Brandt's Tumbling Log
This is a tumbling log of things and thoughts that pass my way.
If you got here by accident, you may want to visit my website instead.
“ In the interim, I’m sure I’ll eventually get used to life without autofocus. BLONK! My 30-inch screen helps, as does Spaces, since it’s easier to give windows their own non-overlapping real estate.
Stevey’s Blog Rants: Settling the OS X focus-follows-mouse debate (FWIW after six months I still haven’t gotten used to it, but the 30-inch screen really does help. Maybe this is all just a plot to sell more display hardware?)
“ Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as a kind of cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might otherwise have built up and caused society to overheat.
Gin, Television, and Social Surplus
“ I love the idea of being alerted as soon as there is a new book about dogs in space, but there might be a danger of some kind of Cass Sunstein-style echo chamber actually happening here, if readers only get told about the kinds of things they already like. I like to hear about books that are not like those I’ve already read. Will “Wisdom of crowds”-style filtering do that for me? I dunno. Are links that make it to the front page of Digg really the best things on the internets at that moment?
Steven Poole: Free your mind [emphasis added]
20 x 2 : What’s The Difference?
(via JPG Magazine). Just about the sweetest thing you’ll watch on the Interwebs this week.
(via JPG Magazine). Just about the sweetest thing you’ll watch on the Interwebs this week.
Ninth Letter, an art/lit mag from UIUC, just posted the excellent video Making Basquiat, showing the process that went into publishing my brother’s essay “Basquiat and Six Uses of Space”. It’s a close-to-home example of how typography and design can respect and reflect the content of the text. (They also link to a PDF of the essay that you can read, should you have missed my earlier link to it.)
“ Speaking of iCal, which proudly boasts Helvetica in miniature point sizes on the screen, it has the utterly mind boggling feature that it shows you calendar information on a computer screen with everyone’s favorite 1950 typeface for print, and prints these exact calendars on paper in Lucida Grande, a computer display font from this milennium. ‘Utterly backwards’ might be an apt term for such misfit typography. With these kind of typographic failures, I truly wonder if there are still designers working at Apple with any typographic sense in their Miedinger-tainted brains at all.
Swiss Interface Syndrome (though I must admit the amateur typography is far down on my list of things I find offensive in iCal, quite possibly the least usable calendaring software I’ve used)
Overestimating Threats Against Children
“Boy boils egg.” News at 11.
UltraSPARC T2 Plus
The price/performance ratio of Sun hardware is starting to look pretty darn compelling: 10GbE and a pair of Niagara processors for under $10k. Throw in ZFS and Solaris Zones, and it sure is some food for serious thought.
Greg Sadetsky:
Don’t you find Accelerator to be much more expensive than S3?
Garrick Van Buren:
I haven’t done the math comparing the two, primarily because I’m a strong believer in ‘you get what you pay for’, plus, interacting with S3 isn’t the same as interacting with MySQL. I have a hard time imagining the difference in price is so large that it overshadows the cost of learning how to be tied to Amazon.
“ The Web isn’t hypertext, it’s DECORATED DIRECTORIES! What we have instead is the vacuous victory of typesetters over authors…
I DON’T BUY IN
HTun
HTun is a tool to allow you to create a fully bidirectional IP VPN over an HTTP proxy or just over port 80, allowing you to bypass restrictive firewalls and use any service you desire.
Hash Collisions (The Poisoned Message Attack)
A nice example of one practical application of hash collisions.
Gentium Basic and Gentium Basic Book released
I haven’t investigated Gentium closely yet, but I’ve heard good things. May be a promising candidate for CSS3 Web Fonts.
BLDGBLOG: The mathematics of preservation and the future of urban ruins
Certainly my favorite BLDGBLOG post yet. It has too many juciy bits in it for me to pick just one to point out, so if you’re interested in topology, urban spaces, and ruins then go read this.