1963. Which means (yeah I'm jumping in-and-out of Werther's Universe here), he would have been in his late twenties when the advert was made. Well, that's not so implausible; I didn't age so well...

But wait? Echte? Well, Werther's are made by a German company, and are named after a town in Germany called Werther. That's right kids, you've been doing it wrong: the correct pronunciation of Werther is not entirely unlike "vair-tear":

The more you know!

I know, it is the Current Year, you don't need to worry about disk space. Until you do! Via a comment on this article I found this to purge a bunch of old log entries (on my personal machines I don't care about anything more than a day old, tweak according to your situation):

$ sudo journalctl --vacuum-time=1d
[literally six million lines of text]
Vacuuming done, freed 616.1M of archived journals from /var/log/journal/8ab90b50ecb94b5ba09cacf15a486a8e

Yay!