Link-o-rama – Zonker.net

February 1, 2023

Quick links: Middle Ages cat names, Turkish Funk, Java price increases…

AI-generated picture of a cat staring at a computer, in a woodcut / watercolor style.

A couple of quick links today for your enjoyment:

I’ve written about my cats and their many nicknames. But have you ever wondered what people named their cats in the middle ages? Apparently Open Culture has given this some thought. My question is… what have my cats named me?
A little Bandcamp recommendation magic from Khruangbin led me on a little exploration to find some Turkish psychedelic funk by Beynelmilan. Check out Anatolian Funk if you dare. It’s damn good.
Really interesting piece on Ars about Jimmy Carter and the Space Shuttle program. We’ve been watching For All Mankind recently, so I found the Ars post (which is not about a divergent timeline) really interesting.
Price hikes for Oracle Java. Good coverage from SMK, but I do wish there was a breakdown of how much of a price hike and whether there’s any new goodness to justify the price increase.

That’s it for today, we now return you to your regularly scheduled Internet.

January 27, 2023

Deep-dive into the “Dune” font, Davison Art Nouveau

Whether the Dune series is your cup of tea or not, anybody who’s spent more than a little time in the sci-fi section of a book store is likely familiar with the series’ book covers and the unusual typeface. I caught a link off the Orange site to a story on Fonts In Use about the history of the typeface that graces Frank Herbert’s series, and it’s right up my alley.

My dad had a few lettering books lying around the house at all times. The Speedball Textbook for Pen and Brush Lettering being the book I remember best. (And have a copy of, though it’s getting infrequent use.) He’d refer to them sometimes when laying out signs or patterns for lettering on vehicles. He’d have to improvise when adding characters that weren’t in the books or weren’t quite right.

All that to say, interesting lettering always catches my eye. What I know about Dune, as a series, hasn’t compelled me to pick up any of the books. But the covers? I have to say, the lettering does call out to me.

The font was drawn by Meyer M. “Dave” Davidson for a typesetting company in New York (PLINC) and first showed up in the PLINK 1967 Alphabet Yearbook. From there it made its way onto some of Herbert’s paperbacks and then became part of the “visual identity” of his books.

The post goes into great detail and has lots of cover images and the history of Davidson Art Noveau. No spoilers here, I encourage folks to go read the post and check out all the wonderful book covers.

Today we all have thousands of fonts at our fingertips to choose from, of varying quality and ranging from open source to proprietary licensing. I’m not entirely convinced things are better though.

December 15, 2022

Space debris, normalcy bias, RSS as the foundation for social media

Too many tabs open in the browser today, even compared with my usual tab overload.

Good piece on Ars about space debris. Pull quote by Moriba Jah, an astrodynamicist from the University of Texas at Austin, “I also predict that we will see a loss of human life by (1) school-bus sized objects reentering and surviving reentry and hitting a populated area, or (2) people riding on this wave of civil and commercial astronauts basically having their vehicle getting scwhacked by an unpredicted piece of junk. I predict that both those things are going to happen in the next decade.”Just reading this post, I feel like Jah would be a lot of fun to work with…
“How to rebuild social media on top of RSS” by Jacob O’Bryant. Not sure this way of thinking will take off, but I like the idea.
“How normalcy bias will define our future” by Jessica Wildfire. Wildfire writes about the concept of normalcy bias and how it’s defined the past few years and how it’ll impact us in the future. The concept is something that’s been gnawing at the edges of my brain for a while now, but I didn’t have the name for it. Things that, objectively, should be cause for alarm that people just refuse to react appropriately to. (Whether that’s Trump, COVID, or Elon Musk, to name only a few…)

Definitely worth a read. Expect I’ll write more about it in the future. What’s on your mind lately?

March 1, 2021

Amyl and the Sniffers, Fraidycat web follower, Mogwai

Let’s shake some of my browser tabs and see what falls out.

Fraidycat web follower / feed reader

RSS has been on the decline since Google snuffed Google Reader. Many sites, these days, don’t even support RSS. It’s a problem.

One solution that might fit the bill for many users is Fraidycat. It comes as a standalone app for Linux, macOS, and Windows, as well as extensions for Firefox and Chrome. (I’m currently using the standalone app for the Linux desktop.) The standalone appears to be an Electron app, so I might switch to the Firefox extension.

Fraidycat pros:

It handles RSS/Atom feeds, and a number of sites that don’t have proper feeds like Twitter, YouTube. Want to follow a YouTube channel outside YouTube? Fraidycat has got you covered.
It allows you to organize feeds by a free-form system of tags (including emojis) and their importance (Real-time, Frequent, Occasional… etc.).
Has an import/export system that makes it super-easy to switch from, say, the desktop app to the Firefox extension. Or just export OPML to import into another feed reader, or plain HTML bookmarks.
Easy to use, intuitive, open source-ish.

Fraidycat cons:

Doesn’t handle things like Twitter lists, Wikipedia pages that you might want to follow. Coughs up an error when you try to follow these.
The license is open source-ish. Specifically the Blue Oak Model License which is MIT-ish but not OSI-approved.
Earlier this year the next release for Fraidycat was “postponed” so the author could work on another project. Hoping it really is just a temporary postponement and not about to become abandonware.

Amyl and the Sniffers

I snagged this EP by Amyl and the Sniffers on the last Bandcamp Friday. It’s raw, joyous and punk-y. I think I might have been 45 seconds into the first track when I decided “yeah, OK, I’ll listen to this again and again.” Released in 2016, but I’d have believed it if somebody it came out in 1983. Assuming live music returns someday, I’d definitely head out to see them live.

[bandcamp width=100% height=120 album=3846936675 size=large bgcol=333333 linkcol=2ebd35 tracklist=false artwork=small]

Short, sweet, noisy. Give it a listen, loud.

Mogwai – It’s What I Want To Do, Mum

Song I stumbled on while testing out Fraidycat. Instrumental goodness.

[youtube https://youtu.be/tFUGspVnZFQ]

Gimmie something I wouldn’t usually read…

If you are entirely unlike me and need reading suggestions (vs. having a stack of books taller than you that need reading), then I have a great site for you.

Break the Bubble will give book suggestions that are “bubble breakers” for books you might be unlikely to stumble on, usually. Give it The Hitchhiker’s Guide, A Prayer for Owen Meany, and Post Office by Charles Bukowski and it suggests I might want to read Dread Nation by Justina Ireland or My Life as a White Trash Zombie by Diana Rowland. (Also a “Captain Underpants” title, so there may be a few glitches in terms of age appropriateness.)

That’s it for today’s Link-o-Rama. What else should I be looking at on the Web?