"fonts" entries

Four short links: 3 February 2016

Four short links: 3 February 2016

Security Forecast, Machine Learning for Defence, Retro PC Fonts, and Cognitive Psych Research

  1. Software Security Ideas Ahead of Their Time — astonishing email exchange from 1995 presaged a hell of a lot of security work.
  2. Doxxing Sherlock — Cory Doctorow’s ruminations on surveillance, Sherlock, and what he found in the Snowden papers. What he found included an outline of intelligence use of machine learning.
  3. Old-School PC Fonts — definitive collection of ripped-from-the-BIOS fonts from the various types of PCs. Your eyes will ache with nostalgia. (Or, if you’re a young gun, wondering how anybody wrote code with fonts like that) (my terminal font is VT220 because it makes me happy and productive)
  4. Cognitive Load: Brain GemsWe distill the latest behavioural economics & consumer psychology research down into helpful little brain gems.
Four short links: 13 November 2015

Four short links: 13 November 2015

CEO Optimism, Fibbing Networking, GPU TensorFlow, and GUI Font Design

  1. CEO OptimismCEOs always act on leading indicators of good news, but only act on lagging indicators of bad news. (Andy Grove)
  2. Fibbing — lie to your router table to get the most from your network. Clever!
  3. TensorFlow for GPUs — Amazon image of TensorFlow ready to run on their GPU compute cloud.
  4. metaflop — UI for metafont that makes it super-easy to design your own sweet-looking font. (via BoingBoing)
Four short links: 27 May 2015

Four short links: 27 May 2015

Domo Arigato Mr Google, Distributed Graph Processing, Experiencing Ethics, and Deep Learning Robots

  1. Roboto — Google’s signature font is open sourced (Apache 2.0), including the toolchain to build it.
  2. Pregel: A System for Large Scale Graph Processing — a walk through a key 2010 paper from Google, on the distributed graph system that is the inspiration for Apache Giraph and which sits under PageRank.
  3. How to Turn a Liberal Hipster into a Global Capitalist (The Guardian) — In Zoe Svendsen’s play “World Factory at the Young Vic,” the audience becomes the cast. Sixteen teams sit around factory desks playing out a carefully constructed game that requires you to run a clothing factory in China. How to deal with a troublemaker? How to dupe the buyers from ethical retail brands? What to do about the ever-present problem of clients that do not pay? […] And because the theatre captures data on every choice by every team, for every performance, I know we were not alone. The aggregated flowchart reveals that every audience, on every night, veers toward money and away from ethics. I’m a firm believer that games can give you visceral experience, not merely intellectual knowledge, of an activity. Interesting to see it applied so effectively to business.
  4. End to End Training of Deep Visuomotor Policies (PDF) — paper on using deep learning to teach robots how to manipulate objects, by example.
Four short links: 21 May 2015

Four short links: 21 May 2015

Font Design, Pro Go, ICANN Foolishness, and Bad Organisations

  1. On Font Design (Kris Sowersby) — The many pairs of hands and eyes involved have made this typeface special for me. For the first time I don’t feel I have ownership of a typeface I have ostensibly “created.” Lovely to read about the design journey for a font.
  2. Why We Use GoWe use Go because it’s boring. Previously, we worked almost exclusively with Python, and after a certain point, it becomes a nightmare. You can bend Python to your will. You can hack it, you can monkey patch it, and you can write remarkably expressive, terse code. It’s also remarkably difficult to maintain and slow.
  3. Unfortunately We Have Renewed Our ICANN AccreditationYou can thank ICANN for this policy, because if it were up to us, and you tasked us with coming up with the most idiotic, damaging, phish-friendly, disaster-prone policy that accomplishes less than nothing and is utterly pointless, I question whether we would have been able to pull it off at this level. We’re simply out of our league here.
  4. Why Good Developers Write Bad Code (PDF) — trigger warning: software development pathologies from the real world.
Four short links: 26 March 2014

Four short links: 26 March 2014

Better Fonts, Speaking Javascript, Arduinos & Phones, and Averaging Streams in Go

  1. brick — uncompressed versions of popular web fonts. The difference between compressed and uncompressed is noticeable.
  2. Speaking Javascript — free online version of the new O’Reilly book by Axel Rauschmayer.
  3. micio.js — clever hack to communicate between Arduino and mobile phones via the microphone jack.
  4. Exponentially Weighted Moving Averages for Go — Go implementation of algorithm useful for dealing with streams of data.
Four short links: 6 February 2014

Four short links: 6 February 2014

Emotions Wanted, Future's So Bright, Machine Learning for Security, and Medieval Unicode Fonts

  1. What Machines Can’t Do (NY Times) — In the 1950s, the bureaucracy was the computer. People were organized into technocratic systems in order to perform routinized information processing. But now the computer is the computer. The role of the human is not to be dispassionate, depersonalized or neutral. It is precisely the emotive traits that are rewarded: the voracious lust for understanding, the enthusiasm for work, the ability to grasp the gist, the empathetic sensitivity to what will attract attention and linger in the mind. Cf the fantastic The Most Human Human. (via Jim Stogdill)
  2. The Technium: A Conversation with Kevin Kelly (Edge) — If we were sent back with a time machine, even 20 years, and reported to people what we have right now and describe what we were going to get in this device in our pocket—we’d have this free encyclopedia, and we’d have street maps to most of the cities of the world, and we’d have box scores in real time and stock quotes and weather reports, PDFs for every manual in the world—we’d make this very, very, very long list of things that we would say we would have and we get on this device in our pocket, and then we would tell them that most of this content was free. You would simply be declared insane. They would say there is no economic model to make this. What is the economics of this? It doesn’t make any sense, and it seems far-fetched and nearly impossible. But the next twenty years are going to make this last twenty years just pale. (via Sara Winge)
  3. Applying Machine Learning to Network Security Monitoring (Slideshare) — interesting deck on big data + machine learning as applied to netsec. See also their ML Sec Project. (via Anton Chuvakin)
  4. Medieval Unicode Font Initiative — code points for medieval markup. I would have put money on Ogonek being a fantasy warrior race. Go figure.
Four short links: 7 November 2013

Four short links: 7 November 2013

Help Searching, Offline First, AWS Tips, and Awesome Fonts

  1. Learn to Search — cheeky but spot-on help for people running conferences.
  2. Offline Firstno, the mobile connectivity/bandwidth issue isn’t just going to solve itself on a global level anywhere in the near future. THIS!
  3. 10 Things You Should Know About AWS — lots of specialist tips for hardcore AWS users.
  4. The League of Moveable Type — AWESOME FONTS. Me gusta.
Four short links: 27 June 2013

Four short links: 27 June 2013

Cloud IDE, Magic Headlights, Policy Simulator, Anti-OCR Font

  1. nitrous.io — IDE “in the cloud”, as “the kids” say.
  2. smartHeadlight — headlight that tracks raindrops and doesn’t send out light to reflect off them back into your eyes causing you to clutch your head and veer off the road into the parking lot of a Hooters to which your wife will NOT enjoy being called to tow your VERY SORRY HONEY ass home. Thank heavens science can save us from this awful hypothetical scenario. (via Greg Linden)
  3. Knight Funds outline.io — it’s a public policy simulator that helps people visualize the impact that public policies like health care reform and school budget changes might have on local economies and communities. Simulators are hugely underused way to get public to understand policy debate. (via Julie Starr)
  4. ZXX Font — designed to be hard to OCR, though a common trick makes it pervious to OCR. Secrecy is not an option on your font menu. (via Beta Knowledge)
Four short links: 31 January 2013

Four short links: 31 January 2013

Courier Prime, Lethal Education, Internet Numbers, Mobile Numbers

  1. Courier Prime — tweaked Courier “for screenplays” (!). (via BoingBoing)
  2. The Dead Grandmother/Exam Syndrome and the Potential Downfall Of American Society (PDF) — education is dangerous to female extended family members. As can be seen in Table 1, when no exam is imminent the family death rate per 100 students (FDR) is low and is not related to the student’s grade in the class. The effect of an upcoming exam is unambiguous. The mean FDR jumps from 0.054 with no exam, to 0.574 with a mid-term, and to 1.042 with a final, representing increases of 10 fold and 19 fold respectively. (via Hacker News)
  3. Internet: 2012 in Numbers — lots of surprising numbers, with sources. Three that caught my eye: 42.1% – Internet penetration in China; 2.7 billion – Number of likes on Facebook every day; 59% – Share of global mobile data traffic that was video.
  4. 2013: The Year Ahead in Mobile (Business Insider) — Mobile is already 1/7 of global Internet traffic and growing its share quickly […] on pace to top 25% by year end. Interesting prediction that rich people already have devices, so everyone’s working on low-cost units so they can sell to new customers in “growth markets” aka developing world.
Four short links: 27 July 2012

Four short links: 27 July 2012

Weibo cf Twitter, Rendering Fonts, Clothing Manufacturing, and Profiling Python

  1. Social Media in China (Fast Company) — fascinating interview with Tricia Wang. We often don’t think we have a lot to learn from tech companies outside of the U.S., but Twitter should look to Weibo for inspiration for what can be done. It’s like a mashup of Tumblr, Zynga, Facebook, and Twitter. It’s very picture-based, whereas Twitter is still very text-based. In Weibo, the pictures are right under each post, so you don’t have to make an extra click to view them. And people are using this in subversive ways. Whether you’re using algorithms to search text or actual people–and China has the largest cyber police force in the world—it’s much easier to censor text than images. So people are very subversive in hiding messages in pictures. These pictures are sometimes very different than what people are texting, or will often say a lot more than the actual text itself. (via Tricia Wang)
  2. A Treatise on Font Rasterisation With an Emphasis on Free Software (Freddie Witherden) — far more than you ever thought you wanted to know about how fonts are rendered. (via Thomas Fuchs)
  3. Softwear Automation — robots to make clothes, something which is surprisingly rare. (via Andrew McAfee)
  4. A Guide to Analyzing Python Performance — finding speed and memory problems in your Python code. With pretty pictures! (via Ian Kallen)