Oh baby, am I a nerd or what? I love this site. It asks you a series of questions about what the letters in a font look like and then tries to identify it for you. There are questions like What angle are the ends of the upper-case ‘C’ or What shape is the dot under the question mark. It didn’t manage to identify the font used in the 1997 Saatchi “Sensation” exhibition guide and it took 27 questions to wrongly identify the typeface used in the index and headings of the Department of Transport 1979 driving guide as “Brazilia Seven”. Nevertheless the questions really make one think about the countless tiny differences that make up the identity of a font. OK, I need to get out more. Just let me see how it does with my John Bull printing set and then I promise I’ll go to bed.
Archive for the 'Technology' Category
This idiotic story is so ironic it makes me laugh. American scientists criticising Vegan parents as unethical. Scientists have consistently used science on behalf of their big-business employers to persuade and coerce parents all over the world into feeding their children with poisonous chemicals. The examples are so numerous that one only has to look at this week’s crop of stories to see a representative sample.
“War Of Words On Cancer Food Scare” This UK story is about a cancer causing food colouring that found its way into lots of supermarkets. Nobody is quite sure how much the recall of the poisoned products will cost the supermarkets. Nobody is discussing the costs to the people who ate the contaminated food. I had a look to see if Sudan Red 1 is banned in the USA, I couldn’t work out its status from the US Food and Drug administration site.
I also saw a story in the Observer magazine which mentioned Triclosan, an antibacterial agent used in many products. “The subject of an Environment Agency investigation, Triclosan is an anti-bacterial or antimicrobial agent which kills all bacteria instantly, even the beneficial ones. Cropping up not only in chopping boards, but in dishcloths and even toothpaste, it is part of the armoury now used by consumers to tackle those dangerous germs we see on adverts for cleaning products. However, alarmingly, it has also been detected in breast milk, and there are concerns that widespread use fosters antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria.”
And then of course there’s childhood obesity. A group of scientists at the Social Issues Research Centre have been sending out press releases to the media about a new report which claims that the Obesity Epidemic is not as bad as it seems. I’ve already seen several news stories that appear to be inspired by these press releases. However, if you take a closer look at the SIRC you’ll find they are a gang of scientists for hire and they are working on behalf of several multinational food companies. According to an article on lobbywatch.org SIRC are nothing more than a thinly-disguised Public Relations company who frequently work on behalf of the food, drink and drugs industries.
Of course not all scientists are as cynically immoral as the ones who work directly for big business, but I am certain that far more children have suffered and continue to suffer from the work of scientists than have suffered from the dangers of veganism.
I’ve been burning loads of DVDs in my Powerbook recently, copies of films and backups and so on. A few days ago I got this weird error message just as Toast was starting to burn a disk: Sense Key = MEDIUM ERROR Sense Code = 0×73,0×03. I couldn’t make any sense of this so I tried with another blank disk and got the same result. My heart sank; the new box of 25 blank DVDs I had just bought was performing really well until this happened.
So I had a look on the web for a solution. Roxio, who make Toast, have a support forum. The people there all seemed to agree that it was a problem with bad or incompatible disks or that maybe the drive was dying. However, with a bit more googling I found some comments elsewhere that suggested that maybe I should make sure my superdrive’s firmware was up-to-date. So I downloaded a firmware ‘flasher’ from the excellent Cynical. He has unsupported, maybe even illegal firmware for most Powerbook superdrives. After a nerve-wracking flashing process, if it goes wrong your drive could be dead forever, I tried to burn a DVD. Still the same problem.
Depressed and desperate I tried burning a DVD with Apple’s Disk Utility as an experiment. It worked fine and it occurred to me that maybe this was a problem with Toast after all, and not the drive. I deleted all the Toast preferences files I could find, nervously launched Toast again and Hey Presto! everything was working just like new. I’m tempted to say that this all proves what to55er5 Roxio are, but that would probably be unfair.
I’m just copying some DVDs that my friend Giles lent me. I can’t believe I just sat and watched the “out-takes” at the end of Toy Story 2. Really.
This is a such a great idea, I’m appalled that this is the first time I’ve ever read about it.
You know how if you try a print a photo in black and white on your inket it always looks terrible? And that’s because the printer’s trying to create all the shades of black in your picture by making different sized dots of black ink. No matter how clever the software is you can always see this ‘dithering’, especially in mid tones.
So if you’re feeling keen you might make your picture into a duotone or even a quadtone in Photoshop. That uses the other coloured inks in the printer to make shades of not-quite-black which improves matters a bit if you don’t mind the picture being a bit brown or blue looking.
What Piezography does is take that quadtone idea a step further. You replace the coloured inks in your printer with three shades of grey ink. So now your printer can’t print in colour but it can produce stunning black and white prints. The pigment based inks are also long lasting; the manufacturers claim they will fade by a maximum of 5% in 100 years.
Unfortunately my printer is slightly too old to use this system but it’s got me thinking - why not mix up my own inks and do the same thing?
Dictionary.com/trampoline: “trampoline
n. An incredibly hairy technique, found in some
HLL and program-overlay implementations (e.g., on the Macintosh),
that involves on-the-fly generation of small executable (and, likely
as not, self-modifying) code objects to do indirection between code
sections. These pieces of live data are called `trampolines’.
Trampolines are notoriously difficult to understand in action; in
fact, it is said by those who use this term that the trampoline that
doesn’t bend your brain is not the true trampoline. See also snap.”
I noticed today that one of our fancy flat screen LCD monitors seems to have the corporate log-in window burned into it. In the good old days we used to have screensaver programs which prevented the icons on our desktops from getting permanently burned into the phosphor of our Cathode Ray Tubes. The programs worked by replacing the desktop with a permanently moving display of eye-candy. Most famous of these programs was After Dark and its flying toasters. Of course the monitor manufacturers introduced new designs which resisted the burning-in of images but the users didn’t really understand and continued to use the unnecessary screensavers for years. How depressing then if the new generation of monitors is going to start getting burned in, sending us right back to the start of the cycle again.
Here’s a site that deserves some attention, if only to correct its Brummie bias. A collection of photos and reviews of spectacular Christmas decorations created by private individuals on their houses and in their gardens. Since the site carries the logo of Birmingham City Council I’m afraid they may not accept submissions from anywhere else, which is a pity. Our London decorations are vastly more varied, imaginative and impressive.
It seems a sensible enough idea: show people web pages, track their eye movements while browsing and voila - you can figure out which page designs work best. It’s the sort of thing that marketing people (booo hiss) love and I can see the appeal, but like much audience research it does work better when you’re thinking about news in its role as entertainment rather than education. It also tends to ignore the value of good writing. I think that our gaze is partly driven by a sort of pre-reading that we do with our peripheral vision based on word shapes. Good writers unconsciously incorporate this into their style and make text that looks attractive as well as sounding good when read. Even so, it’s definitely worth a look.
This computer at 216.169.118.82 is the most prolific producer of false positive hits on peer-to-peer networks that I’ve seen. The software that is producing the false results on the Gnutella network only responds with a flood of results every now and then, most of the time it doesn’t do anything. Yesterday’s address was 216.169.118.81 so it will probably change again soon, I expect it’s a pool of addresses used by an isp. Whois searches show that it belongs to:
XciteNet, Inc XCITENET-E-14 (NET-216-169-118-0-1)
216.169.118.0 - 216.169.118.255
Essential Services SKYPORT (NET-216-169-96-0-1)
216.169.96.0 - 216.169.127.255
Here’s a screenshot of the various false hits that it generated, I’ve blurred part of the original file name to protect the innocent.
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