IBU

Consol

• The '~' character is Pronounced: Til- Dee (or Til- Der or Til- Da).
• The '~' character is a web addressing convention that means: "go to the web directory underneath the home directory of the user name whose name (usually initials) follows the '~'.
• Example: Web Addresses For Julian H. Stacey: In my case, my login name on berklix.com is jhs, so http://www.berklix.com/~jhs takes you to my login directory, where the Apache (web server) looks for a default directory name of public_html & within that for a default file name of index.html
• People on non American keyboards frequently have difficulties, as there is No '~' key on German keyboards (Manufacturers omitted it & other keys such as < > [ ] | & re-arranged the keyboard, adding German umlauts, legal section/ paragraph symbols etc (a pain for Unix C programmers ! Even some German Unix C programmer friends prefer American keyboards, & I a British Unix C programmer for similar reason prefer American not English keyboard layout.
• You can sometimes still get the '~' out of the German keyboard, if you know the right combination with Alt Grosse etc (But it might be tricky, There's not one but 4 German keyboard types (2 German & 2 Swiss German)
• Any Ascii character such as '~' you can't find on your keyboard, you can generate long hand ! Just type the percent % key and then the hexadecimal for the character you want. eg '~' in the table below is 7E, so this works: http://www.berklix.com/%7Ejhs/

  00 nul   01 soh   02 stx   03 etx   04 eot   05 enq   06 ack   07 bel
       08 bs    09 ht    0a nl    0b vt    0c np    0d cr    0e so    0f si
       10 dle   11 dc1   12 dc2   13 dc3   14 dc4   15 nak   16 syn   17 etb
       18 can   19 em    1a sub   1b esc   1c fs    1d gs    1e rs    1f us
       20 sp    21  !    22  "    23  #    24  $    25  %    26  &    27  '
       28  (    29  )    2a  *    2b  +    2c  ,    2d  -    2e  .    2f  /
       30  0    31  1    32  2    33  3    34  4    35  5    36  6    37  7
       38  8    39  9    3a  :    3b  ;    3c  <    3d  =    3e  >    3f  ?
       40  @    41  A    42  B    43  C    44  D    45  E    46  F    47  G
       48  H    49  I    4a  J    4b  K    4c  L    4d  M    4e  N    4f  O
       50  P    51  Q    52  R    53  S    54  T    55  U    56  V    57  W
       58  X    59  Y    5a  Z    5b  [    5c  \    5d  ]    5e  ^    5f  _
       60  `    61  a    62  b    63  c    64  d    65  e    66  f    67  g
       68  h    69  i    6a  j    6b  k    6c  l    6d  m    6e  n    6f  o
       70  p    71  q    72  r    73  s    74  t    75  u    76  v    77  w
       78  x    79  y    7a  z    7b  {    7c  |    7d  }    7e  ~    7f del
  
  

  If you are in Munich, ask Julian for his business card: The ascii table is on the back.

PS Warning against using % character in URLs (URL = Uniform Resource Locator = Web Reference ) to pictures

• People often want to shrink a picture to put on web, & might call them eg room.jpg & house_shrunk_50%.jpg
  Dangerous because we've just seen how % gets used above to remap names. You likely would get away with that example, but some browsers might fail with eg television_picture_shrunk_50%625_line_format.jpg, as that might get mapped to television_picture_shrunk_50b5_line_format.jpg. Whether or not, depends how closely the browser conforms to the syntax specification for URLS that presumably is somewhere under http://w3c.org
• PS I suggest also be cautious if shrinking pictures eg 70% as (I think it's called an anti-aliasing problem ?) eg small font text in pictures might get really screwed, best shrink by 2 or 4 etc eg 50% or 75%.