For the opposite effect, install `bucklespring` to enjoy an authentic classic clacking on any keyboard (most convenient on GNU/Linux, packaged for the biggest distros).

“This project emulates the sound of my old faithful IBM Model-M space saver bucklespring keyboard while typing on my notebook, mainly for the purpose of annoying the [heck] out of my coworkers.

Bucklespring runs as a background process and plays back the sound of each key pressed and released on your keyboard, just as if you were using an IBM Model-M. The sound of each key has carefully been sampled, and is played back while simulating the proper distance and direction for a realistic 3D sound palette of pure nostalgic bliss” — https://github.com/zevv/bucklespring

If you are a linux user and own a nice camera you can use gphoto2 and ffmpeg to create a virtual camera. I posted howto on HN couple of days ago[0][1], here it is for anyone who might need it. I tried it with both Sony RX100VA and Sony A7III, in both cases it works really well.

edit: forgot to mention that this works over USB, you don't have to pay crazy markup for capture card

edit2: (because I'm so excited about getting this to work) here is a list of supported cameras[2] - sadly I was not able to get GoPro Hero 6 to work.

[0] https://www.crackedthecode.co/how-to-use-your-dslr-as-a-webc...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23325143

[2] http://www.gphoto.org/proj/libgphoto2/support.php

The tests don't not work (I believe that within the middle of bell-curve they accomplish their goal well), but at the extremes they are prone to gamification, especially to those in the know. For example, the pre-2017 SAT had some well known (and some lesser known) tricks that you would only know by studying the test, rather than the material:

- ALL sections (and sub-sections) have questions that strictly increase in difficulty / projected "miss-rate" as time goes on. This is to keep test takers from coming back to answers they're unsure about but may themselves know how to solve -- so if you find yourself struggling with questions in a row, it's better to stop and go back rather than miss out on what you may already know trying to solve questions that you don't. For the reading section, the scale is scoped to each passage. For the vocab section, where there are 3 sections (vocab, grammar, and multiple-choice fill in the blank), the scale is scoped to each subsection. For the math section, it is scoped to the whole thing.

- The "Free Section" (e.g. the one that doesn't count toward your score, which instructors tell you before you start that section, so you can use it as a break if you wish) is usually section 4 or 5 of the test, to help plan your breaks. Some students, not previously-knowing or confused that the "free section" is ungraded, still take it thinking there must be a penalty of some sort.

- The word "equivocal" is tested within the SAT Vocab in around 60% of tests. Unequivocally, these questions have some of the highest wrong-rates of any question on the test.

- Within the grammar questions, Choice (e) "None of the above" is 99% of the time NEVER the answer. This is one of the most certain things on the test.

- The math questions will usually have (1) answer that is an outlier. 95% of the time, this is not the correct answer; (2) will be similar to the correct answer in different ways; and (1) will be the correct answer (e.g., say you're supposed to subtract "x" by 5 to get to the real answer. The obviously fake one might be multiplied by 5. One of the slightly-wrong answers might have 5 added rather than subtracted, another might just be off by 1). If you're ever in doubt, you can drastically increase your chances at guessing on a question by picking the question "most similar" to all of the others -- something like 65% chance, rather than 25% in the naive case.

- Again for math questions -- particularly the "word riddle" type ones -- the SAT will generally purposely pick questions that could have multiple seemingly-correct questions if you plug in 1, 2, 5, or 10 for the variables. 3 is almost always a safe bet, though I particularly liked to choose 7, because who thinks you'd ever choose to plug in 7.

- The essay is funny. Per the SAT's own published rules, they are not graded on fact at all; purely rhetoric, vocabulary choice, and clarity. All of the prompts also usually include a historical figure or event of some sort -- you don't need to know anything about them other than what the prompt tells you, but a well-known and easy way to win points with the graders is to make up a fake quote from someone adjacent to the event / historical figure as a hook: e.g. "Disconsolate upon hearing the tragedy of [EVENT X], [FIGURE Y]'s au pair journaled 'His life was short, but his memory will last forever'. Previously unknown to historians until then, Y's au pair embodied Y's belief that [SOMETHING FROM THE PROMPT]. [then THESIS STATEMENT on 3rd or 4th sentence, always]." (this is an objectively wrong and terrible sentence that I would hate to read in any other context. This is, however, similar to the SAT's example of a top-tier intro).

This is just the tip of the iceberg, too. It's a very predictable format and pattern (it has to be, as it's given multiple times during the same academic year; tests must be similar, lest one session of test takers do statistically significantly better than an equally-talented group which takes the test a month later)

So yes, while I believe the SAT does attempt to test for knowledge, it's that same pursuit of a bell curve that makes it easily gamifiable for those who know the test and not the material -- who are, once again, usually already the wealthy and connected.

Something like this isn't really necessary. I do something like this (bash) all the time when I want to change a part of a filename (renames "foo-bar-baz.txt" to "foo-bar-quux.txt"):

    mv foo-bar-{baz,quux}.txt

You can have an 'empty' bit to add or remove something from the name (renames "foo-bar.txt" to "foo-bar-baz.txt"):

    mv foo-bar{,-baz}.txt

That will work with pathname parts as well (as in the linked demo video) if you include them in the command.

I guess the linked script is useful if you need to do some complex edits to the filename, since you can't usefully have more than one curly-brace-group for this use case. But in that case honestly I'm fine just double-clicking the first argument to select, and then middle-clicking to paste, and then using the arrow keys to edit.

Oof. It wasn't handling binary files. Also fixed directory traversal, and you can optionally specify a content directory on the cmd line.

  gawk '@load"filefuncs";@load"readfile";func send(s,e,d,t,b){print"HTTP/1.0 "s" "e|&S;print"Content-Length: "b|&S;print"Content-Type: "t|&S;print d|&S;close(S);}func cf(x){split(x,y,"/");for(z in y){print "FOUND "y[z];if(y[z]==".."){return 0;}}return 1;}func mt(f){c="file -b --mime-type "f;r="";while((c|getline z)>0){r=r z;}close(c);return r;}BEGIN{if(ARGV[1]!=""){if(chdir(ARGV[1])){print "Failed to chdir to "ARGV[1];exit;}ARGC=1;}RS=ORS="\r\n";while(1){S="/inet/tcp/8080/0/0";while((S|&getline l)>0){split(l,f," ");if(f[1]=="GET"){p=substr(f[2],2)}if(p==""){p="index.html"}stat(p,s);if(cf(p)&&s["type"]=="file"){m=mt(p);o=readfile(p);send(200,"OK",o,m,s["size"]);break;}n="<html>Not Found</html>";send(404,"Not Found",n,"text/html"RS,length(n));break;}}}'

You can also do a per-directory _global_ git configuration, e.g.

in .gitconfig, you say:

    [user]
        name = Me Myself
        email = personal@example.com
        signingkey = D34DB44F

    [includeIf "gitdir:~/src/github.com/work_org/"]
        path = ~/.gitconfig_work

Then in ~/.gitconfig_work:

    [user]
        name = Me Myself
        email = work@example.com
        signingkey = D34DC0D4
    
    [core]
        sshCommand = ssh -i ~/.ssh/work_ed25519

I like this way better, because I don't need to remember to specify per-project config, as long I put them in the right directory :-)

I am not the original poster, but I also worked on office file formats -- specifically I was one of the poor saps who worked on file import and export for Word Perfect after it was acquired by Corel. Before you send me hate mail, in my defence the code was mostly written before I got to it, and I was merely fixing the innumerable bugs in it.

I'm mostly familiar with the Word file format, so I will restrict my comments to that. It's been more than 15 years since I did this stuff, so my memory is hazy -- specifically I can't remember how the Excel file formats work at all.

Basically, the Word file format is a binary dump of memory. I kid you not. They just took whatever was in memory and wrote it out to disk. We can try to reason why (maybe it was faster, maybe it made the code smaller), but I think the overriding reason is that the original developers didn't know any better.

Later as they tried to add features they had to try to make it backward compatible. This is where a lot of the complexity lies. There are lots of crazy work-arounds for things that would be simple if you allowed yourself to redesign the file format. It's pretty clear that this was mandated by management, because no software developer would put themselves through that hell for no reason.

Later they added a fast-save feature (I forget what it is actually called). This appends changes to the file without changing the original file. The way they implemented this was really ingenious, but complicates the file structure a lot.

One thing I feel I must point out (I remember posting a huge thing on slashdot when this article was originally posted) is that 2 way file conversion is next to impossible for word processors. That's because the file formats do not contain enough information to format the document. The most obvious place to see this is pagination. The file format does not say where to paginate a text flow (unless it is explicitly entered by the user). It relies of the formatter to do it. Each word processor formats text completely differently. Word, for example famously paginates footnotes incorrectly. They can't change it, though, because it will break backwards compatibility. This is one of the only reasons that Word Perfect survives today -- it is the only word processor that paginates legal documents the way the US Department of Justice requires.

Just considering the pagination issue, you can see what the problem is. When reading a Word document, you have to paginate it like Word -- only the file format doesn't tell you what that is. Then if someone modifies the document and you need to resave it, you need to somehow mark that it should be paginated like Word (even though it might now have features that are not in Word). If it was only pagination, you might be able to do it, but practically everything is like that.

I recommend reading (a bit of) the XML Word file format for those who are interested. You will see large numbers of flags for things like "Format like Word 95". The format doesn't say what that is -- because it's pretty obvious that the authors of the file format don't know. It's lost in a hopeless mess of legacy code and nobody can figure out what it does now.

For programmers who have worked on long lived legacy systems before, none of this should be a surprise. People think Microsoft purposely obfuscated their stuff, but when I worked at Corel, Microsoft used to call us up to tell us when we had broken our Word export filter. At least by that point, having Word as a standard file format was a plus for them. However, whenever we asked them what we should do to fix the filter, they invariably didn't know -- we knew more than they did.