The DejaVu fonts are a font family based on the Vera Fonts. Its purpose is to provide a wider range of characters while maintaining the original look and feel through the process of collaborative development (see authors), under a Free license.

Tracks open source projects in real-time and provides activity information and commit statistics. Free IRC bots to gather data are offered.

we decided to create an all new giant Moog synthesizer, with the addition of some new bells and whistles. This year’s print is a 24″ x 18″ four color screen print and has a limited edition of 100. The graphics go full bleed, we created a DKNG moog parody logo, and to top it all off, it glows in the dark. The best part is the glow ink spells out the name MOOG which is composed of the buttons and knobs from the artwork.

This diagram (HT Rebecca Giblin) shows the  distribution of 2500 newly printed fiction books selected at random from Amazon’s warehouses. The reason that you can’t get many books back to the 1920s and then suddenly can? Copyright.  Someone owns the copyright in the US if the book came out after 1923.

In the end, after reading tens of articles about Klout and its influence, I realized that not only were my misgivings entirely valid, but also that there were a number of other important reasons to choose to leave Klout and influence others to follow my lead.

Road-Runner Prime Cuts and Chops
1. Banana
2. Asparagus
3. Papaya
4. Liquorice
5. Vanilla
6. Sponge Cake
7. Celery
8. Candied Yam
9. Caramel
10. Salami
11. Tamale
12. Chop Suey
13. Noodle
14. Pork Chop
15. Cheddar Cheese
16. Double Martini
17. Bratwurst
18. Yorkshire Pudding
19. Pistachio

Here is a brief timeline of the history of dice.

Designer Roy McCarthy's alternative Olympics brand is for people who want to celebrate the Games in their homes, shops or pubs, without fear of infringing the usage laws of the official 2012 branding...

The Universe is full of galaxies, immense collections of stars, scattered throughout the vastness of space. …Fortunately, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey has been kind enough to take pictures of millions of galaxies, and make them available for everyone to look at. These images have been used by hundreds of professional astronomers to make lots of new scientific discoveries. One big problem, though, is that it would take way to long for even a very keen group of professionals to go through all the images and actually look at them, to classify their appearances and spot interesting things.
…Galaxy Zoo asked members of the public, the Zooites, to look through nearly one million galaxies to make a catalogue of their shapes for scientific use. All of these objects are special, in their own ways, but some are particularly weird and wonderful. The Zooites started collecting these peculiar galaxies on the Galaxy Zoo Forum, the most beautifully simple, the most spectacular, the most messy, even those that happen to look like animals and, here we get to the point, letters of the alphabet!
Really? There are galaxies that look like letters? OK, S and Z I can believe, but M? H? R? Capitals or little letters? What about punctuation, or numbers?
Well, there aren't many, but when you've got pictures of millions of galaxies and an energetic group of Zooites there isn't much that can stay hidden! They sought them out and put them on the Forum, even organised them into handy lists and made fantastic messages and pictures spelling their names. But this was a bit time consuming for all but the most committed Galaxy hunter. Until, along came an astronomer whose boss had asked for a particularly stunning astronomical image. The Galaxy Zoo alphabet sprang to mind, but I'm not one to do things by hand. I'd much prefer to write a program to do it instead. Even then the code stayed sitting on a disk for ages, until it was finally made ready for the web at Science Hack Day: Chicago. So now everyone has the power to make the galaxies do their bidding! They're yours to play with...

Although academic computer scientists have generally dismissed Objectivist-C, it has a zealous following among self-taught programmers and college sophomores.

Interesting things to make out of paper—from mathematical models to toys.

ast month’s splashy introduction of the new LEGO** friends line has stirred up a lot of controversy. My goal with this article is to provide some historical perspective for the valid concerns raised in this heated debate. First, I will trace the history of the LEGO Group (TLG) and its various attempts to market products based on gender (of which, LEGO Friends is neither the first nor the most egregious.) Second, I will analyse the LEGO Friends sets and the arguments levelled against them with both empirical and anecdotal evidence. Finally, I will suggest courses of action for those who want to do something about reducing the gender gap in LEGO products, toy stores, and culture at large.

From an early age on, I’ve noticed signs where an N with serif is placed upside down. This awareness is the first thing that triggered me to become a graphic artist. Many years later, in 2004, I started to photograph this phenomenon all over the world.

To spot upside down N’s you must travel. Upside down serif N’s are everywhere. And nowhere. Most upside down N’s remain unseen for years because they are hidden between ‘normal’ letters.

We hereby invite you to become an N-hunter and photograph your finds wherever you may find yourself.

This is a userscript for Google Chrome (it might work with Firefox/Greasemonkey but I haven't tested). It binds the left/right keys to click on prev/next links.

This is especially useful for browsing comic archives, image galleries and blogs.

The expanding popularity of an Arma 2 mod, Day Z, might have surprised all of us, but imagine the surprise felt by the chap who created it, Dean “Rocket” Hall. There are nearly 48,000 characters now registered in the game’s stats, when he imagined there’d be just a few hundred. His motivation to make the ultra-bleak multiplayer zombie survival mod might not surprise any of you, though, when you read his take on what games should be, and why the kinds of stories experiences like Day Z produce are so important. There were a couple of times in this interview where I hooted in agreement with what Rocket had to say. See if you can spot them.

The Made in NY Digital Map is a visual testament to the vibrant state of New York's digital industry - showing a powerful constellation of over 500 homegrown startups, investors and coworking spaces across the five boroughs. Browse by neighborhood, review job postings, or add your own startup to the digital landscape - the Made in NY Map is a living resource that reflects New York City's dynamic innovation ecosystem.

According to Crayola Crayons.

Get your work done quick, fast, and in a hurry with GFDA’s new Black on Black ‘Don’t fucking procrastinate’ mug. This mug will keep your coffee hot and your productivity hotter.

Having recently received a few questions concerning backsaws, I’ve decided to open up the archives and give you an article Christopher Schwarz, contributing editor, wrote for the Spring 2008 issue of Woodworking Magazine: “Understanding Western Backsaws.” Therein, he explains the size, tooth configurations and raison d’etre of four saws: the dovetail saw; the carcase saw; the tenon saw; and the sash saw. Plus, you’ll find Chris’s thoughts on halfback saws.

When Geeks Wed launched in January of 2012, focusing on inspiring geeky, gamer and alternative brides and grooms with daily updates, photos and DIY projects.

Here's a handy map that shows how far marriage equality has come—and how far it still has to go.

So my actual solution has been to create a command to toggle home directory version control on and off. That way, I can turn it on; let my normal muscle memory take over as I craft and execute version-control operations; and then turn it off again:

When the announcement came out that Yoko Harada was a winner of the Ruby Hero award this year, she made the tech community proud. “Ruby is a programming language designed for productivity and fun”, according to Skillcrush, the new female-founded company which makes tech accessible to anyone.

What is noteworthy about this award is that the winners are selected based on pure merit by the community, not by journalists, venture capital judges or non-coders. The previous winners select the winner based on contributions they have made to the Ruby community in open source code projects, educational content, and the creation of new plugins and applications. Yoko won for the Nokogiri project, which is the integration of the two coding languages: Java and Ruby, in order to create JRuby which allows users to quickly parse through other coding languages such as HTML, XML, SAX and things like Google Reader documents to find specific information.

Each dot represents one word of the song. The colours represent who is saying that word. Sometimes, I’m asked if there are prints of my work available; I don’t normally do that sort of thing, but on the off-chance that you would like a print of this graphic, I’m providing a hi-res TIFF (254 x 321 mm / 10 x 12.6 inches; zipped file; 18.1MB) that you can download and have printed. You don’t have to pay for it—I certainly don’t want to profit from it—but if you do want to download and print it, it would be nice if you would consider donating something to a cancer charity.

In 1962, my father travelled from England to NZ. He wrote a diary (B5, hardcover, blue) and shot his first rolls of colour film.
The slides sat alongside the journals in the attic for the last few decades before being digitised.
Despite over-exposing himself, so to speak, Dad's diary of his first real journey is such that it deserves to be archived, and as none of my siblings, nor I, can read his handwriting, he has done it for us, awesome!

Samuel Taylor Coleridge remarked, some two centuries ago, on the tendency for politics that begin in fear to end in either folly, or failure. And today we find ourselves in the midst of a political climate increasingly dominated by fear. Not fear of an external enemy, but a fear felt by many in our political class of an open contest of ideas. And these politics of fear, rooted as they are in some politicians' lack of trust in the judgement of the people, and lack of faith in their own convictions, carry within them the seeds of failure. Although in the current climate of cynicism about politicians it may seem absurd to say so, trust is at the heart of functioning democracies.
…
There is, I believe, a corresponding general disinclination developing in our own, and other, democracies to accept that government requires compromise, and to understand that perfection never happens. Ironically, this discourages the kind of ambitious policy that people say they want – the lack of which is often cited as the reason for cynicism. Any over-arching statement of vision will inevitably become a rod to beat the maker in a climate where anything less than perfection is defined as an absolute failure.

A Kit-of-No-Parts demonstrates a new approach to building electronics that emphasizes the expressive qualities of diverse materials as well as the skill and creativity of the builder. I believe that a more insightful and skilled process is also capable of producing more intelligible and personal results. Conventionally electronics that are built from a kit-of-parts have been optimized for speed, efficiency and repeatability of assembly. While this approach demonstrates the power of modular systems that have made many of the technologies we rely on possible, it also constrains us to particular styles of building, influencing what we build as well as impacting how we come to think about electronics.
In order to promote a different approach I have developed a series of techniques that allow us to build electronics using a variety of craft materials and tools.

when a person in authority can't control their emotions it sets the tone of the workplace!!
it's not as funny as it is emotionally damaging!!
…
yes sir

The board was twenty-four feet long and four feet wide, its surface a varnished relief map of the coastline of two imaginary countries. It represented twenty thousand square kilometers, approximately the size of the Western Front. There were a dozen layers of land above sea level, each measuring an eighth of an inch vertically; the water had three measured depths. One journalist reported that nine thousand cities and towns, along with every mountain, valley, tunnel, bridge, and river, were delineated with fictitious names. Pins of various colors, sizes, and shapes (twelve thousand to twenty-five thousand of them, depending on whom one talked to) stood in for forty-plus types of military units. Each pin had a different kind of move, and each occupied the approximate amount of space on the map that its equivalent force would occupy in the field or at sea. There were at least four thousand on the board at all times. Originally based on World War I technology, the game’s parameters were stretched to include equipment “within the realm of probability”: motorized supply carriers and artillery, PT-like patrol boats, mine sweepers, submarines, tanks and armored cars, machine guns, and landing barges. Geddes had the complete navies of all five leading powers constructed in the model shop of his office. The battleships were built to exact scale (one inch to one hundred feet), complete with brass hulls, armaments, and planes. As time went on, there were also destroyers, aircraft carriers, capital ships and cruisers, tankers, tenders, barges, depot ships, and merchant vessels (ranging from the Queen Mary to a Chinese junk). In all, they would eventually number more than seventeen hundred. Each country had the same railroad mileage, resources, and imports. Military units moved at speeds contingent upon the terrain they were covering; their artillery’s range (and destructive power) increased a kilometer for every contour level it occupied above its target. The same applied to ships other than patrol boats. Those who found themselves several positions down could rally by sending up aircraft or engaging in other maneuvers. Three dice in a specially designed case were used to determine how much destruction the attacking force might enact when it got within range of an objective.

I help plan technical events at the Wikimedia Foundation. I think we’ve improved in making them more welcoming and inclusive over the course of my time there. We just recently filled to capacity on registration for an upcoming event, and I thought I’d share a few things we’ve done:

This checkered history commends itself to other cities looking to implement skywalks. While designers, planners and officials in the US have – one hopes – learned their lessons from the mid-century failures of modernism, the application of urban forms spawned by modernist approaches nevertheless continues apace in other parts of the world. This then gives us the opportunity to ask what, if anything, might be different this time around? In the case of skywalks in particular, designers must recognize that they are creating a total environment, one that is very much the antithesis of city streets that promote serendipity and dynamism. Assuming recognition of this knowledge, we hope that the advantages, in terms of connectivity, etc, created by the skywalk is a benefit that – somehow – manages to offset the cost of removing people from the street. Indeed, the same critical lens should be applied to any innovation of urban form.

Yesterday, I had one of the most unpleasant experiences of my life when I was mugged at knife point in broad daylight just metres from my front door. But I learnt a lot about how I could have allowed the police to better respond to a crime like this, and the actions that I needed to take to ensure my data was safe.

I have several wooden mallets I’ve made and used through the decade that I wouldn’t change for anything that are just great, I have seen silly little brass-headed chisel hammers some engineer thought we needed with short shafts that are imbalanced and cute. I hate cute. I posted in the past on my Thorex hammer and then found I couldn’t find them in the USA until a few weeks ago. What the secrecy was I don’t know. I found this hammer. It’s wonderful in the hand and gets the job done without an ounce of excess weight. I love it. Now that doesn’t mean it replaces all other mallets, but for under twenty bucks it gets new woodworkers started with something solid and without compromise.

Ten desirable skills you can teach yourself is a nice round-up of terrific guides to teaching yourself new tricks including basic repair skills, learning a language (the Foreign Services Institute has a chart of how hard various languages are to learn), teaching yourself to code, building electronics (starting with soldering), getting yourself up to speed in photography, learning an instrument, developing a basic sense of design, the inevitable cooking tips, and even some starter self-defense moves. Also, a very nicely organized list of free online college courses.

The Geologic Time Spiral

A Path to the Past

Designed by Joseph Graham, William Newman, and John Stacy


The Earth is very old—4.5 billion years or more according to scientific estimates. Most of the evidence for an ancient Earth is contained in the rocks that form the Earth's crust. The rock layers themselves—like pages in a long and complicated history—record the events of the past, and buried within them are the remains of life—the plants and animals that evolved from organic structures that existed 3 billion years ago.

Also contained in rocks once molten are radioactive elements whose isotopes provide Earth with an atomic clock. Within these rocks, "parent" isotopes decay at a predictable rate to form "daughter" isotopes. By determining the relative amounts of parent and daughter isotopes, the age of these rocks can be calculated.

Thus, the scientific evidence from rock layers, from fossils, and from the ages of rocks as measured by atomic clocks attests to a very old Earth.

logstash is a tool for managing events and logs. You can use it to collect logs, parse them, and store them for later use (like, for searching). Speaking of searching, logstash comes with a web interface for searching and drilling into all of your logs. It is fully free and fully open source. The license is Apache 2.0, meaning you are pretty much free to use it however you want in whatever way.

Waymarking is a way to mark unique locations on the planet and give them a voice. While GPS technology allows us to pinpoint any location on the planet, mark the location, and share it with others, Waymarking is the toolset for categorizing and adding unique information for that location. Groundspeak's slogan is "The Language of Location" and our goal is to give people the tools to help others share and discover unique and interesting locations on the planet.

Edmund Welles [...] has the distinction of being the world’s only original, composing band of four bass clarinetists, they invent and perform heavy chamber music. The bass clarinet has a five octave range and a huge span of tonal, melodic, and rhythmic capabilities.

PGFPlots draws high--quality function plots in normal or logarithmic scaling with a user-friendly interface directly in TeX. The user supplies axis labels, legend entries and the plot coordinates for one or more plots and PGFPlots applies axis scaling, computes any logarithms and axis ticks and draws the plots. It supports line plots, scatter plots, piecewise constant plots, bar plots, area plots, mesh-- and surface plots, patch plots, contour plots, quiver plots, histogram plots, polar axes, ternary diagrams, smith charts and some more.

The Descriptive Camera works a lot like a regular camera—point it at subject and press the shutter button to capture the scene. However, instead of producing an image, this prototype outputs a text description of the scene. Modern digital cameras capture gobs of parsable metadata about photos such as the camera's settings, the location of the photo, the date, and time, but they don't output any information about the content of the photo. The Descriptive Camera only outputs the metadata about the content.

Here’s what Social Security is not: • going broke; • a Ponzi scheme; • expected to stop paying out benefits in your lifetime; • bankrupting our nation or future generations. Here’s what Social Security is: • a critical source of income support for millions of retirees; • an elegant and binding intergenerational contract between yesterday's and today’s workforces; • a progressive social insurance program that efficiently provides a reliable, affordable, guaranteed pension to those past their working years. • a national treasure to be fiscally strengthened and carefully preserved for both today’s elderly and for future generations.

Japanese tool and sharpening expert Harrelson Stanley discusses how to hold your body, your shoulders and your hands to keep the blade-to-stone relationship smooth and in control. When you think about it, this is an interesting approach. We focus so much on the point of contact on the sharpening stone, that if we think of our body position at all, it’s how we’re holding the chisel. That is part of the concept, but the way we move our arms, roll our shoulders and even stand, is all translated to the point of contact.

A "boring machine" (har-har) is an old hand tool for drilling up to 2" diameter holes in timbers, typically for timber frame construction. These boring machines (in this case, the Millers Falls model) are no longer manufactured, and haven't been for at least 70 years. They are quite rare, and as you can imagine, priceless. There are few non-electric tools capable of boring holes in wood in this way. They are truly an antique, blast from the past kind of tool. They are highly prized by timber framers who use hand tools.

If you’re like me and use the margins in books for commentary (‘Interesting idea.’ or ‘The author is insane!’), cross-references (‘see also Book X by M. Malaprop.’), and comparisons (e.g. ‘cf. p.58.’), then you might also share my frustration: In many, if not most books, the margins are just too small.

Access to land is one of the biggest challenges facing farmers - especially beginning farmers. Will you acquire your farm by leasing, purchasing, or a combination?  How much can you afford and how will you pay for it?  How will you determine the right property for you?  How will you work with landowners, landlords and community resources?  These are big questions for all farm seekers. This online course will help you find the answers that are right for you.  As you go through the course, you will build your own action plan.  You will have new information and be better prepared to make sound land acquisition choices.

The John Starr Stewart Ex Libris Collection (1600+ bookplates) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

I think it is great!  Inexpensive, pretty, and able to hold a large collection of tools.   It has great tool visibility and uses a minimum of hardware to make.   Jan Zoltowski has done a brilliant job of refining the basic tool cabinet design. While I am not a purist, I am a predominantly hand tool user and this is a hand tool cabinet, so I see this  from a hand tool users perspective.   If you look through my blog you will find more than one tool storage design.  You will also see where I have critiqued my own designs fairly severely.   I am apparently never satisfied with my own tool storage.   So don’t take my snarking on this cabinet as a deal breaker.  It is still a great design and with a bit of modification would be a near perfect design.

This is the sweater that proves that I am a Certified Math Nut. Okay, here’s how it works. You have to start in the bottom lefthand corner, because the mathematician in me couldn’t bear to start anywhere except where the origin would be on Cartesian coordinates. Naturally, the numbers go from left to right and from low to high.

I have been reading a book on the development of the English language recently and I’ve become fascinated with the idea of word etymology — the study of words and their origins. It’s no secret that English is a great borrower of foreign words but I’m not enough of an expert to really understand what that means for my day-to-day use of the language. Simply reading about word history didn’t help me, so I decided that I really needed to see some examples.

Using Douglas Harper’s online dictionary of etymology, I paired up words from various passages I found online with entries in the dictionary. For each word, I pulled out the first listed language of origin and then re-constructed the text with some additional HTML infrastructure. The HTML would allow me to associate each word (or word fragment) with a color, title, and hyperlink to a definition.

Cristoforo is my name for a pair of new fonts reviving classic American-Victorian art nouveau metal types by Hermann Ihlenburg: Columbus (1892), Columbus Initials (upright swash capitals) and the italic companion American Italic (1902). Cristoforo Regular will have some 300+ glyphs.

Amsterdam, with many equally narrow streets, did not begin its development as a cycling city until the Seventies, before which the UK’s and the Netherlands’s cycling profile looked similar. Today, when around just three per cent of journeys in London are made by bike, that figure is 47 per cent in Amsterdam — 14 per cent more than in 1991. So I went to Amsterdam to see whether we could head in the same direction as its cyclists.

cliff is a framework for building command line programs. It uses plugins to define sub-commands, output formatters, and other extensions.

Within the growing TED-Ed video library, you will find carefully curated educational videos, many of which represent collaborations between talented educators and animators nominated through the TED-Ed platform. This platform also allows users to take any useful educational video, not just TED's, and easily create a customized lesson around the video.

A series of mixes intended for listening while programming to aid concentration and increase productivity (also compatible with other activities).

National Radio Project produces Making Contact, an award-winning, 29-minute weekly magazine/documentary-style public affairs program heard on 140 radio stations in the USA, Canada, South Africa and Ireland.

building=yes is a searchable and linkable index of every single way tagged building=yes in OpenStreetMap (OSM).

Python has a nice model of abstract iteration which can be used to increase the expressiveness of your programs. I think Python's iteration tools are one of the most underused features of the language, especially by programmers coming from other "similar" languages.

My goal here was to show Python iteration in a light that would encourage programmers to explore more of its possibililities.

Contemporary commercial tapestries might be argued to be the exemplification of superficial chintz; spectacularly vapid, vividly dull, unquestioningly conformist, gaudily bourgeois, and at the same time unyieldingly time-consuming. The subject matter is often romanticised, uncritical, and both exploits and reinforces established stereotypes. The outcome? Standardised ‘precious things’ cherished by the softly smiling, callous fingered Grandma’s of the world – harmless old dears who quietly revel in the creation of ‘cheeky terrier’ and ‘dewy chrysanthemum’ cushions, or ‘God bless this house’ picture frames. No mention of mortality, no depiction of suffering, nothing surprising, nothing funny. Crapestries capitalise on cross-stitch orthodoxies, exploiting their established themes. Some crapestries are funny, some are sad, and some may cause offence; but that’s fine.

My newest project is a Python library for monitoring memory consumption of arbitrary process, and one of its most useful features is the line-by-line analysis of memory usage for Python code.