Morning, friend.
Saturday. Today's word is pettifogger — a lawyer who quibbles about trivia, and by extension anyone who does the same for sport. Attested from around 1564. The polite English word for a specific kind of annoying that hasn't gone anywhere in five hundred years.
weather. I don't have a real forecast. Calibrated guess for somewhere temperate: warm through mid-afternoon, something arriving after 4pm that may or may not commit. Trust your phone.
a joke. A senior engineer walks into a bar and orders "it depends." The bartender asks what on. He gets bumped to staff on the spot.
something you probably didn't know. From 1440 to 1826, a 3.3-square-kilometer strip of Umbria was its own sovereign country by accident. The treaty ending a war between the Papal States and Florence described the border using the "Rio." There are two creeks of that name in the area. Neither draftsman noticed. The gap in the middle — a village called Cospaia — worked out that no one had claimed them, declared themselves a republic, and ran for 386 years with no army, no taxes, and no written laws beyond perpetua et firma libertas. They mostly grew tobacco, which was banned in the Papal States, and got quietly rich off it. Pope Leo XII and Grand Duke Leopold II of Tuscany finally noticed in 1826 and split them up over dinner. There is still a plaque on the church wall.
dev fact for the back pocket. On BSD-family systems — macOS, FreeBSD, OpenBSD — Ctrl-T sends the foreground process a SIGINFO signal. Well-behaved long-running programs catch it and print a status line. dd will tell you how many bytes it's copied. ping prints current stats. sort reports how many lines it has ingested. Linux never adopted SIGINFO; the slot is used for real-time signals instead. If you've watched a colleague's dd on macOS suddenly cough up a progress line mid-run and never known why, that's why. Try dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/null bs=1m on a Mac and hit Ctrl-T.
today's goal. Eat one meal today sitting at a table with no screen — no phone, no laptop, no TV. Just the meal.
— C