January 2012
1 post
5 tags
Fringe Typography Part 4: Brought to You By Nissan
The fourth, and probably final, instalment in the Fringe Typography series.
Episode eight of season four starts out normally enough, floating some polymer Helvetica above a motorway…
…then treating us to a lingering, slightly pervy shot of the back of a Nissan Leap…
…before finally delivering the gratuitous money-shot we’ve all been waiting for:
And then finishing up with a loving shot of...
December 2011
1 post
5 tags
November 2011
1 post
7 tags
Speaking in Tongues
Or, “Translations from Adobelish to English of Danny Winkour’s Official Announcement of the Discontinuation of Development of Mobile Flash”
Adobe is all about enabling designers and developers to create the most expressive content possible, regardless of platform or technology.
Adobe is all about bilking a couple of grand out of designers and developers every year or two by flogging badly...
October 2011
5 posts
4 tags
My earlier post about Dennis Ritchie has been updated to include a few links I found since posting it originally.
5 tags
Darker Lines →
Stephanie at Rhodia Drive:
Every now and again we receive a letter asking whether or not the
signature Rhodia violet lines have become darker. Rob Morrison sent us
the photo above and said that the seemingly darker lines “really
disguise the writing.”
The lines on the new pads do appear darker because Rhodia is now using
a 100% natural ink as opposed to a chemical one.
Little...
4 tags
Dennis Ritchie, Grandfather of Your iPhone
Dennis Ritchie died Saturday just past. He isn’t as famous as Steve Jobs, but his work has ended up in just as many hands. He didn’t invent the iPhone, or the Mac, or the iPad, but as the man who created the C programming language, and one of men responsible for the creation of Unix, his contribution to these devices is almost as big as Steve’s.
His work, ten years before the first Mac was even...
4 tags
Goodbye, MobileMe →
I won’t miss iDisk (Dropbox always did it better1), but I will miss the Keychain, Dock items, and Mail settings syncing.
I imagine it’s safe to say that they weren’t wildly popular, but they were extremely useful. Need to use another Mac for a while? Create an account, punch in your MobileMe user and pass, and voilà!, it’s almost your Mac.
You can quickly and painlessly install all your (App...
1 tag
Steve Jobs
Larry Ellison in an interview with CNN Money1:
I remember when Steve was my neighbor in Woodside, California, and he had no furniture. It struck me that there wasn’t furniture good enough for Steve in the world. He’d rather have nothing if he couldn’t have perfection.
And I jokingly said, “The difference between me and Steve is that I’m willing to live with the best the world can provide....
September 2011
1 post
4 tags
WatchThe № 27 bus, Aberdeen Airport–Guild St., 2011/09/07 at 17:08.
August 2011
3 posts
8 tags
“Sometimes even my most compulsive phone-and-Internet behaviour (texting while...”
– Nona Willis Aronowitz, being a smug, self-absorbed, reckless, Generation Y asshat in a piece entitled “Internet Anonymous: Isn’t Everyone a Little Cyber-Addicted?”.
At the risk of sounding like a cantankerous,...
6 tags
“We are having a problem with Mr. Computer again. It has totally spaced out. ...”
– Dick, Philip K., “The Day Mr. Computer Fell Out of Its Tree” in Dick, Philip K., We Can Remember It for You Wholesale: Volume Five of the Collected Stories (London: Millennium, 2000), p. 309.
5 tags
June 2011
3 posts
8 tags
7 tags
Fappy McFappins
Scene: The kitchen, whilst making tea.
Me: Fappy McFappins would be an awesome name for a kid.
Don: Or Dave.
Me: Sweetheart, I know what we’re going to call our next kitten! Fapper!
Emily: After his uncle Don.
Don: >shocked
5 tags
Keep Your Hands Off My Fucking Browser
David Kaneda:
What’s New in Lion’s Safari →
A few interesting items from a development point of view:1
Not only does the browser go full screen, but there will be a JavaScript API for doing so
The mention caching audio/video in an HTML5 application cache — does this just mean the cache is larger than before?
“New process architecture” and Sandboxing — ie....
May 2011
4 posts
5 tags
3 tags
6 tags
About This Redesign…
It’s no secret that I’m almost impossible to please. The majority of my posts are eviscerating others when they don’t adhere to what I consider to be an acceptable standard. That’s just What I Do™.
With that in mind, it would take someone incredibly stupid, or incredibly confident, to voluntarily accept my ludicrously specific design brief and take on the project of redesigning this site.
In...
6 tags
Limitless Confusion
After an exam, which went quite well:
Me: You should see _Limitless_. It’s about a drug that makes you super-smart. Apparently, there are people in real life who take drugs to make them smarter. They’re called nootropics or something.
Sarah: Why didn’t you tell us about this *before* the exam?
Me: It’s got the guy from _The Hangover_ in it.
Sarah: Alan?
Me: I don’t know. The guy from _The Hangover_.
Sarah: Alan? The guy with the baby?
Me: No. The guy from _The Hangover_! The good-looking one.
Sarah: Bradley Cooper?
Me: The good-looking one.
Sarah: Bradley Cooper!
Me: Is he the good-looking one?
Sarah: Yes. I really want to see that film.
April 2011
5 posts
3 tags
…and now I’m overhearing a pair of women on the bus, talking about their respective community service terms and disclosures where “it came back saying I done attempted murder but it was reduced to advanced (sic) assault”. All whilst their children run around the bus shrieking.
Today is not a good day.
6 tags
Overheard on a Train
Two hipsters on the 1631 Dyce–Aberdeen train:
Girl: “Anyone who thinks you’re born innocent is just an idiot, you just need to look into the eyes of a newborn to see there’s sin there.”
Boy: “I know, I know. Two-year-olds are especially bad — they can be mean and cruel and only care about what they want.”
Girl: “People say it’s survival instinct, but they’re wrong. It’s just pure greed. It’s all about what they want.”
Boy: “But the good thing is that you can teach them obedience. You can punish them until they realise that life is about God’s love.”
Me: [Conversation moves onto empty platitudes about doing “God’s work” amongst the “unChristian people in Africa”] >facepalm
8 tags
Maniacal Rage: “Lion Distribution” →
A really interesting piece from Garrett Murray on the kinks in the Mac App Store distribution method. What really caught my eye, and applies regardless of your platform, OS choice, or hardware, was the closing sentence:
[A]s always, back up, back up, back up.
Garrett Murray knows it, I know it, and you should know it. I can’t stress how important it is to have proper backups of your...
9 tags
“Typesetting” in Microsoft Word →
Having hopes is healthy. They can act as a motivator to reach your goals, a psychological stress-release valve, or even just an idle daydream. I hope that I win the EuroMillions lottery, that my MacBook will spontaneously sprout an i7 processor and 16 GB of RAM, that I’ll find the secret of eternal youth, and become the greatest thinker in the history of the human race. Like I said, hopes are...
7 tags
To Recap
From a piece in the New York Times, with the cringe-inducing title
“The Digital Generation Rediscover the Magic of Manual
Typewriters”:
They’re fetishizing old Underwoods, Smith Coronas and Remingtons,
recognizing them as well designed, functional and beautiful machines,
swapping them and showing them off to friends. At a series of events
called “type-ins,” they’ve been gathering in...
March 2011
10 posts
7 tags
“Progress”
Erik Mallinson:
I’m really, really bummed that Bob Slate is closing. It’s been around for 78 years and for quite a few of those I made it my stop for whatever I could find there. Nowhere else can you walk into a store and buy one sheet of resume paper. Need a coin roll? 2 ¢ each. Those dry transfer sheets that Field Notes just repopularized? They have around 10,000 individual sheets in 10...
4 tags
Platforms and Audiences
Steve Kinney:
During [the last eighteen months], my professional life got a lot more interesting and I want to talk about it. I’m doing some really cool stuff, but I don’t want to alienate the people who started following me because I posted some random crap I found on the Internet, but updates on my quest to drink 500 different beers this year and being a teacher don’t dovetail all that...
8 tags
Japan
This blog is normally more fixated on white people problems — like UI design, typography on crappy pulp TV shows, and the manifold stupidities of Everett Bogue — than cataclysmic human tragedies, and many of them go by daily without remark. Its author is also strongly against shallow “clicktivism” (“Massive Human Tragedy‼ Click the “Like” Button to “Help” the People Affected‼ — Also, Please Look...
6 tags
“I wonder what future generations will say about us. My grandparents suffered...”
– Brooks, Max, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (London: Gerald Duckworth & Co., Ltd., 2006), p. 334.
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The Gatekeepers
I thought I’d never say it, but it looks like my favourite cybergogic transhuman yogi has, somehow, fallen in with someone that actually seems to know what they’re talking about. In his most recent post, Bogue interviews Thom [sic] Chambers, who publishes a magazine1 called In Treehouses, and they discuss the future of publishing. For whatever reason — perhaps Chambers acts as a moderating...
7 tags
Just Write, For Fuck’s Sake
Jessica Firger, writing for the Wall Street Journal:
After quitting her PR job seven months ago to write full time, MacLean knew she’d have to portion out the Internet or else she’d never get anything done. So she downloaded Self Control, a free computer program that blocks access to email and sites such as Twitter and Facebook for a predetermined amount of time. Even rebooting the computer...
7 tags
‘Augmented Humanity’ by Numbers
Number of Photos of Everett Bogue:
2
Number of Photos of Everett Bogue Not Taken By Everett Bogue
0
Number of Photos of Everett Bogue That Are Not Recycled from His Blog
0
Number of Pages
114
Size of Pages
8 ½″ × 11″
Approximate Percentage of Area of an Average Page Given Over to ‘Margins’
65%
Number of Times Correct Paragraph Indentation Is Used Instead of Line Break–Line Break–New...
6 tags
Tumblr2WP →
One Thing Well:
Tumblr2WP lets you backup your Tumblr weblog in a format that’s widely used and relatively easy to parse. Unlike Tumblr’s own Mac-only sort-of-backup tool, which (weirdly) hides a potentially useful XML export in a static HTML version of your site.
One Thing Well sort-of misses the point here: as I expounded before, HTML is the archive format. Tumblr’s backup applet gives...
9 tags
A Succinct Distillation of My Feelings on... →
Reari, saying in less than 40 words what it took me 664 and a couple of tangents to say:
Maybe I’m just reblogging because I personally dislike the way how a lot of the people I know (former acquaintances) just love spamming pictures so much that the intrinsic value of each photograph they take is basically nil.
7 tags
“Take a Photo; It’ll Last Longer”
In the six weeks that I had an Instagram account, I took and uploaded a single photo:
I took it the night we put up our Xmas decorations. It wasn’t posed — it just was, so I snapped it, applied a filter, and uploaded it.
Looking at it now, I realise that this photo not real. It’s disconnected and somehow false to claim the photo as mine. This is not an artefact, or a record, or a...
February 2011
4 posts
6 tags
Tumblr’s Future
Some Suggestions on How to Handle the Transition from Free to “Freemium”
Since my earlier posts on niggles I had with Tumblr, I’ve thought about the topic a lot — specifically, how Tumblr can handle the inevitable transition from a free to a paid/freemium model. (This entire post is based upon the assumption that such a transition is inevitable, which I think is the only logical conclusion to...
7 tags
Plaintextism
John Sparks, in his post “The Joy of Text”:
There’s something to be said for the use of plain text files. Text is simple. Text files are easy to read on any computer running any operating system and don’t require any proprietary word processor to interpret. Even more important, text files can be read by humans. Keeping your writings in text makes them digitally immortal.
Moreover, text is...
5 tags
Far Beyond the Memory Hole
Or, @EvBogue Saves His Blog to /dev/null
Yesterday, everyone’s favourite messianic, augmented-minimalist-cybernetic-superhuman-yogi Everett Bogue took down his seminal blog Far Beyond the Stars.
Quoth he of this momentous step:
When I wrote The Art of Being Minimalist, the world needed instructions. It needed someone to tell the world, point blank: here’s what happens when you throw out...
7 tags
January 2011
5 posts
6 tags
Finally There’s an Archive Button for Mail.app →
Steve Kinney:
I spent a decent chunk of time yesterday trying to cobble together an AppleScript that archived mail for people who use multiple mail accounts. I’m happy to say that it was a waste of time due to this delightful little application. I haven’t put it through its paces yet, but I’m optimistic.
I don’t use Gmail, so archiving email doesn’t happen automagically for me; I have to do...
14 tags
Addendum to “(Dis)orientation”
Since I posted my Tumblr portrait video rant, a couple of people have asked me the question, “…but isn’t Tumblr free?” The meaning behind that question is actually: “Isn’t it really f—ing churlish to complain that a free service isn’t 100% perfect for your needs?”
That’s a pretty fair question. Tumblr is free, and it isn’t costing me anything whatsoever to host my blog here, and — most of the...
7 tags
(Dis)orientation
Today’s discovery: Tumblr rotates videos shot in portrait orientation 90° counterclockwise. That’s incredibly unhelpful, and an undesired modification of the original. It’s pretty obvious: if something has been shot in portrait, it’s only really going to work in portrait. Watching a video of my kitten leaping from right to left, rather than the expected from-the- ground-up-into-the-air, is...
7 tags
Steve Kinney on HIGs and What Works Best →
Steve Kinney, responding to yesterday’s post on Twitter for Mac:
From the geek perspective, Mike is totally on point. That said, John Gruber is also right. The point is that most people don’t really care. I pointed out the other day that most of us stress way too much over stuff. Koralatov is totally right, Twitter for Mac’s UI craps all over Apple’s HIG. Yep. But it’s still the best Twitter...
4 tags
December 2010
2 posts
5 tags
Amy Pond
Mike: So the Doctor Who Christmas Special was shit…
Don: The girl who plays Amy Pond was in Johnny Foxes on Christmas night.
Mike: Did you try to pull her?
Don: I screamed “AMY POND!” at her because I don’t know her real name.
Mike: You know how to get all the pussy, Don.
8 tags
Everett Bogue
Iain: Everett Bogue is starting to get to me.
Mike: I knew it was only a matter of time. Are you now aiming to become an $80 a day “superhuman”?
Iain: He’s so irritating!
Mike: Irritatingly awesome?
Iain: It’s like he almost gets it right every time. But not quite. And annoys me while he’s at it!
Mike: I think you should make love to him, Iain. Just get that animosity and frustration right out in one session of man-on-superhuman lovin’.
Iain: I don’t know that I’d be able to survive his super-human sex.
Mike: Only because you wouldn’t let yourself, Iain. Evolve into a superhuman like him. Throw off the chains of security and embrace yourself!
Iain: Okay. Selling my house, keeping
Mike: >wells up< I have never been as proud of you as I am at this moment.
November 2010
2 posts
4 tags
“In many ways, I think the success of the App Store has caused a lot of problems...”
– Nial Giacomelli, responding to Neven Mrgan’s post on people pirating The Incident.
I agree with all the points Giacomelli makes in his post, but think he fails to cover another serious downside of iOS software, and one which is inextricably linked with most developers operating at a loss: the low...
7 tags
October 2010
2 posts
3 tags
Unsustainably Cheap
Subhed to an article in the Telegraph entitled “Clothing Prices Rise for [the] First Time Since [the] 1990s”:
The price of clothing and footwear have risen for first time since early 1990s, according to official figures, raising the fear that the era of cheap imports from the Far East is over.
Sadly, this sort of unsubstantiated, alarmist journalism is becoming more common rather than less....
“This professor is not only reckless enough to keep a single copy of his entire...”
– Jim Whimpey, on the story of a thief that returned the data from a stolen laptop to its owner (naturally, s/he kept the laptop itself).
I’m on the same page as Whimpey regarding the recklessness of this guy, and how undeserving he is of having his data returned. It isn’t the ’90s any more, and...
September 2010
3 posts
6 tags
Fringe Typography the Third
The third installment of my series on irritating, plastic-Helvetica-stuffed establishing shots from Fringe. This time: season three première “Olivia”. To keep viewers on their toes the producers have mixed it up a little this time with some delightful non-Helvetica.
1985, in Helvetica, on some steampunk-looking screen…
…which is immediately followed up with Arial. Nothing endears you to a...