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.
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.
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?
@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.
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.
What would you consider as the most recognizable bitmap fonts in tech history?
I’m imagining stuff like: - the arcade/Atari font - Chicago (Mac, then iPod) - VCR/video equipment fonts - Minecraft font - IBM PC fonts (MDA, VGA, stuff like that) - perhaps System font from Windows 3.x - Commodore 64, just because of the sheer popularity of the machine
Wrote a book about the history of keyboards: https://shifthappens.site · Design director @figma · Typographer · Occasional speaker · Chicagoan in training