Bag of Beans

How many college students today ever flip through trays of library catalogue cards? Some of them may never have used an actual tabbed file. But the tab as an information technology metaphor is everywhere in use. And whether our tabs are cardboard extensions or digital projections, they all date to an invention little more than a hundred years old. The original tab signaled an information storage revolution and helped enable everything from management consulting to electronic data processing.

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The DejaVu fonts are based on the Bitstream Vera fonts, and are a set of nicely designed fonts that are released and being improved upon under an open source license. Of particular interest for programmers is the monospaced font, which makes code editor listings much more readable, especially when compared to the ancient Courier New. Among other advantages, it has the important characteristic that lowercase ‘L’, capital ‘I’, and numeral ‘1′ characters are visually distinct, as well as capital ‘O’ versus numeral ‘0′. Bitstream Vera was one of the first things I installed when setting up a new development environment, but from now on I will be using DejaVu.

The DejaVu fonts are a font family based on the Vera Fonts release 1.10. Its purpose is to provide a wider range of characters (see Current status page for more information) while maintaining the original look and feel through the process of collaborative development (see Authors). The family is available as TrueType fonts and also as third-party packages.

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• The Coding Horror blog has some articles (Programming Fonts and Revisiting Programming Fonts) comparing quite a few programming fonts using screenshots.

Particletree has an informative article on Fitt’s Law, an important guideline in user-interface design.

Published in 1954, Fitts’s Law is an effective method of modeling the relationship of a very specific, yet common situation in interface design. That situation involves a human-powered appendage at rest (whether it’s physical like your finger or virtual like a mouse cursor) and a target area that’s located somewhere else.

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If you’ve ever wondered why most staplers have the feature to bend staples outwards as well as inwards, here’s your answer.

And now for what may be the most prosaic post in Eternal Recurrence history: examining your stapler! Yes, your stapler. A simple object you’ve used thousands of times and probably feel like you’ve mastered. Well, think again. Your stapler may possess a mysterious feature…

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Would something like this actually be useful?

The principle is a cylindrical building with a helical shape for the floor. The slope of the floor is 1.5% (it rises by 1.5 cm every meter), thus hardly noticeable. The height of each ’storey’ is 3 meters, so that when you walk 200 meters along the corridor, you have walked a full circle, but you end up one ’storey’ above or below your starting point. This results in a diameter of approximately 60 meters, therefore quite common for large skyscrapers. The corridor is on the outside, so that everybody has access to the fabulous views over the city. Offices are all on the inside. As the tower is hollow in the middle, and the inner diameter of the patio is still approximately 40 meters, this makes for a very nice light shaft with peaceful lighting conditions.

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This computer-controlled waterfall is simply stunning.

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Here’s an interesting write up for a project to build a Cintiq-like interactive pen tablet.

This is hybrid screen/graphics tablet which makes me drool. The price however makes me weep, £2000ish for the 20” version. They also do a thing called the PL at 17” for a more reasonable £500ish. Occasionally they appear on the site in their bargain basement ex-demo section. Still hard for me to justify though.

Then I had one of those “spang” moments. None of the tech involved is new and all is readily available second hand, it’s just a matter of putting it together. My Wacom at work will happily operate with the stylus off the surface, after that it’s just an LCD screen, right? Anyhow where’s the fun in just buying something?

The finished product:

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Wired has some great photos of buildings lit with LEDs at night.

Light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, are reinventing the look and feel of skylines, bridges, facades and other architectural surfaces around the globe. The light bulb is being unscrewed by energy-efficient LEDs that are both environmentally friendly and cost-effective. The $10.2 billion industry is growing to provide new design options for architects and planners.

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If you’ve ever needed to generate an image of planet, here’s one easy way to do so in Photoshop.

Using just one texture in Photoshop, I’m going to teach you how to make a planet that looks somewhat realistic although, in the end, whether it looks realistic or not is entirely up to you and the way you play with settings.

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