tilvember is a concept coined by Thomas Rigby who describes it as
This November, I will aim to share at least one thing I have learned that day on my blog in, what I’m calling,TILvember
I’m aiming to do the same in 2025 but instead of doing it on my blog, I’ll do it here in my digital garden. I’ll make notes of things I learn and add them to a (hopefully) growing list below.
2025
Nov 1st
As the cross-country skiing season started today with the Finnish Cup, I was surprised to learn that the snow used was cannoned last season and stored over summer for use this weekend. This snow is then stored either under mats designed to isolate and keep snow cold enough to utilise even up to 90% of the snow later in the year or under sawdust that has about 50-60% utility rate.
Last year, BBC wrote about how Finnish ski resorts save snow.
Nov 2nd
I learned that there’s a better interface to create and manage tables in HTML through HTMLTableElement.
Nov 3rd
One of the weirdest TILs this year I learned from Mastodon and is about a Finnish children’s song. In 1950s, Finnish actor and composer Georg Malmstén composed Lasten liikennelaulu (in Finnish) that’s been recorded multiple times ever since and is probably known by every Finn.
The weird part is that the work was originally paid by the oil company Shell (in Finnish).
Nov 5th
In a company training, we talked about Cynefin, a way of categorising work based on how much of knowns and unknowns there are. I find it fascinating as different problem domains require different approaches and especially in consulting work that I’m currently doing, it’s so important to be on the same page. The phenomenon described in xkcd 1425: Tasks is a good example of how arbitrary it can sometimes be.
Nov 7th
Thanks to Giles Turnbull, I learned about the Pooh case in writing
Nov 8th
If you have a Google Doc with links and you export it to HTML or ePub, Google will add their tracking to all of your links by replacing https://example.com with https://www.google.com/url?q=https://example.com (and a bunch of tracking params).
This means that if you export a doc into HTML and share it with someone else, Google can track them.
Thanks Joe for bringing this to my attention.
Nov 9th
In the never-ending quest to find short stories and tiny podcasts, I bumbled upon Breaker Whiskey, a serial story with short, 3-4 minute episodes. The author describes it as
In 1968, two women find themselves in rural Pennsylvania during what turns out to be some kind of apocalyptic event. By the time they discover that everyone else is gone, it’s too late to figure out what happened. Despite not liking each other at all, the women work together to survive, until six years later one of them sets out on her own, driving around the country to find other survivors. This is her, calling out to anyone who might listen.
Nov 10th
Paged Out magazine is a free experimental (one article == one page) technical magazine about programming (especially programming tricks!), hacking, security hacking, retro computers, modern computers, electronics, demoscene, and other similar topics.
I love it’s approach of 1 page per article as that sets interesting constraints and requires focus from the author but it also enables a lot of experimental approaches by them as well.
As soon as I read the first few issues, the gears in my head started to turn as I really want to write an article for it — all I need to figure out now is a appropriate topic.
Nov 11th
I ran into Cistercian numerals in Mastodon and they really intrigued me. In short, it’s a numeral system from the 1200s where you can easily draw every number up to 9999 with a single character.
Nov 12th
What a way to start the day: I learned there’s a Roll and Write version of one of the greatest 2 player board games, Lost Cities. During the pandemic, I discovered my love for roll and write games and Lost Cities: Roll & Write seems like a really nice game.
While in theory the game fits into a rather small space (it’s just draw sheets, markers and dice), it’s still harder to fit into the bag thanthe original which I have as part of my Potluck deck that fits into a deck box.
I found the game through Board Game Journey’s Youtube video. They are a relatively new, small board game channel — check them out if you’re into board games.
Nov 13th
One of the lovely things about IndieWeb Carnival is that you get exposed to all sorts of people from all around the world and get to read their thoughts. Today I read Anthony Nelzin-Santos’ newest entry ’tis the (small) season which introduced me to not only a great new blog to follow but to Small Seasons, a Japanese concept that splits the year to 72 micro-seasons.
(PS. You can find this month’s Carnival topic and an updating list of entries in Alex’s blog.)
Nov 14th
.meow is a “domain for the Queer Community, by the Queer Community”, a wonderful project run by a non-profit that is applying for their own top-level domain with money it makes funneled into queer people and projects.
As they put it
The dotMeow foundation is a queer-owned, queer-operated non-profit with one goal: to turn internet infrastructure into community support.
A bonus
Somehow, it took me until today to learn that Mike Myers played both Austin Powers and Doctor Evil in Austin Powers movies. I love those movies but never connected the dots until today.
Nov 15th
I had a long conference recording from an old conference and as I was reorganising my video collection, I wanted to finally split it into individual talks.
ffmpeg is a handy command line tool for all sorts of video tasks and I took some notes on how to Split video with ffmpeg.
Nov 16th
I’ve known about (and used a bit myself too) /s as an indication that something said is said sarcastically. But I never spent much time thinking about it: it was just something people in IRC did and after the first time I saw it and asked what it meant, I learned it means sarcasm.
Today I learned that there’s more of these and they are called tone indicators.
Some examples of tone indicators are “/j”, “/s”, “/srs”, “/p”, “/r”, “/ly”, “neg”, “pos”, “/gen” and “/c”. Though there are many others, these are the ones that are most commonly used and needed for clarity of communication.
I’ll admit, I’ve never seen any of the others being used but apparently they are a thing.
Nov 17th
Somehow I had missed that Javascript has a CSS API. I learned about it today when Nathan shared a toot about CSS.escape.
CSS: escape() static method - Web APIs | MDN is a method that helps turn strings into a format that can be used for CSS selectors:
const element = document.querySelector(`#${CSS.escape(id)} > img`);That is so handy!
Nov 18th
I’ve been recently getting more into Magic the Gathering and after a fun Commander night (my first!) last night, I reinstalled MTG Arena and played a couple of games. Since I don’t have any real decks in it, I chose to play with the “Starter Duel” decks, assuming these would be nice, balanced beginner decks.
That’s when I learned about Rise of the Dark Realms. In a “Starter Duel” deck.
Rise of the Dark Realms {7}{B}{B} Sorcery
Put all creature cards from all graveyards onto the battlefield under your control.
My opponent was at 1 health, I had the game in the bag next turn and all of a sudden, they play Rise of the Dark Realms, swarm their board with 18 creatures with great enter the battlefield abilities and did 35 damage to me the next turn.
What is this card and why is it in a starter deck 😅.
Nov 19th
I was building a self-playing Keynote presentation with videos for an event and ran into the problem that setting Keynote to self-playing mode with 10 second auto-advance, if I put a video that was longer than 10 seconds, it cut it off.
I figured out a way to extend slide auto-play in Keynote beyond presentation default.
Nov 21st
Alexander B. Joy wrote about Two-sentence journals last summer and I found it very interesting way to do journaling.
Nov 22nd
The Braille railing is an artwork by Neapolitan artist Paolo Puddu, titled Follow the Shape. Installed first as a temporary intervention in 2015, it later became permanent in 2017 after winning the “Un’opera per il Castello” competition, a programme encouraging artists to re-engage historic sites with contemporary ideas.
Nov 23rd
I’m not yet sure if I’m able to put into clear words what I learned but this old talk by Devon Wiersma about graffitis in video games from 2022 popped up to my radar today as shared by notGDC.
In the talk, Wiersma goes through what graffitis are and how they can be an effective way of environmental storytelling and world building in video games.
Nov 24th
I’m in a phase where I keep following weird threads to rabbit holes because that’s all my brain is capable of doing right now. One of those rabbit holes led me to learn about The Kajima Cut and Take Down Method. It’s a method of demolishing big buildings without causing havoc in the surrounding area.
They replace some columns with jack, destroy and dismantle the bottom floor and then lower the jacks down and repeat for the next level. There’s a really cool timelapse video on the site to see how it’s done.
Nov 25th
Do you want to find new music to listen from indie artists? The Indie Beat Radio is a project that creates a radio from participating artists in Bandwagon and let’s you listen to great music and discover new artists.
I kept the radio on the background for the whole day at work and it was exciting to hear so many songs from different genres.
Nov 26th
Today while learning more Kotlin stuff, I learned about the Elvis operator:
In Kotlin, the Elvis operator returns its left-hand side if it is not null, and its right-hand side otherwise.
val length = nullableVariable?.length ?: 0If nullableVariable is null, the left side evaluates to null and triggers Elvis operator to return 0.
(Ps. my favourite operator is still Python’s walrus operator :=)
Nov 28th
Yesterday, I don’t think my brain had any capacity to learn anything. But today, I ran into something wild: people put their pet tortoises into a fridge for the winter to hibernate.
Nov 29th
Last night, I learned that the Finnish translation of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is Humiseva Harju and that was a crushing revelation. For over 20 years, “Humiseva Harju” has been a central location in my paracosm and I had no idea it was an existing name for such a famous work.
I keep wondering now how many people throughout years have thought of me as a big Emily Brontë fan whenever I’ve been speaking about it.
I was watching a movie from the telly when I saw a brief ad telling me “Humiseva Harju” is coming to movie theaters next February and I had to go look for it online because I was so confused whether I actually saw my paracosm being adopted to the cinema screen. Turns out, I was almost 200 years late with my creation.