Innocence, once lost, can never be regained. Darkness, once gazed upon, can never be lost.
From bibles to web sites, the century-long trek of one font
Part of the first page of the Doves Press edition of the Bible
I appreciate a good font, and I certainly appreciate good typography. Reading badly laid out books can be painful (although my threshold is much higher than my friends who are typographers by trade). The over-use of Comic Sans or Papyrus fonts is not something that just bothers me. Recently I read about the resurrection of a font last used over a century ago. The story is quite incredible. Two men founded a publishing company, one bringing the creative side (Thomas Cobden-Sanderson) and the other the money (Emery Walker). The company, Doves Press, created a new font (new, although based on a font from the 15th century) to be used in their publications, which included an edition of the Bible, as well as books by well-known authors such as John Milton, whose Paradise Lost published by Doves is nothing less than a masterpiece of bindery, before even getting to the contents. Trouble Begins When the publishing company ran into financial trouble, the partners fought over the single remaining asset of the company – the typeface. Today we think of fonts as digital files on a computer. We don't think about how much time goes into designing them, especially since anyone who wants…
The cheapest, fastest, and most reliable components of a computer system are those that aren't there.
Time for some Pi
The Raspberry Pi 2 Model B
The Raspberry Pi is a single-board credit-card-sized computer introduced in 2012. The computer was designed for use in teaching computer science to a new generation whose cell phones and modern computers had reduced the number of children who knew how computers actually worked. Used in education as well as by hobbyists, the Raspberry Pi has been incredibly successful and has sold over four million units. New versions of the Raspberry Pi are designed by the non-profit Raspberry Pi Foundation, and then built by multiple partner manufacturers. This week the Raspberry Pi Foundation announced the availability of their second-generation board, the Raspberry Pi 2 Model B. It's not the second board (there has been the Model A, Model A+, Model B, and Model B+ before, as well as the Pi Compute Module for embedded applications), but rather it is the first board since introduction to use a new processor, the Broadcom BCM2836. The new processor is roughly six times as fast as the previous processor, going from a single-core ARM11 to a quad-core ARM Cortex-A7 processor, as well doubling the RAM to 1GB (shared with the GPU). Despite those changes, the board remains backwards-compatible with previous Raspberry Pi software, the hardware is pin-compatible with the previous Model B+ board,…