Friday June 13, 2008 / Filed under: Miscellany
Pangrammer Helper 2.0
Pangrammer Helper 2.0 is a new version of the pangram-making utility I created in 2005. The new version adds the ability to keep track of how many times each letter of the alphabet is used in your pangram. (Thanks to Scot Ober for the suggestion.)
In case you don’t know, a pangram is a phrase or sentence that uses every letter of the alphabet at least once. The most common one in English is “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” Here are a few pangram links for more examples and information:
P22’s 2004 Pangram Contest Winners
Pangram Discussion on Typophile.com
NPR Sunday Weekend Edition 2002 Pangram Contest Results
Saturday December 8, 2007 / Filed under: Miscellany
A Klingon Christmas Carol
What’s more nerdy: Attending a performance of A Christmas Carol performed entirely in Klingon, or appearing in it? Whatever, it was a load of fun, and only three blocks away at the University of Minnesota St. Paul Campus Student Center. How could I not go?
So, you might well ask: WTF? Imagine if you will, Charles Dickens’ classic translated and interpreted by the Klingon Imperial Theater Company, hosted by a representative from the Vulcan Institute of Cultural Anthropology, and you’ll get some idea. If you’re still not with me, imagine a parody of the Christmas classic seen through the eyes of Trekkies. (Not that I would call myself a Trekkie.) (And not that Trekkies call themselves “Trekkies.”)
The production, put on by Commedia Beauregard, was cleverly written and very entertaining. The audience, not too surprisingly dominated by Star Trek fans, was in stitches most of the time. While the performance was entirely in the made-up Klingon language (except for occasional commentary by the Vulcan), English subtitles were projected on a screen next to the stage.
I managed to sneak a few (flashless) photos of the performance. Here is the scene in which SQuja’ (Scrooge), on the left, is visited by Kahless Past (Christmas Past). Notice that the ghost is the “old style” Klingon:
Here is a scene of happier times from SQuja’s youth, in which everyone is having a grand old time trying to kill each other:
Like the Dickens original, SQuja’ sees what a fool he has been, for seeking gold rather than honor in battle, and vows to change his ways:
A funny coincidence: The part of SQuja’ was played by Michael Ooms, son of Richard Ooms who for years played Scrooge in the Guthrie Theater production of A Christmas Carol.
Tuesday October 30, 2007 / Filed under: Miscellany
White Menu Bar in Leopard, Part 2
Not surprisingly, utilities such as OpaqueMenuBar are starting to appear. Definitely more convenient than altering the desktop picture, especially if you change it frequently, or change monitors regularly. (Thanks to Andrew for the tip.)
Sunday October 28, 2007 / Filed under: Miscellany
White Menu Bar in Leopard
I’ve seen some complaints on various blogs about the new translucent menu bar in Mac OS 10.5. I’m not too crazy about it either, so I figured out a simple way to make the menu bar white again:
1. Open or create a desktop picture in Photoshop (or any other image editor) at the exact size of your desktop (my MacBook Pro is 1440 × 900).
2. Draw a solid white rectangle at the top of the image 22 pixels tall.
3. Save and install.
(P.S. Looking around the ‘net briefly after posting, I was not surprised to learn that I was not the first to think of doing something like this. Still, works great.)
Friday September 28, 2007 / Filed under: Miscellany
Friends School Plant Sale Video
My partner, Pat, has been heavily involved with the annual fund-raising plant sale at Friends School of Minnesota ever since our daughter started kindergarten there nearly ten years ago. For the 2007 sale, she wondered if it would be possible to do a time-lapse video of the event to help promote it.
After investigating a number of possibilities, I decided that the simplest way would be to use the iSight camera built into my MacBook Pro along with Boinx Software’s iStopMotion.
The venue for the sale was the Grandstand at the Minnesota State Fairgrounds, a cavernous space filled with concrete support columns every twenty or thirty feet. I was a bit concerned about leaving my laptop unattended for the week it would take to capture the video, but fortunately we found a well-placed column that had a flat “shelf” about ten feet off the ground. It had just enough space to hold the laptop. There was also a conduit that could be used to attach a security cable.
I still thought it might be a little conspicuous (and tempting) for my not-exactly-cheap MacBook Pro to be visible up there, so I covered it in a make-shift cardboard “disguise” to make it a bit less obvious what it was.
We alerted the fairgrounds security to its presence, but just in case an over-zealous and uninformed security guard happened upon it and thought it was a bomb or something, I added notes and stickers to the outside to explain what it was. And, of course, I completely backed up my hard drive, removed all personal files, logged out of my personal account and set up a temporary user account, in case all else failed and it got stolen or damaged.
Happily, none of that happened. It sat undisturbed for the whole week, shooting one frame every two minutes. I stopped by at least once a day to check on its progress (and to hit command-S to save the footage captured so far), hauling a ladder to and from the site in order to get at it. Unfortunately, some time during the last day of the sale, iStopMotion seems to have crashed, so any video it captured after I hit “save” that morning was lost. (Neither I or the helpful people at Boinx could figure out what happened.)
Nevertheless, the captured video was amazing. I added titles and music, and, well, here is the finished video:
Saturday September 22, 2007 / Filed under: Miscellany
Groan Extra Bold Extended
I Rotis for Typophile a few years back…
I Meta man once. I said, “Avenir seen you somewhere before?”
He replied, “I was elected Centaur once. Joanna know what happened? Italia what happened. The Air Force took a Janson me. They put me in charge of Arial maneuvers. But the DIN was terrible. I lost my Tempo and stormed out Didot. I shouted, ‘Avant Gardes posted Ronda clock! To Helvetica Mandarin chief! Peignot attention to him!’
“They said, ‘This Stymie went too far.’ Well, no more Beton Ronda bush. I admit I made some Eras. It cost me my Courier. Univers see it until it’s too late.
“Bodoni hurts when I laugh. Now, I spend my Times Roman the streets.” He walked away singing Myriad a Little Lamb.
I wondered Weidemann was saying all these crazy things.
Franklin, I don’t give a Dom.
(My sincerest apologies. Please don’t bother to Melior complaints to me.)
Monday June 11, 2007 / Filed under: Miscellany
MST3K Comeback (Sort of)
If you were or are a fan of Mystery Science Theater 3000 like me, this is pretty cool: RiffTrax. (Via Wired News this morning.)
Monday August 14, 2006 / Filed under: Miscellany
Strange Affinity
Some time in the last year or so, I bought, through Amazon Books, Paula Scher’s book Make It Bigger, a beautiful overview of her outstanding career as a graphic designer. If you’ve ordered books through Amazon and haven’t opted out of their periodic mailings, you regularly get recommendations for other books in which you might be interested, based on your previous purchases. It usually comes up with reasonable suggestions, but take a look at the one I received the other day:
We’ve noticed that customers who have purchased books by Paula Scher often purchased books by Peter Hall. For this reason you might like to know that Peter Hall’s newest book, Understanding Disease: A Centenary Celebration of the Pathological Society, will be released soon. You can pre-order your copy by following the link below.
I guess there must be more than one author named Peter Hall.
Tuesday July 11, 2006 / Filed under: Miscellany
Harry and the Potters
Yesterday afternoon I went to a packed rock concert with my daughter at the new Minneapolis Public Library. You read that right: a rock concert in a library. The band was Harry and the Potters who, if you have never heard of them, pretend to be Harry Potter (two of them) and play songs inspired by characters and situations in the famous books. (That’s “Bill Weasley” on drums.) The warm up act was Draco and the Malfoys (what else?), who advised the audience that there was no point in staying once they finished. Both bands were very fun, very loud, and very punk rock. Fans do amazing things sometimes.
Friday March 17, 2006 / Filed under: Miscellany
Will Work For Fool
I had this idea for a shirt while driving yesterday. Want one? (In case you’re wondering, the font is Felt Tip Woman.)
Monday March 6, 2006 / Filed under: Miscellany
An Oscar in the Family
Well, none of my fonts showed up on the Academy Awards show this year (unlike last year), but my cousin Eric Simonson did. He and his co-producer Corinne Marrinan snagged an Oscar (Best Documentary Short) for their film “A Note of Triumph: The Golden Age of Norman Corwin.” Eric was nominated once before for another documentary short, “On Tiptoe: Gentle Steps to Freedom” (2000), and our whole family was excited to hear that he had been nominated again. Only this time he got the statue. Way to go, Eric! (And Corinne! though I don’t know you.)
I confess that I probably wouldn’t know Norman Corwin from Irwin Corey if I hadn’t worked on a package design for a collection of his radio broadcasts back in the nineties. I also confess I don’t know much about Eric’s documentary. All the years I have watched the Oscars, I have always wondered, where the heck can you see these short films? I saw his earlier nominated film at a family reunion. As luck would have it, “The Golden Age of Norman Corwin” will be screened this week at the Plaza Maplewood Theater in nearby Maplewood, Minnesota. I’m planning to go.
Congratulations, Eric!
Saturday May 14, 2005 / Filed under: Miscellany
Pangrammatic Haikus
Reader Dan Madden is a fan of my Pangrammer Helper, a little Flash application I made that helps in the creation of pangrams. (A pangram is a sentence or phrase which contains every letter of the alphabet.) He and his family had so much fun with it that it prompted his brother, an english professor at BYU in Utah, to hold a “Pangram Haiku Contest” with his students. Here are some of the results:
Lost in flight, quiet.
Yellow jacket reproves me.
Vexed, I buzz away.
Mosquito buzzes
around jackal’s furry paw.
So vexing, that bug!
Read ye my haiku!
Strong, living words dazzle. Jump
back, quietly fixed.
Haiku verses flow
like a bad, exacting quiz.
Too jumpy, yet fun.
The ax swerves, tree dies:
Quite a lop job, so crazy.
Man kills for nothing.
Wise raven in tree
Spies sly fox dozing. Gives him
Loud quack. Bejeezus!
Your quick wit doesn’t
Faze me. I can’t help your jive!
Go back to de-tox!
Tuesday March 22, 2005 / Filed under: Miscellany
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, etc.
As a long time fan of the books, radio show, tv series, computer game, etc., I am looking forward to April 29 when The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy finally makes it to the medium of motion pictures. It looks to be very different visually from the tv series (not necessarily a bad thing) but true to the spirit of the stories in all their incarnations.
I’m still sad about author Douglas Adams’ death in 2001, but, according to everything I’ve read, the movie is based entirely on his the screenplay he was working on when he died. Whatever is different from the earlier works will be either thanks to or the fault of Adams. (Not that there was ever a definitive version of any of the the Hitchhiker stories.)
In other quirky British franchise news, Aardman Studios is working on a Wallace and Gromit movie to be released next Fall. (Yippee!)
Friday August 6, 2004 / Filed under: Miscellany
Scott McCloud at MCAD
I spent last evening enjoying a talk by Scott McCloud at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. He did a similar talk there two years ago which I also attended.
McCloud is a comic book artist and writer best known for his book Understanding Comics. He talked mainly about online comics, a phenomenon he has been involved in since the beginning.
The audience was mainly hard-core comics people, so it felt a little weird for me to be there. When I was young, I read Mad magazine and wanted to be a cartoonist for a while. But I’ve only been into comic books sporadically.
McCloud’s book caught my attention a few years ago and I would put it on my short list of most inspiring and thought-provoking books. The reason is that I just like the way McCloud thinks.
He has a knack for getting beyond conventional thinking, drawing out fundamental principles and presenting them lucidly. It’s an old cliché to say someone “thinks outside the box.” In McCloud’s case, I wonder if he even remembers what the inside of the box looks like.
Anyway, it was a lot of fun. As with the last time I saw him talk, he had his family with him. And, once again, he did a dramatic reading of Monkey Town at the urging of his two young daughters (only this time he didn’t blow out any of the speakers in the auditorium). And I got him to sign my copy of Understanding Comics. Pretty cool.
Thursday July 22, 2004 / Filed under: Miscellany
Dubious Typeface Ideas
Meta Swash Alternates
ITC ITC Garamond
Avant Garde Oldstyle
Comic Serif
One Pixel
Cooper Black Monospace
Neue Helvetica Super Ultra Thin
Brush Script Titling
Centaur Frisky
Snell Commoncase