Web Excursions 2021-06-24
How Memes Become Money - The Atlantic
There is no easy way to resolve this tension. Selling an NFT of a tweet isn’t about fostering an audience or creating a sustainable source of income to support a creative life. It’s the newest, most direct way of converting attention into money, and of plucking a unit of content out of its cultural context—the conversation it was part of, the historical moment that made it significant, the people who saw it and got excited about it—and presenting it for purchase.
It’s appropriate to give credit to people for their creativity and compensate them for their labor. It’s empowering to siphon value from the social-media companies that have been making billions off our personal lives. But it’s also a kind of giving up.
The Best Mac Site-Specific Browser for Google Docs - TidBITS
Requirements:
Window and tab support
Multiple domain support: allow both drive.google.com and docs.google.com to co-exist in the same app
Receive incoming Google Docs links
Send external links to my default Web browser
Grammarly support
In the end, I’m going to use the combination of Coherence X and BrowserFairy.
Why are the Microsoft Office file formats so complicated? (And some workarounds) – Joel on Software
Excel 97-2003 files are OLE compound documents, which are, essentially, file systems inside a single file.
They were designed to be fast on very old computers.
These are binary formats, so loading a record is usually a matter of just copying (blitting) a range of bytes from disk to memory, where you end up with a C data structure you can use.
The file format is contorted, where necessary, to make common operations fast.
They were designed to use libraries.
They were not designed with interoperability in mind.
They have to reflect all the complexity of the applications.
They have to reflect the history of the applications.
There are two kinds of Excel worksheets:
those where the epoch for dates is 1/1/1900 (with a leap-year bug deliberately created for 1-2-3 compatibility that is too boring to describe here), and
those where the epoch for dates is 1/1/1904. Excel supports both because Excel for Windows had to be able to import 1-2-3 files, which used 1/1/1900 for the epoch.
Both 1900 and 1904 file types are commonly found in the wild, usually depending on whether the file originated on Windows or Mac.
Converting from one to another silently can cause data integrity errors, so Excel won’t change the file type for you.
as you work on your Excel clone, you’ll discover all kinds of subtle details about date handling.
it’s not really going to make it any easier to import or save to the Office file formats.
These are insanely complex and rich applications,
and you can’t just implement the most popular 20% and expect 80% of the people to be happy.
two major alternatives you should seriously consider:
Let Office do the heavy work for you.
Word and Excel have extremely complete object models,
available via COM Automation,
which allow you to programmatically do anything.
In many situations, you are better off reusing the code inside Office rather than trying to reimplement it.
Use a simpler format for writing files.
If you merely have to produce Office documents programmatically, there’s almost always a better format
If you really, really have to generate native Excel files,
find an extremely old version of Excel… Excel 3.0 is a good choice,
before all the compound document stuff, and
save a minimum file containing only the exact features you want to use.
Use this file to see the exact minimum BIFF records that you have to output and just focus on that part of the spec.
If you really want to generate fancy formatted Word documents, your best bet is to create an RTF document.
Everything that Word can do can be expressed in RTF,
but it’s a text format, not binary,
so you can change things in the RTF document and it’ll still work.