I finally got a chance to read through the whole thing. As one commenter notes, reading through this process is mesmerizing. My favorite bit:
If you’re familiar with Bodoni and Didot, you’ll also be able to see my many departures from those faces. The very slight flares at the ends of the thin flourishes, for example, are a personal favorite detail of mine. Without them, the end of a thin stroke seems arbitrary to me, like, “well, guess it may as well end here…”. I prefer to say, “This is exactly where I want the stroke to end”—to make the last bit of ink (or toner, or whatever) to be like a punch line or dessert—kind of a little tiny celebration at the end of something joyful.
ICANN, keeper of domain names, allows a 5-day grace period within which a domain name may be returned gratis. “Domain tasters” take advantage of this by registering excessive numbers of domain names, throwing up advertising on them, and then leaving before they get the bill.
Now, ICANN has implemented a penalty fee for large numbers of cancellations. Johm Timmer reports:
In 2008, ICANN decided to act. It allowed domain registrars to withdraw as many as 10 percent of their total registrations; they would face penalties for anything above that. Initially, ICANN adopted a budget that included a charge of $0.20 for each withdrawal above the limit, which was in effect from June 2008 to July of this year. Later, it adopted an official policy that raised the penalty to $6.75, the cost of a .org registration; that took effect in July 2009.
The numbers dropped from 17 million in June 2008 to 60,000 in July 2009. This is fantastic news.
First off, I love the Ninjawords online dictionary, and have for some time, since I first discovered it through Wordie.
This story, however, is outrageous. The gist is that the Ninjawords developers had to remove “objectionable content” from their dictionary in order to get it published in the App Store, removing words like “ass” and “snatch.”
Take a moment to breathe that in. Apple. Censored. A dictionary.
The situation with the App Store in general seems to be showing a particularly ugly side to Apple, that I would have never expected to see so fully a year or more ago. I don’t use an iPhone, but I was happy that they came up with a model for the App Store that seemed to be so beneficial to the little guys in software development. The App Store, in theory, makes iPhone applications compete primarily on quality, not brand recognition.
Kernest is one of the first good options for using embedded fonts in a website. Unlike projects like Cufón or sIFR, Kernest takes advantage of @font-face embedding, which is now supported by Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari.
One of the problems with @font-face at the moment is that Safari and Firefox support font formats like OpenType and TrueType, while Internet Explorer only supports Embedded OpenType. The usual workaround is to supply a different format depending on the requesting browser. This is exactly what Kernest takes care of for you.
Not only will it serve the right file type depending on the browser, it will only serve the font files when the request comes from a domain name tied to that particular font. Many of the current selection of fonts are free, but in order to make them available to your domain, you must activate them. Based on my brief use, this is a very simple process, requiring only a user account, and adding new domains is completely effortless.
After activating a font for your domain, you simply link to a stylesheet specific to your domain on their server. It is worth noting that there is no javascript involved, and this is as it should be.
I’ve been trying Kernest out for a few days now, and have found the experience very pleasant all around. I don’t know much about what TypeKit’s model will be like, whether they will have some fonts available free of charge, or if there will still be a charge for the service. If not, Kernest looks like it could be a great free alternative for projects without a budget for fonts.
And in the meantime, I highly recommend giving it a try. There are already several serviceable fonts on the site. I’m currently using Droid Serif from Ascender Corp
I had high hopes for Ross Douthat’s column at the Times, but haven’t often found myself reading him since the move from The Atlantic. When I do take a minute to check on what he’s been writing about, he simply seems out of place. Perhaps the Times really can’t handle a conservative voice like his.
Perhaps it’s evidence that evolution has programmed boys to compete within large groups, so they can learn to eliminate rivals for women — and that girls have been programmed to judge, one-on-one, who would be the most protective father for offspring.
Am I the only one who thinks these kinds of articles are idiotic? Why is Dan Benjamin linking to this, much less agreeing with it? First of all this is a story in Time magazine – not exactly a bastion of rigor. Second of all, the only thing an fMRI study like this shows is that by the time boys and girls have reached this age (8 to 17, according to Time), their brains have become “hard-wired” to function differently in social situations. This says nothing of the possibility that social factors – which, oh, by the way, have taught these kids language – have forged these “hard-wired” distinctions. But please, go ahead and assume that studies prove what you already accept as common knowledge. Take it away Dan:
This may not come as a huge surprise to parents of teenage kids, but now there’s some science to help explain the difference.
Part of what is appealing about Andrew Sullivan’s blog is that he has Patrick Appel and Chris Bodenner there who clearly help prepare a lot of his posts, and I imagine make the construction of the blog an actual conversation. I also like that he often posts readers’ emails in full when they make a good point, no matter what their view. Here, Patrick is filling in while Andrew is taking a break, and continues the practice of posting thoughtful emails from readers. A taste:
Domenech asks why less [sic] Americans are married with kids at my age, and the best he can come up with is that tired old socially conservative canard of uppity women and a pornography-filled society. Does he really want to know why there is a greater delay in marriage and rearing children than there was in 1970? One word: cost.
Of course, the act of posting these in such a respectful way encourages other readers to send in their own thoughtful emails.
Digital clock: only figures, no case, only the necessary – only accurate time. Each figure has self-contained power supply and independent control, it can be fixed to any surface autonomously. A light sensor will switch the clock to an invert mode: the figures are white in the dark time of day and black at daytime.
The thing is, I’d be happy if these actually got people to upgrade from IE7, IE6, or even IE5. Everyone seems to be responding to these as though Microsoft is desperate to go after Firefox and Chrome (and maybe Safari). But if you watch “G.R.I.P.E.S.” it’s pretty clear that these are at least partially an effort to get people using older versions of their own browser to get with the program.
I never said this, but these ads are actually a good showing from Microsoft.
To understand the units of time we need to investigate the number systems of ancient civilizations. How did the Sumerians count to 12 on one hand and to 60 on two? What advances did the Babylonians make and how did they use this number system for measurement? And what refinements did the Egyptians make to time measurement to give us the system we still use today?
My dad would like this. Pico Iyer lives in a “two-room apartment in nowhere Japan:”
When the phone does ring — once a week — I’m thrilled, as I never was when the phone rang in my overcrowded office in Rockefeller Center. And when I return to the United States every three months or so and pick up a newspaper, I find I haven’t missed much at all.
So I am glad, honestly, to have the old world of print and film supplemented by the new world of text and video. And I’m eager to stick up for casual and often vulgar online writing and culture as long as I’m not forced to defend them in grandiose terms. The internet often gratifies my curiosity and sense of humor, no small thing but nothing to confuse with whatever it is in me—something far more deeply interfused—that is gratified by poetry, philosophy, history, modes of writing that hardly exist online. What are the native species of internet prose? Op-eds, diary entries, aperçus, allusions, screeds, and scrawls of graffiti—worthy forms but marginal and perishable like little nodding flowers along a river.
At the very least, a Cheney-Obama contest would have clarified conservatism’s present political predicament. In the wake of two straight drubbings at the polls, much of the American right has comforted itself with the idea that conservatives lost the country primarily because the Bush-era Republican Party spent too much money on social programs. And John McCain’s defeat has been taken as the vindication of this premise.
Substantively, I think he brings a needed reasonable voice to the current conservative din – without the ego of David Frum or the questionable alignment of Andrew Sullivan. However, I hope his future columns will be more focused. This one covers too much ground for 800 words.
And I understand how he’s been made to feel like an outcast by a small, vocal group. Still, this was an opportunity for Specter to hold his ground and set an example for progressive-minded Republicans trying to overcome one of their biggest obstacles: winning the party primaries.
Of course, this speaks to much larger problem in the GOP. We need to attract more centrist and progressive conservative voters at the primary level, so that level-headed candidates stand a chance. We need courageous Republicans more than ever. And this week, Sen. Specter turned his back.
Charlie Rose hosts one of the most intelligent conversations I’ve heard in a long time, with Mike Allen, Jim Ellis, Jeff Greenfield, Al Hunt, Katty Kay and John Heilemann.
I think I’m going to take a little bit of a break from nscott.net to focus on Midnight Breakfast for a little while. If you haven’t seen it already, MB is a fun tumblog run by a few friends and yours truly. Check us out sometime.
The newspaper is dead. You can read all about it online, blog by blog, where the digital gloom over the death of an industry often veils, if thinly, a pallid glee. The Newspaper Death Watch, a Web site, even has a column titled “R.I.P.” Or, hold on, maybe the newspaper isn’t quite dead yet. At its funeral, wild-eyed mourners spy signs of life. The newspaper stirs!