The Null Device
2002/2/16
Via Lukelog, this piece about typographical anachronisms in films, from newspapers being set in fonts which wouldn't exist for 20 years to bloopers like building sign in Tim Burton's Ed Wood which is made of great big metal TrueType Chicago letters. (That's the old Macintosh System 7 screen font.) Reminds me a bit of Kibo's USENET rants about typography and bad films.
And then there's this piece about the scourge of Arial, or how the ubiquitous font originated (designed not for its original charm but as a third-party drop-in replacement for Helvetica), how it got everywhere (on the back of the Beast of Redmond), and why it's more evil than Helvetica.
Has anybody successfully gotten a USB ZipCD CD-RW writer working under Linux? I'm having problems with it. When I run cdrecord, several seconds pass between the different pieces of data that are printed at the start, and it gets an SCSI error when starting to write the disc (which suggests that something is buggered at the USB link level.) (The same unit works perfectly on a MacOS X machine, but I need to get it working under Linux.) Any suggestions?
Business model of the day: A staffing company in the UK is offering hookers who double as office temps, from secretaries to web designers and project managers. I suppose one could call them a full-service temp agency. Though one gets the feeling that they missed the mark by a few years.