The definition of INVALID_HANDLE_VALUE is #define INVALID_HANDLE_VALUE ((HANDLE)(LONG_PTR)-1) Why is there an extra cast of LONG_PTR? Why not just go straight to the final answer? #define INVALID_HANDLE_VALUE ((HANDLE)-1) One clue is that 32-bit Windows did use that simpler definition. That clue…

Different 64-bit processor ABIs have different policies on how 32-bit bit values are passed in 64-bit registers. Let’s see if we can find a pattern among the Windows ABIs. Contents of upper 32 bits of 64-bit register holding a 32-bit value Processor 32-bit signed value 32-bit unsigned value AArch64…

Psychology The simple trick to change other people's minds (Image credit: Getty Images) By David Robson People will be far more open-minded than you realise if you adopt these simple conversational techniques. "The growth of knowledge depends entirely upon disagreement," claimed the philosopher Karl…

Whenever this town-focused series includes a city, prideful hollering ensues. The English distinction – not tied to a cathedral, a certain form of local government, nor population size – is whimsical, even if signed off by royalty. This selection of destinations is not about alpha cities. The…

What It Means Derelict is a formal word that describes something that is no longer cared for or used by anyone. It can also describe someone who is negligent or who fails to do what needs to be done. // The kids made sure to stay away from the spooky derelict houses in the neighborhood on Halloween.…

Not long ago, I was auditing a codebase for work (looking for bugs) when I realized that despite the quality of the code, I was becoming mentally fatigued extremely quickly and had a hard time working on it for long stretches of time… I ended up figuring out what made this codebase so difficult to…

What It Means To instigate something is to cause it to happen or begin by urging or goading others. Instigate is a synonym of provoke. // The pair was accused of instigating a plot to oust the newly elected mayor. See the entry > instigate in Context "The image of John, Paul, George and Ringo waving…

This is a page from an upcoming zine called "The Secret Rules of the Terminal". To get an email when the zine comes out, sign up for the zine announcements list! browse more comics! get the zine! read the transcript! The “terminal” is actually a bunch of components that work together. Let’s imagine…

written on Sunday, March 23, 2025 Sometimes in Rust, you need to convert a string into a value of a specific type (for example, converting a string to an integer). For this, the standard library provides the rather useful FromStr trait. In short, FromStr can convert from a &str into a value of any…

What is vendoring about? I'm writing this post because basically I haven't found any guide about this, and for sure with this level of completeness and masochism. So what are we even talking about? Have you ever used the native-tls crate? Well it is an abstraction for TLS stuff in Rust and since…

A recent Oxide and Friends podcast episode, “A crate is born,” detailed the creation of a proc macro for deriving “diffable” data structures with a trick I want to tell you about. To help rust-analyzer as much as possible, @rain explained that the macro should always emit as much valid source code…

A niche programming pattern to satisfy the borrow checker. Many Rust programmers don't know the exact semantics of let: A variable in let must be assigned at least once in each control-flow path it is used in (exactly once if it is not declared mut). This means we don't have to initialize variables…

This is a page from an upcoming zine called "The Secret Rules of the Terminal". To get an email when the zine comes out, sign up for the zine announcements list! browse more comics! get the zine! read the transcript! the terminal driver: an interface that hasn’t changed since the 80s stressed-out…

What It Means Something described as flippant, such as behavior or a comment, is lacking in proper respect or seriousness. // The celebrity made a flippant remark when questioned about the scandal. See the entry > flippant in Context "While the show seems to take a flippant attitude to the neatly…

Published on 2025-03-25, 4607 words, 17 minutes to read I like making things with computers. There’s just one problem about computer programs: they have to run somewhere. Sure, you can just spin up a new VPS per project, but that gets expensive and most of my projects are very lightweight. I run…

I'm perfectly willing to swear we tried our best with this Photoshop. Image: Maggie Jones and Bernard DUPONT via creative commons "I may be right, I may be wrong, but I'm perfectly willing to swear..." It's a curious song with an unlikely origin story, and yet A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square…

London, like New York, is often too busy, and too much in flux, to play itself on film. So, time after time, filmmakers rebuild it on backlots – with varying degrees of accuracy. Each of these other Londons represents a particular vision of the city, and conveys the creators’ preconceptions,…

한옥 우리나라 고유의 형식으로 지은 집을 양식 건물에 상대하여 이르는 말 국립국어원 표준국어대사전 Image by mrsiraphol on Freepik 1. 한옥은 원래 없었다?! 한옥이라는 말은 원래는 없는 말이었습니다. 그도 그럴 것이 한옥이라는 용어 자체가 서양식 주택인 양옥과 구분하기 위한 용어이기 때문이죠. 한옥이라는 말은 1907년 정동길 주변을 기록한 약도에서 처음 등장합니다. 당시 서양의 근대 건축양식이 우리나라에 들어오면서 이들과 구분하기 위해 표시한 것이었죠. 이때는 한옥이라고 하면 살림집을 의미했는데요.…

How many times have you walked along Oxford Street? Dozens, probably. But we bet you never noticed the statue inspired by Darcey Bussell. A bronze likeness of the former ballerina and Strictly star perches above the entrance to The Plaza, the now-closed shopping and food court on the eastern stretch…

Hygiene Your feet are home to billions of bacteria. How often should you wash them? (Image credit: Gorka Olmo/BBC) By Jasmin Fox-Skelly Some people scrub them every day while others say letting water run over them in the shower is enough. So are you cleaning these important appendages enough? When…

I recently had the chance to spend sometime visiting Seattle, Washington with my family, and as a historic preservation buff I was of course drawn to the original stories of the city and its early days. But let’s go back a bit, this trip actually started in Astoria, Oregon at a conference with a…

What It Means To garble something, such as a word, name, message, etc., is to cause it to be unclear or distorted. This type of garbling can be the result of an accident, ignorance, or a transmission error. Garble can also mean "to so alter or distort as to create a wrong impression or change the…

This is a small Maida Vale mews that sits between the busy Harrow Road to the north and the Grand Union Canal to the south. The mews was originally called Carlton Mews, as the main road it leads off was Carlton Terrace. However, when Carlton Terrace was renamed as Great Western Road, the mews was…

낮과 밤이 같아지는 춘분이 왔다. 봄이 본격적으로 시작됐다는 의미다. 그런데 노랗고, 분홍 봄꽃을 즐기기도 전에 우리를 먼저 찾아오는 불청객이 있다. 울퉁불퉁한 도로의 ‘포트홀’이다. 겨울철 제설을 위해 뿌린 염화칼슘은 아스팔트를 부식시킨다. 그래서 포트홀은 주로 봄철에 생겨난다. 식물이 기지개를 켜는 춘분과 사뭇 어울리지 않는 모양새다. 서울시에 따르면 2022년 기준, 서울에서 발생한 포트홀은 2만 3,251건이다. 도로 복구에는 통상 차로 1개를 기준으로 1km에 1억 원이 소요돼 복구 비용도 만만치 않다. 게다가 복구…

Five years ago today, we installed solar panels on our house in London. Solar panels are the ultimate in "boring technology". They sit on the roof and generate electricity whenever the sun shines. That's it. This morning, I took a reading from our generation meter: 19MWh of electricity stolen from…