Brandt's Tumblr

"Several people have told me they like the iPad because it lets them bring the Internet into situations where a laptop would be too conspicuous. In other words, it’s a hip flask."

The Acceleration of Addictiveness. I disagree with much of what Graham’s written here, but I find this metaphor amusing nonetheless.

"1Password can now sync automatically using Dropbox! Also known as “syncing to the cloud”, this amazing feature allows you to keep your Mac, Windows, and iOS devices in sync at all times, even when they are running on different networks."

Agile Blog. Yes! My one nit-pick with 1Password has now been resolved!

"It’s sad. Several generations of college students learned their grammar from the uninformed bossiness of Strunk and White, and the result is a nation of educated people who know they feel vaguely anxious and insecure whenever they write “however” or “than me” or “was” or “which,” but can’t tell you why. The land of the free in the grip of The Elements of Style."

50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education (via)

"I recently left zineland and did a bunch of freelance work and hooboy do people not know how to ship. A three-year project that yielded only 90-second page load; or $1.5 million down the drain with only a few microsites to show. And I’ve started to find myself going, God, these projects need editors."

Real Editors Ship (Ftrain.com)

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The thing is that Univers was released in 1956 by Deberny & Peignot, a small French foundry. Helvetica was released a year later with the full might of the Linotype marketing machine behind it. Linotype stuck it on every single typesetting machine they could and took it round the market, particularly around the New York advertising scene. And there was little Deberny & Peignot with no marketing budget. It’s a fluke of marketing that Helvetica now is this incredibly popular typeface.

What galled me most in the movie [Gary Hustwit’s Helvetica] was when Massimo Vignelli said that Helvetica was a Modernist typeface – No! No! Helvetica is anything but Modernist, Clearly it has its roots in Akzidenz Grotesk and that was designed in 1899, which is Victorian as far as I am concerned. Akzidenz is a fantastic font but it’s not Modernist, it’s got a really antique feel about it, which again shows that Max Miedinger [Helvetica’s designer] didn’t have a clue about type design. He was the salesman at [foundry] Haas’sche Schriftgießerei for Christ’s sake.

And there are a lot of things wrong in the design of Helvetica once you start going in to the detail. I can appreciate why a lot of designers like Helvetica compared to Univers – Univers has a starkness about it, it’s cold. Maybe because of the antique-ness of Helvetica it has a certain charm that Univers lacks and at the same time has this neutrality, so I can see why people go for it, but if you start analysing it and going into the nitty gritty it is quite a horrendous font. It’s quite poorly crafted and has become completely overused. People go on about Arial and how awful it is, and Comic Sans, what an atrocity that is, why not the same about Helvetica? It’s often used wrongly too.

Bruno Maag interviewed by Creative Review for The Helvetica killer

"Windham Solid Waste Management District (WSWMD), the organization that Brattleboro does all of its recycling through has just announced an expanded plastic recycling program. This is good news to many Brattleboro residents who may now recycle any plastic food or beverage container."

Brattleboro Solid Waste. Hooray!!! (it’s about time…)

"HE EMERGED FROM THE METRO AT THE L’ENFANT PLAZA STATION AND POSITIONED HIMSELF AGAINST A WALL BESIDE A TRASH BASKET. By most measures, he was nondescript: a youngish white man in jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt and a Washington Nationals baseball cap. From a small case, he removed a violin. Placing the open case at his feet, he shrewdly threw in a few dollars and pocket change as seed money, swiveled it to face pedestrian traffic, and began to play…"

Pearls Before Breakfast: Can one of the nation’s great musicians cut through the fog of a D.C. rush hour? A “must read”, and do click on the videos to play them as you reach them.

"Latency is bad, too."

Daring Fireball Linked List: Is AT&T Capping 3G Upload Speed? So much for my high hopes.