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dsevil

117 karma · joined September 26, 2017

just chillin on the internets
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dsevil··on Points are a weird and inconsistent unit of measure
Just posted the following poorly-fleshed-out comment there:

So disappointed that this document, as much as it obsesses over obscure physical quantities no one cares about, makes no mention of THE FUCK.

1 fuck is equal to the amount of concern you have about something below which you cannot achieve without having no concern at all, as which giving "zero fucks" is defined. "Absolute zero fucks" would be the formal terminology.

For preliminary purposes, we can assume 1 fuck = 1 shit = 1 damn, but must account for the possible existence of a big-point-vs-printers-point style situation. Also they could be drastically different, like if 1 shit given about global warming would be equivalent to 299_792_458 fucks or something like that.

I have very little knowledge about the *real* machinations behind the standardization of measures (a tinfoil conspiracy kook would call it an Agenda 21, or 21 Agendas One, but I'm not going there), I want this to be discussed.

dsevil··on Rubio stages font coup: Times New Roman ousts Calibri
I've seen some comments about how Times New Roman was replaced with something else to improve readability by many.

There's an irony: the _Times_ (of London) commissioned it in 1932 to improve the readability of its newspaper, which previously used a Didone/Modern style typeface.

I like Times New Roman and I find Calibri, a rounded-corner sans serif, to be an absolute abomination of milquetoast typography.

dsevil··on Rubio stages font coup: Times New Roman ousts Calibri
I think there's clones of it that aren't.
dsevil··on Old Timey Code and Old Timey Mono Fonts
I didn't want to even try to mess with ligatures in a monospace font though I did œ and Œ and for WGL4 completeness IJ. So yeah I'll do ij as well...
dsevil··on Old Timey Code and Old Timey Mono Fonts
When clicking to OPEN them (which I'm not able to do) or just right-clicking to INSTALL them (which I'm able to do)?
dsevil··on Old Timey Code and Old Timey Mono Fonts
Old Timey Mono is the mostly faithful reproduction.

Old Timey Code is the coding friendly font.

I'm aiming for both.

dsevil··on Old Timey Code and Old Timey Mono Fonts
Ok so there's no capital or small Y with breve in Unicode.

Are you seeing the combining breve to the right of the Y/y (instead of atop it) when trying to use them?

Your suggestions are welcome, thank you!

dsevil··on Old Timey Code and Old Timey Mono Fonts
I was taught to use lowercase letter L for the digit 1 though I did see typewriter samples using the capital I.
dsevil··on Old Timey Code and Old Timey Mono Fonts
Yeah the dot is mostly a manner of preference. It looks less crowded than slashed zero maybe? The dotted zero does disambiguate from U+00D8 [LATIN CAPITAL LETTER O WITH STROKE](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%98).
dsevil··on Old Timey Code and Old Timey Mono Fonts
It appears to look that way in the Turbo Pascal manual as well. I'll check ATF specimens and whatnot.
dsevil··on Old Timey Code and Old Timey Mono Fonts
Based on Reproducing Typewriter, a letterpress typeface from c. 1906 used to create fake typewritten letters for promotional material. Where other monospace typefaces replicated actual typewriters, Reproducing Typewriter had improvements for better readability at smaller point sizes and/or where poor quality reproduction was an issue.

I thought its features would make it the basis of a good coding font, too. Old Timey Mono is much closer to the original while Old Timey Code makes it an even better typeface for writing source code.

It was the coding font used in the Turbo Pascal 3.0 user manual. I've not seen it elsewhere except old patents' cover pages.

Enjoy and if you have any comments or questions, comment or enquire away.

https://github.com/dse/old-timey-mono-font

https://webonastick.com/fonts/old-timey-mono/

dsevil··on There aren't that many uses for blockchains (2022)
That's ONE of the linchpins of cryptocurrency, yes. Git has that part.

Someone else mentioned consensus which is orthogonal. Git does not have that part.

dsevil··on CSVs Are Kinda Bad. DSVs Are Kinda Good
Original author writes: >>> "Quick aside: I first learned about these ASCII delimiters while working with .fec files. For whatever reason, the Federal Election Commission in the United States also decided that they needed to ditch the comma, but they landed on using ASCII character 28 which is supposed to be used as a file separator not a field saparator. I have no idea why they picked that one when 31 was right there. Anyway, the FEC also has a tool called fs2comma.exe that turns it back into a CSV format, and a couple of years I filed a FOIA request and got the source code."

I can only speculate on this but in Perl, for fake multimensional arrays à la `$foo{$x,$y,$z}`[^1], Perl uses ASCII character 28 (U+001C INFORMATION SEPARATOR FOUR) as its default subscript separator. Perl borrowed this feature from AWK, which uses the same character by default for the same purpose.

Based on Perl, I initally used that same character for that same purpose in a project or two. I cannot speculate on why Aho, Weinberger, and/or Kernighan chose that character. (On or before 1977.)

[^1]: Not to be confused with nested array (or hash) references in Perl, a truer form of multimensional arrays: `$foo->[$x]->{$y}->[$z]`

dsevil··on Aptos, our modern successor to Calibri
In case you haven’t figured this out:

Go to https://www.microsoft.com/design

Scroll to the bottom.

Look for the set of social media links; the first one is an “M”.

dsevil··on The age of average
All the websites look the same but it's mostly because all the frameworks are the same. I'm thinking mainly of Bootstrap and Zurb Foundation. They share a lot of the same principles such as the 12-column grid, general typographic dimensions, button styles, etc. Granted, a lot of that stuff is for good reasons. In point of actual fact, I've studied their final CSS products and they share quite many implementation details.

There's also that "rule of threes" which almost every client likes.

Also, most of the new fonts are derivative. Amazon Ember looks like a bland mashup of Calibri and ITC Officina, like the latter of which a lot of other fonts look, and the former of which is bland as heck. Poppins looks like ITC Avant Garde Gothic. TheSansMono kind of looks like Consolas. There are a truckload of direct modifications of DejaVu Sans Mono/Bitstream Vera Sans Mono. Bitstream eVera Sans is a fugly bizarro version of Verdana/Tahoma.

dsevil··on <i>: The Idiomatic Text element
FontAwesome's documentation in the past contained examples using the <i> element. Example:

<i class="fa fa-facebook"></i> <!-- renders the Facebook logo or something like that -->

I believe they presently just use <span> now.

dsevil··on Routed Gothic Font
The fact that I haven't done any serious work involving hinting with this font may have something to do with this issue as well. I'll have to look at this later.
dsevil··on Routed Gothic Font
I couldn't think of a better word than "ugly". Maybe "weird" or "quirky"? Honestly I'm not sure of that whole sentence. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
dsevil··on Lesser Known Terminal Editors
joe needs to be on that list. probably.

https://joe-editor.sourceforge.io/

dsevil··on Emacs 26.1 released
Install the web-mode package. It handles a lot of modern web stuff pretty well.