Notices by Marcin Wichary (mwichary@mastodon.online)

I think every designer should write a love letter to a font at least once in their lifetime.

This is mine: A 150-year-old font you have likely never heard of, and one you probably saw earlier today.

https://aresluna.org/the-hardest-working-font-in-manhattan/

@nikitonsky I saw that earlier this year – definitely a tough watch.

I want to re-set my taste a bit and watch some beautiful movies that weren’t made in America. (A few years ago I did a Subtitle February and I liked that a lot.)

I watched Drive My Car (Japan, 2021) yesterday, and Decision To Leave (South Korea, 2022) today. What else should I watch? Thanks in advance!

Does anyone here remember Norton Utilities? I realized recently how much of an influence those had on me back in the day. This suite of little useful nerdy DOS tools that eventually got packaged together and had their own little shared UI universe…

In hindsight, together with Norton Commander, this was the first GUI I used in my life! But also there was something amazing about having this kind of a Swiss Army knife. A little toolbox of getting under the hood of your computer.

They already cancelled my first Eurostar train today, but I rebooked to the next one, departing half an hour later. Hope there aren’t more unpleasant surprises.

Tomorrow, I am waking up before 6am and taking a channel train from Paris to Leicester (and back) to visit an archive and look at the 19th century files of a company whose work eventually led to Gorton the font.

I have no idea how likely it is they will have *anything*! But I can take photos of whatever I find. I’m more than mildly excited.

Then, staying up all night and fretting about the U.S. election.

Walking the streets of sleepy, dark, almost empty Paris, with occasional smell of bread baking… probably cliche, but still very nice.

(Trying extra hard to find little pleasures in this trip in case this is all for nothing.)

Last time I did something like this, I spent a day at Stanford University, and found so many great things about the Laser Eraser (that you couldn’t find online), I ended up pretty much rewriting one of my book chapters at the last minute to reorient it around it. It’s one of the best chapters, I think.

I am not a professional researcher, so I have no idea! I just know they have 48 files/folders.

If I find nothing related to the font, it’s still a fun train trip through one of the marvels of model engineering, right?

Last train boarded! The train is very hot inside… and so are there examples of Gorton and some pixel fonts I found while traversing St. Pancras Intl.

Moving again. The driver inspected the pantographs and found no issue. My guess is that some alarm was tripped and they needed to check so we don’t get stopped in the middle of the tunnel.

Eurostar to London went for 10 minutes and then stopped. “It’s a power issue. The driver is going to fix it.” They are serving breakfast but we are standing on a curve, so everything is lopsided. We’ve been waiting for 35 minutes now. The overhead screen says we’re traveling at 1 km/h, showing just the amount of integrity I’d expect out of a Soviet five-year plan during year five.

I built this proof of concept of a tool called https://text.makeup. It is meant to be a friendly Unicode explainer – meant not just for Unicode nerds, but nerds of any kind. Useful for debugging, but also learning.

You can go there now to play (much more fun on desktop!), but I also recorded a 5-minute video that explains it further.

I am curious: Does this feel like fun? Is it worth building out for real? What would you like to see in it if so?

Yeah, no, make yourself at home

@foone Also Windows 98 (I think?) had these three new power/sleep keys, so it was the darkest timeline.

Love how WarGames is filled to the brim with fonts no one wants: Gorton, low-poly vector fonts, old-school bitmap fonts, 14-segment stuff.

@aral I disagree in that “Maybe later” became so common it helps understand the specific nature of the dialog. “No” is more generic and could apply to many other system prompts, but seeing “Maybe later” makes it easy to click without worrying and reading the rest.

Plus, a lot more characters means it’s easier to target.

This week at Config I gave a talk about pixel fonts that I think turned out really well.

It’s called “In defense of an old pixel,” and I don’t think I ever worked harder on a talk before. Check it out here! (25 minutes)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDI8ubVZi7w

Love that you can quietly harbour a little side “career” that LinkedIn will never know about.

Book idea: Showing PC motherboards every 5 years since 1981 (maybe even earlier?), showing what changed and talking about the changes and what one can learn from them. Same with ISA/PCI cards and other things that went inside the case.

(Inspired by watching this Usagi Electric video: https://youtu.be/Alsv-v9o4yQ?si=83eXjCkQnjc9FrTf)