@drj@typo.social
@drj@typo.social avatar

drj

@drj@typo.social

Yorkshire He/Him/Lambda • Type designer by day • Making fonts by night • Fonts published as CubicType

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drj, to random
@drj@typo.social avatar

My most recent @FontsInUse post is a couple of notes about the cover of a 6809 assembler manual.

#mc6809

https://fontsinuse.com/uses/56920/6809-mnemonic-assembler-manual

rzeta0, to Typography
@rzeta0@mastodon.social avatar

what are the best #typography accounts to follow on #mastodon ?

i do miss the ones I followed on twitter

drj,
@drj@typo.social avatar

@rzeta0 you know we have a whole instance over on typo.social ;)

pwaring, to random
@pwaring@fosstodon.org avatar

Today has made me realise how reliant I am on a decent search engine to do my job effectively. DuckDuckGo is down and Google results are full of garbage articles nowadays (DDG often highlights a StackOverflow question in the type of things I search for, which is super-useful).

I have toyed with the idea of running my own search engine based on a hand-picked list of computing sites - maybe it's time to push that forward...

drj,
@drj@typo.social avatar

@pwaring @frabcus 25 IronWolf 18TB drives (rotating, i think) would store one (1) CommonCrawl, and would cost about GBP 5,000 (and being generous, plus the same again for rack and CPU and management hardware?).

I mean heck, i can store 1% of CommonCrawl right now on my music and backup server.

(I used to try and nudge budget holders at the uni to "just store the internet, it's smaller than you think")

drj, to random
@drj@typo.social avatar

Tomorrow is the 29th birthday of my Model M keyboard. What would be a good way to celebrate?

drj, to random
@drj@typo.social avatar

Extraction missions on a hostile planet? Battling mutant arachnoids in an interdimensional void? Securing out of control generation ships?

These are all situations where the right sign, guiding you to exits, escape pods, and supplies like ammo and health pacs can save time and save lives.

Here at Signage Intergalactic Group Network our elite first response wayfinding teams go in ahead of combat units to create sign systems even marines can use. SIGN: your guide to Mission Success.

fanf, to random
@fanf@mendeddrum.org avatar

on my blog!

https://dotat.at/@/2024-05-13-what-ident.html

Unix version control lore: what, ident

drj,
@drj@typo.social avatar

@fanf Perforce (p4) had something similar, and i routinely used it. Many of my tools in Go also embed their version, but i am not fond of the variety of hacks used to stuff it in there:

go build -o ../build/ -ldflags "-X main.version=$$(git describe --long --dirty --tags)"

(see https://git.sr.ht/~drj/font8/tree/main/item/ttf8/Makefile#L3)

That particular tool also stamps the fonts it makes with the tool version, and it now occurs to me that i should all of these what(1) compatible (which i knew about, but kinda forgot i guess).

pwaring, to Fonts
@pwaring@fosstodon.org avatar

Getting Greek characters to display properly in a PDF generated from Markdown with Pandoc has caused some frustration today - here's what eventually worked for me:

  1. Use xelatex instead of pdflatex:

pandoc --pdf-engine=xelatex

  1. Use Linux Liberatine O as the font in your Markdown metadata:

mainfont: "Linux Libertine O"

I'm a bit sad that I can't use Palatino, which I think is a nicer font, but Linux Libertine 'just worked' and is free (as in beer and speech).

drj,
@drj@typo.social avatar

@pwaring The exact font is going to matter (because of all sorts of weirdly technical encoding issues).

I was going to suggest that if you're doing greek you might want to try one of the many fonts from Greek Font Society, then i noticed that their first font on their 20th/21st century page is accompanied with a Palatino-like latin: https://greekfontsociety-gfs.gr/typefaces/20th_21st_century

so that's a double suggest.

drj, to random
@drj@typo.social avatar

Since the Welsh letter ŵ (w with to bach, which is unique to Welsh) does not appear in any Microsoft CodePage that you can set in the OpenType OS/2 header CodePageRange (see https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/opentype/spec/os2#ulcodepagerange1-bits-031ulcodepagerange2-bits-3263 ), it's entirely possible that OSes and apps that use this field cannot support Welsh.

Screw you Microsoft.

#ToBach

fanf, to random
@fanf@mendeddrum.org avatar

had a fun conversation in the pub this evening about practical chemistry

TIL conical flasks are safety equipment!

when a reaction gets too energetic, a conical flask will blow its bottom out and drop the mess on the bench or the floor

instead of exploding in all directions

ie not towards the experimenter’s face and eyes

clever design!

drj,
@drj@typo.social avatar

@fanf ... If they are oriented downwards 🤔

dabeaz, to random
@dabeaz@mastodon.social avatar

A bit disappointed...

>>> exc = ValueError("Bad Value")
>>> match exc:
... case ValueError(msg):
... print("Failed:", msg)
...
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 2, in <module>
TypeError: ValueError() accepts 0 positional sub-patterns (1 given)
>>>

drj,
@drj@typo.social avatar

@dabeaz haha. Because why would "except:", the pre-existing system for matching instances, match "match:", the new system for matching instances written by language dilettantes.

onpaperwings, to random
@onpaperwings@typo.social avatar

This is a very niche post, but anyone that has an interest in printing technology and typographic history should fill out this short survey on the future of the Type Archive in London which shut down and is now under the Science Museum Group:

https://www.cphc.org.uk/updates/2024/4/12/the-monotype-collection-the-next-chapter

cc @typographica @okay @typeoff @kupfers

drj,
@drj@typo.social avatar

@onpaperwings if you wanna put in a good word for returning the collection to our Kelham Island in Sheffield, that'd be outstanding! ;)

drj, to python
@drj@typo.social avatar

Recently in PyPNG i removed support for interlace PNG output (too specialist), and i'm currently removing documented and tested support for converting numpy arrays to PNG (in so far as they act like Python sequences, numpy arrays work, but testing it and documenting it was always annoying; and numpy semantics subtly change with various versions). It's quite therapeutic.

Please make your library smaller.

#PyPNG #Python

drj, to random
@drj@typo.social avatar

Trying a new medium for Lino cutting: cheap DIY plywood. Making it a woodcut, technically.

#linocut #printmaking #maker

(Also, photo upload from phone on web mastodon seems to work now)

drj, to random
@drj@typo.social avatar

wait, Egg Day and Trans Day of Visibility on the same day? The global conspiracy has run out of cards and is just Going For It, right?

mathling, to random
@mathling@mastodon.social avatar

On tools, a wee rant

I am fond of tools, tools of all kinds: tools for building and making, tools for cooking, tools for writing, software tools

Here's the thing: I find a tool I like and I am loyal beyond reason

I do not buy a shiny new spade when my old spade is already fine

I do not fool with a shiny new source control system when my old SCS is already fine

I have been using Emacs for a half century, about

drj,
@drj@typo.social avatar

@mathling i feel a certain irony here, because part of the reason i stopped using emacs, around version 19, is that they kept adding features that i didn't want and had to go hunting in the manual to see how to disable them.

eniko, to random
@eniko@peoplemaking.games avatar

you look at NES games and you're like "that doesn't look too hard, that scope looks achievable to a small modern indie team with modern gamedev tools"

and then you try to execute on it and it takes literal years because making games is actually literally impossible

drj,
@drj@typo.social avatar

@eniko @Infoseepage some of the numbers become favourites

dabeaz, to random
@dabeaz@mastodon.social avatar

Current annoyance:

>>> @dataclass
... class Point:
... x : int
... y : int
...
>>> p = Point("two", "three")
>>> match p:
... case Point(x):
... print("Yep:", x)
...
Yep: two
>>>

Actually, there are multiple annoyances.

drj,
@drj@typo.social avatar

@dabeaz @natevw We're rapidly approaching the point where continuing to mess with Python is gonna end up being classified as the sort of behaviour that requires psychiatric therapy (or possibly, drug therapy)

sofia, to ArtificialIntelligence
@sofia@chaos.social avatar

thinking about designing my own #computer again. don't expect something to come from it, but seeing other computer projects inspires me.

one thing that excites me most is the idea of having a self-organizing mesh network for connecting components. that doesn't seem like that extreme of an overhead computationally, but i wonder how far you can push it.

it seems like every peripheral protocol has some sort of controller, so i guess i'd just have a little router in each and call it a node.

drj,
@drj@typo.social avatar

@sofia have you had a look at Plan9? They pursued "everything is a file" much more thoroughly, and had a more sensible implementation of devices. Most devices would be a two file directory: one for data one for control. The control file which would read and write short text commands. Much better than 200 different ioctls.

drj, to retrogaming
@drj@typo.social avatar

When the nibling asks to play Pokémon Yellow and i get this off the shelf:

#RetroGaming #GameBoy #Pokemon

drj, to random
@drj@typo.social avatar

In the year 2024, i created a HyperCard stack. AMA.


drj, to random
@drj@typo.social avatar

It's comin' home!

The Stephenson Blake type collection was moved to London 30 years ago in an act of vandalous cultural appropriation. There is now an opportunity for this historic collection to return to Sheffield where it belongs!

Please fill in the survey and show support for our Kelham Island Museum :)
https://uk.surveymonkey.com/r/KVWBWCW

You would do me an honour by boosting this.

#SheffieldIsSuper
#StephensonBlake
#FoundryType

drj, to pixelart
@drj@typo.social avatar

Do you like Pixel Art and Classic Macs and Exploded Technical Drawings?

Check out this exploded view of the Mac SE/30 from the HyperCard Service Manual of the time.

#PixelArt #MacSE30

dabeaz, to random
@dabeaz@mastodon.social avatar

Thought: I'd bet a lot of projects would have fewer dependencies if pip was 100x slower. Maybe we should try to do that.

drj,
@drj@typo.social avatar

@dabeaz no don't. that sounds implementable.

pwaring, to random
@pwaring@fosstodon.org avatar

Fun things I have (re)learnt about C recently:

  1. int isn't guaranteed to be the same as the word size, only >= 16 bits.

  2. getchar returns int, not a char.

  3. Character literals are also int.

  4. You can get the numeric value of a character literal digit c with: c - '0'. This assumes that 0-9 are sequential, which is true for any encoding you're likely to meet, and required from C89 onwards (see Baudot code for an example which does not meet this criterion).

#c

drj,
@drj@typo.social avatar

@pwaring you're probably ready for Advent of Code in C now :)

kristinHenry, to drawing
@kristinHenry@vis.social avatar

Thinking about a string of thoughts as a string of beads today.

I didn't get around to posting yesterday's drawing here, but it's on my Patreon and Ko-fi:
https://www.patreon.com/posts/97661100
https://ko-fi.com/post/InkyDays-February-2024-Q5Q5TZZTP

drj,
@drj@typo.social avatar

@kristinHenry these both remind me of the green tentacle in the 1987 video game Maniac Mansion. Though that seems an unlikely direct source.

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