Today I Learned: May 6, 2019
E*-dashes. Hard drive costs. Youtube shuffling utilities.
1) E*-Dashes
You know… for someone who thinks of himself as an amateur writer, I learn new things about the English language surprisingly often. Basic things, even. For example, I didn’t realize — not fully — until to day that English has three different kinds of dashes.
The first dash is the dash. It goes between hyphenated words. Store-bought. Ready-mad. X-wing.
The second dash is the en-dash. With an “N”. En-dashes are used in modern English to separate parenthetical asides from the rest of the sentence. I’d demonstrate, but I can’t, because Medium auto-converts en-dashes into em-dashes.
Em-dashes, or triple-dashes (see that monodash there?) are also used to separate parenthetical asides — like this one — from their parent sentences. The difference between an en- and an em-dash is that em-dashes are longer, and spaces are placed around en-dashes but not em-dashes. Apparently both are acceptable to use, but em-dashes are the more archaic form and en-dashes the more modern form.
Also, em-dashes are unambiguously the correct punctuation to use before the name in a quotation.
2) How Much is a Hard Drive These Days?
About half as much as the last time I checked, which was… a couple years ago? They’re definitely not getting cheaper at Moore’s Law rates — not that memory has ever improved at Moore’s Law rates, but they used to be faster than this — but they are improving.
3) Shuffling Large Playlists is Surprisingly Hard
I recently made a very large youtube playlist that I wanted to listen to at random. It worked alright, but I found myself seeing the same videos come up repeatedly — it seemed to be getting stuck in loops.
Apparently this is a known problem among Youtubers — Youtube just can’t shuffle large playlists very well. There are some dirty fixes, like “un-shuffle and re-shuffle whenever you get a video for the second time, but the much better solution is the utility website http://youtube-playlist-randomizer.valami.info/. It’s simple, clean, and it shuffles playlists like a boss.
I declare no conflicts of interest in this TIL.