- Nov. 10, 1999: Metric Math Mistake Muffed Mars Meteorology Mission – Sometimes the simplest of mistakes have the most dramatic consequences.
- Linotype: The Film – The revolution in printing before DTP… soon in documentary form.
Tag: Typography
- The origins of abc – “We will begin where civilisation began, meander through the Middle Ages, race through the Renaissance, and in doing so discover where our alphabet originated, how and why it evolved, and why, for example, an A looks, well, like an A.”
- Icelander’s Campaign Is a Joke, Until He’s Elected – This is brilliant. “A polar bear display for the zoo. Free towels at public swimming pools. A “drug-free Parliament by 2020.” Iceland’s Best Party, founded in December by a comedian, Jon Gnarr, to satirize his country’s political system, ran a campaign that was one big joke. Or was it?”
- Priori Acute – What if M.C. Escher had been a typographer?
- What “Nothing to Hide” is Hiding – Why “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear” is a bad argument in favour of increased surveillance.
- exactly – “What if it’s a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?” Looks like we’re not going to find out because of a few hold-outs…
- A Typeface for the Underground – Design and typography on the London Underground. Fascinating stuff.
- Britain to Levy a One-Time Tax on Banker Bonuses – “To a large extent the levy underpins a quite broad understanding here — even among those generally sympathetic to the industry — that bank profits this year were largely subsidized by the government due to historically low interest rates.” The best discussion I’ve seen of today’s pre-Budget speech is, bizarrely, in a US paper.
- The Numbers Post (aka Brutal Honesty) – “I hope that this article might serve as a counter-point to the articles that seem to go around the web about devs making hundreds of thousands of dollars off an iPhone app. Everyone within the dev community understands that the odds of that happening are very slim, yet those are the stories that people like to hear.”
- Why we’ve reached the end of the camera megapixel race – I had many reasons for upgrading from my 300D, but the 6MP sensor wasn’t one of them.
- Bring bad design to justice – Do your part…
- The League of Moveable Type – Most free or open source fonts I’ve seen have been pretty poor but these guys seem to have the right idea.
- Government plans travel database – “When your travel plans, who you are travelling with, where you are going to and when are being recorded you have to ask yourself just how free is this country?”
- Learning and Working in the Collaborative Age: A New Model for the Workplace – Fascinating ten minute video on what Pixar look for in candidates, summarised as Depth, Breadth, Communication and Collaboration. Given those criteria I’m guessing they’re very selective!
- WordPress for iPhone – It turns out that my recent review of WordPress for iPhone was the four-hundredth post on ZX81.org.uk. Time for a small celebration!
- Font Conference – Typeface adventures…
- Simon Pegg’s Geek Roots Show in Spaced – I’m no longer a twenty-something, but I still love Spaced. Now available in the US.
- The Cost of E-Voting – One of the many reasons that I am against e-voting machines: the cost. “The cost … increased 179 percent per voter on average.” All that money for a less reliable system. Bargain!
- Change we can believe in – I didn’t realise that we were in line for some new coins. They look surprisingly good, certainly much better than the new US notes. (Originally from daringfireball.net)
- Bali bombings: A sister’s search for justice – I’ve always said that it’s much easier to be against capital punishment when it’s just an abstract idea. Here the sister of one of the Bali bombing’s victims argues why she’s still against it.
- Are You Better Off than You Were 2,000 Years Ago? – The next president of the United States of America? If only…
- Apple unveil iNvisible iBook – Even more Apple announcements this week. Kind of.
- How to Spot Arial – I never realised that Arial and Helvetica were so different!