February 2010
15 posts
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Revised Font Stack →
Awesome piece analysing the font stacks found on various websites, and the mistakes made by popular, otherwise well-designed sites in choosing their stacks.
It also has a fantastic list of preassembled font stacks, in both serif and sans-serif. The stack font-family: Futura, "Trebuchet MS", Arial, sans-serif; has been duly filed for future use.
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“The Original of Laura is a facsimile series of the original index cards, with...”
– Maud Newton on the posthumous publication of Nabokov’s The Original of Laura.
It’s good to see that his publisher didn’t decide to try and glom a book together out of the index cards he left behind.
It’s actually more interesting as an exercise in alternative formatting for a novel than a...
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Top 10 Most Expensive Video Games Budgets Ever →
I’m pretty sure this should be “The Ten Highest Video Games Budgets Ever” or “The Ten Most Expensive Video Games Ever Made”, but whatever.
There’s no doubt that Grand Theft Auto 4 was an excellent return on investment, but in terms of its worth as a game or advancement of the art, I’m not so sure. I can honestly say I’d rather see the money distributed between a bunch of inventive little studios...
“For us, the gear isn’t that important. We just look for things that are easy for...”
– David Portner of Animal Collective, in an interview with Music Radar.
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Oatmeal
From the Wikipedia:
Samuel Johnson referred, disparagingly, to this staple diet in his dictionary definition for oats: “A grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.”
Lord Elibank was said by Sir Walter Scott to have retorted: “Yes, and where else will you see such horses and such men?”
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Five Best Netbook Operating Systems →
You’re missing the point of the poll when you pick an OS intended for a full-size laptop and name it the “Best Netbook OS”. Surely the best netbook OS would be one optimized specifically to take advantage of/mitigate the compromises inherent within the hardware itself? Perhaps it says more about the poor standard of the available netbook-specific OSs than the poll respondents themselves, but I...
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La-La Land
Edgar Bronfman Jr.:
Such subscriptions could be taken up by “hundreds of millions if not billions of people, most of whom are not today either buyers or certainly heavy buyers of music”, Mr. Bronfman said. And they would be much more profitable than per-track downloads in the long term, he added.
I think the emphasis in that sentence falls on the word “could”, but it would likely be better...
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Sheep
Whilst watching ‘A History of Scotland’, episode four:
Neil Oliver: In the morning, the sheep were still there, but the Highlanders were gone.
Mike: They’d had their wicked way the night before, so like all one-night stands, they’d snuck off in the morning.
Emily: Honey! Those are your ancestors you’re talking about!
Mike: I know, and I’m proud that they were smart enough not to be caught at the scene of the deed!
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Football
Whilst discussing Caledonian Thistle’s 3–0 defeat at the hands of Kilmarnock yesterday afternoon:
Don: We weren’t expected to win the match—
Mike: Because you’re shite?
Don: No! Because the team we were playing are a division above us!
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42 Reasons Why Netbooks Are Better Than the Apple... →
Or, “I Have Totally Missed the Point of This Device and Will Now Begin Making Specious Comparisons to Another Product Category That Bears Only the Most Superficial of Likenesses to the Device in Question”.
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So. Farewell Then, Z.pe
I’m not sure when it happened, or why, but the URL shortening service z.pe has disappeared, presumably for reasons similar to those behind tr.im’s ‘closure’ last year. It seems appropriate to refer your attention to Joshua Schachter’s post on the dangers of relying URL shorteners; Schachter covers the topic quite thoroughly, and I’m not sure there’s anything of value I could add to it.