Damian’s notes

Here’s a really beautifully presented overview of animal onomatopoeia across languages. Genuinely interesting use of the scroll-capture technique to let the reader move through an illustrated article at their own pace.

(Via https://kottke.org/25/03/0046431-the-pudding-how-do-animal)

How do animals sound across languages? Analyzing animal onomatopoeia across languages can demystify how we shape sound into meaning.

Noted by Damian Cugley 1 week, 2 days ago.

Kris Sowersby on the design process for American Gothic, his revival of the venerable Franklin Gothic family of the early 1900s. This essay includes a discussion of the importance and ubiquity of Franklin Gothic, and is presented as a typographical tour-de-force, and looks amazing full-screen on a large monitor.

Klim Type Foundry • American Grotesk design information American Grotesk® is a reprisal of Franklin Gothic, which has staked its place as a key part of American graphic vernacular history, notably in persuasive communication. American Grotesk® appears in a time when truths, half-truths, lies, fiction, or entertainment seem interchangeable, resulting in a culture of personal truths.

Noted by Damian Cugley 1 week, 2 days ago.

Microsoft’s TypeScript is the latest JavaScript infrastructure project to rewrite in Go or Rust for the sake of speed. Microsoft have opted for Go. It will be funny if Go’s biggest user group turns out to be TypeScript programmers.

(Via Michael Tsai - Blog - Rewriting the TypeScript Compiler in Go)

A 10x Faster TypeScript - TypeScript Embarking on a native port of the existing TypeScript compiler and toolset to achieve a 10x performance speed-up.

Noted by Damian Cugley 2 weeks, 2 days ago.

Nolen Royalty (eieio) has created a web site for listing all UUIDs, in case you are having trouble remembering them all.

Writing down (and searching through) every UUID · eieio.games I couldn't remember every UUID so I wrote them all down

Noted by Damian Cugley 1 month, 2 weeks ago.

Today I learned there are language tags ‘en-001’ and ‘en-150’ for World and European English. The former is a better default than ‘en’, which browsers still associate with American-specific conventions like month-day-year dates.

The standard language codes for “World English” and “European English” The “en” language for English doesn’t mean World English but English (unspecified region). There’s another language code that does mean World English, however.

Noted by Damian Cugley 1 month, 2 weeks ago.

In this video from the V&A, artist Colin Reid shows us how he makes dramatic kiln-cast glass sculptures, starting with an impression made from the rocky shores of west Scotland.

How was it made? Kiln-casting a glass sculpture | Colin Reid

Noted by Damian Cugley 2 months ago.

Z85, a format for encoding arbitrary binary data as text, for transmission in text-based channels. In other words, like base64, except a bit more compact (using 5 characters to encode 4 bytes rather than 4 to encode 3).

(Via What’s New In Python 3.13)

32/Z85 This document specifies Z85, a format for representing binary data as printable text. Z85 is a derivative of existing Ascii85 encoding mechanisms, modified for better usability, particularly for use in source code. Preamble Copyright (c) 2013 iMatix Corporation. This Specification is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

Noted by Damian Cugley 3 months, 3 weeks ago.

A database of European (EU and EEA) alternatives to the cloud services and SaaS essentials that mostly come from more well-known American companies. By Constantin Graf, a software developer in Vienna.

(Via Ian Betteridge (@ianb@well.com))