@drj@typo.social
@drj@typo.social avatar

drj

@drj@typo.social

Yorkshire He/Him/Lambda • Type designer by day • Making fonts by night • Fonts published as CubicType

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fanf, to random
@fanf@mendeddrum.org avatar

on my blog!

https://dotat.at/@/2024-05-13-what-ident.html

Unix version control lore: what, ident

drj,
@drj@typo.social avatar

@fanf Perforce (p4) had something similar, and i routinely used it. Many of my tools in Go also embed their version, but i am not fond of the variety of hacks used to stuff it in there:

go build -o ../build/ -ldflags "-X main.version=$$(git describe --long --dirty --tags)"

(see https://git.sr.ht/~drj/font8/tree/main/item/ttf8/Makefile#L3)

That particular tool also stamps the fonts it makes with the tool version, and it now occurs to me that i should all of these what(1) compatible (which i knew about, but kinda forgot i guess).

pwaring, to Fonts
@pwaring@fosstodon.org avatar

Getting Greek characters to display properly in a PDF generated from Markdown with Pandoc has caused some frustration today - here's what eventually worked for me:

  1. Use xelatex instead of pdflatex:

pandoc --pdf-engine=xelatex

  1. Use Linux Liberatine O as the font in your Markdown metadata:

mainfont: "Linux Libertine O"

I'm a bit sad that I can't use Palatino, which I think is a nicer font, but Linux Libertine 'just worked' and is free (as in beer and speech).

drj,
@drj@typo.social avatar

@pwaring The exact font is going to matter (because of all sorts of weirdly technical encoding issues).

I was going to suggest that if you're doing greek you might want to try one of the many fonts from Greek Font Society, then i noticed that their first font on their 20th/21st century page is accompanied with a Palatino-like latin: https://greekfontsociety-gfs.gr/typefaces/20th_21st_century

so that's a double suggest.

drj, to random
@drj@typo.social avatar

Since the Welsh letter ŵ (w with to bach, which is unique to Welsh) does not appear in any Microsoft CodePage that you can set in the OpenType OS/2 header CodePageRange (see https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/opentype/spec/os2#ulcodepagerange1-bits-031ulcodepagerange2-bits-3263 ), it's entirely possible that OSes and apps that use this field cannot support Welsh.

Screw you Microsoft.

fanf, to random
@fanf@mendeddrum.org avatar

had a fun conversation in the pub this evening about practical chemistry

TIL conical flasks are safety equipment!

when a reaction gets too energetic, a conical flask will blow its bottom out and drop the mess on the bench or the floor

instead of exploding in all directions

ie not towards the experimenter’s face and eyes

clever design!

drj,
@drj@typo.social avatar

@fanf ... If they are oriented downwards 🤔

dabeaz, to random
@dabeaz@mastodon.social avatar

A bit disappointed...

>>> exc = ValueError("Bad Value")
>>> match exc:
... case ValueError(msg):
... print("Failed:", msg)
...
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 2, in <module>
TypeError: ValueError() accepts 0 positional sub-patterns (1 given)
>>>

drj,
@drj@typo.social avatar

@dabeaz haha. Because why would "except:", the pre-existing system for matching instances, match "match:", the new system for matching instances written by language dilettantes.

onpaperwings, to random
@onpaperwings@typo.social avatar

This is a very niche post, but anyone that has an interest in printing technology and typographic history should fill out this short survey on the future of the Type Archive in London which shut down and is now under the Science Museum Group:

https://www.cphc.org.uk/updates/2024/4/12/the-monotype-collection-the-next-chapter

cc @typographica @okay @typeoff @kupfers

drj,
@drj@typo.social avatar

@onpaperwings if you wanna put in a good word for returning the collection to our Kelham Island in Sheffield, that'd be outstanding! ;)

drj, to python
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Recently in PyPNG i removed support for interlace PNG output (too specialist), and i'm currently removing documented and tested support for converting numpy arrays to PNG (in so far as they act like Python sequences, numpy arrays work, but testing it and documenting it was always annoying; and numpy semantics subtly change with various versions). It's quite therapeutic.

Please make your library smaller.

drj, to random
@drj@typo.social avatar

Trying a new medium for Lino cutting: cheap DIY plywood. Making it a woodcut, technically.

(Also, photo upload from phone on web mastodon seems to work now)

drj, to random
@drj@typo.social avatar

wait, Egg Day and Trans Day of Visibility on the same day? The global conspiracy has run out of cards and is just Going For It, right?

mathling, to random
@mathling@mastodon.social avatar

On tools, a wee rant

I am fond of tools, tools of all kinds: tools for building and making, tools for cooking, tools for writing, software tools

Here's the thing: I find a tool I like and I am loyal beyond reason

I do not buy a shiny new spade when my old spade is already fine

I do not fool with a shiny new source control system when my old SCS is already fine

I have been using Emacs for a half century, about

drj,
@drj@typo.social avatar

@mathling i feel a certain irony here, because part of the reason i stopped using emacs, around version 19, is that they kept adding features that i didn't want and had to go hunting in the manual to see how to disable them.

eniko, to random
@eniko@peoplemaking.games avatar

you look at NES games and you're like "that doesn't look too hard, that scope looks achievable to a small modern indie team with modern gamedev tools"

and then you try to execute on it and it takes literal years because making games is actually literally impossible

drj,
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@eniko @Infoseepage some of the numbers become favourites

dabeaz, to random
@dabeaz@mastodon.social avatar

Current annoyance:

>>> @dataclass
... class Point:
... x : int
... y : int
...
>>> p = Point("two", "three")
>>> match p:
... case Point(x):
... print("Yep:", x)
...
Yep: two
>>>

Actually, there are multiple annoyances.

drj,
@drj@typo.social avatar

@dabeaz @natevw We're rapidly approaching the point where continuing to mess with Python is gonna end up being classified as the sort of behaviour that requires psychiatric therapy (or possibly, drug therapy)

sofia, to ArtificialIntelligence
@sofia@chaos.social avatar

thinking about designing my own again. don't expect something to come from it, but seeing other computer projects inspires me.

one thing that excites me most is the idea of having a self-organizing mesh network for connecting components. that doesn't seem like that extreme of an overhead computationally, but i wonder how far you can push it.

it seems like every peripheral protocol has some sort of controller, so i guess i'd just have a little router in each and call it a node.

drj,
@drj@typo.social avatar

@sofia have you had a look at Plan9? They pursued "everything is a file" much more thoroughly, and had a more sensible implementation of devices. Most devices would be a two file directory: one for data one for control. The control file which would read and write short text commands. Much better than 200 different ioctls.

drj, to retrogaming
@drj@typo.social avatar

When the nibling asks to play Pokémon Yellow and i get this off the shelf:

drj, to random
@drj@typo.social avatar

In the year 2024, i created a HyperCard stack. AMA.


drj, to random
@drj@typo.social avatar

It's comin' home!

The Stephenson Blake type collection was moved to London 30 years ago in an act of vandalous cultural appropriation. There is now an opportunity for this historic collection to return to Sheffield where it belongs!

Please fill in the survey and show support for our Kelham Island Museum :)
https://uk.surveymonkey.com/r/KVWBWCW

You would do me an honour by boosting this.



drj, to pixelart
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Do you like Pixel Art and Classic Macs and Exploded Technical Drawings?

Check out this exploded view of the Mac SE/30 from the HyperCard Service Manual of the time.

dabeaz, to random
@dabeaz@mastodon.social avatar

Thought: I'd bet a lot of projects would have fewer dependencies if pip was 100x slower. Maybe we should try to do that.

drj,
@drj@typo.social avatar

@dabeaz no don't. that sounds implementable.

pwaring, to random
@pwaring@fosstodon.org avatar

Fun things I have (re)learnt about C recently:

  1. int isn't guaranteed to be the same as the word size, only >= 16 bits.

  2. getchar returns int, not a char.

  3. Character literals are also int.

  4. You can get the numeric value of a character literal digit c with: c - '0'. This assumes that 0-9 are sequential, which is true for any encoding you're likely to meet, and required from C89 onwards (see Baudot code for an example which does not meet this criterion).

#c

drj,
@drj@typo.social avatar

@pwaring you're probably ready for Advent of Code in C now :)

fractalkitty, to random
@fractalkitty@mathstodon.xyz avatar

Hi all! I am hosting the Carnival of Mathematics for March. Please submit any amazing math articles, news, art, music, and musings here: https://aperiodical.com/carnival-of-mathematics/

I’m super excited to host Carnival 225 - if you have extra fun facts about this number please share. I plan to make some artwork for it.

drj,
@drj@typo.social avatar

@fractalkitty it's 15^2
I assume you know that :)

drj,
@drj@typo.social avatar

@fractalkitty it's also the outside angle in gradians of the 16-gon (I think; 400/16 = 25)

drj, to random
@drj@typo.social avatar

In git, i've now taken to making my first commit in a fresh repo be an empty commit; i use the commit message "Empty root commit", which i like because it's both a verb and a noun.

drj, to random
@drj@typo.social avatar

How it started… how it's going.

For a friends' house-warming gift, i made a house-number for them. As i was visiting for their birthday, i managed to give it to them and mount it for them (using hidden slide mounts which are quite cool). It's cast from concrete onto a cut piece of bathroom lino. The very slightly raised numbers were then painted (with Humbrol enamel).

(a few in-progress shots in the next post)

1/2

A concrete plaque with a number 14 painted on in white, mounted on a wall as a house number. The grey concrete has a horizontal wood-like texture. The numbers are very slightly raised and have a more bubbly broad grooved texture.

drj, to random
@drj@typo.social avatar

Why do loads of LED bulbs, which are obviously way more energy efficient that previous CFL bulbs have terrible F energy efficiency class?

drj, to random
@drj@typo.social avatar

After a large uptick, the Carrot Index has now settled at 11

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