Wolfram Alpha assumes that banana is a food. It’s a fair assumption; I ate two of them this morning. Wolfram Alpha also knows about bananas as a species, a color, a word, a language or as a “general material”. I now know that the specific heat capacity of a banana is 3.35 Joules per gram per degree Centigrade. Water, if I remember correctly, has a specific heat capacity of 4.12 J/g/°C.
Wiktionary helpfully reminds us that the correct pronunciation of banana is /bəˈnɑ:nə/.
Ask Jeeves suggested the following questions (and answers):
Why do monkeys like bananas? They don’t.
Is a banana a fruit? No. It is a herb.
Is a banana a herb? No. It is a fruit.
Where can I find a banana? Bananas are worth $4000.
Are you fed up with bringing bananas to work or school only to find them bruised and squashed? Our unique, patented device allows for the safe transport and storage of individual bananas letting you enjoy perfect bananas anytime, anywhere.
A revelation. However the FAQ page is fairly disturbing:
Q: “Is there a battery attachment?” A: No. The Banana Guard was designed for its intended purpose only as a device to prevent banana trauma during transport.
XLII. In Which Simon Sums Up A Few Ways In Which You Can Use Typefaces Of Your Choosing On The Web.
Imagine, if you will, this largely hypothetical scenario; you’re writing a blog that just happens to make occasional mention of a certain character, for example the capital R of Helvetica. Obviously, you’d like everybody reading your blog to see the majestic typography involved, but how to do it? Because, of course, not everybody has Helvetica installed on their computer, or other device. They might be using Windows, or be some kind of Helvetica-hating hipster or maybe even both. Here then, are a few of the options available to you:
Use CSS and hope for the best
If you’re the easy-going type, you could just apply some CSS styling and hope for the best. If your readers have Helvetica, they can enjoy your words in all of their intractable, emotionless, Swiss glory; otherwise you can specify a list of increasingly unfavourable alternatives, ending in the slightly ominous sans-serif. This, coincidentally, is how I roll.
Attempt some voodoo with typeface.js
Another option is to use something like typeface.js — a javascript library that allows you to embed specially converted versions of font files into your web pages. The end results look pretty good, and you have a fair amount of control over things like spacing and ratios. Alas, the real world comes knocking; I’d rate the chances of it working on your average (i.e. rubbish) PC as moderate at best, and you’re only supposed to convert fonts you have an appropriate licence for, which you probably don’t.
If that’s all a bit too frontier for you; the forthcoming Typekit may suit your needs. It’s going to be another standard for embedding fonts into web pages, but with a library of licenced typefaces at your disposal. It hasn’t been announced which foundries they’re working with yet though, so we’ll have to wait and see if Helvetica is on the menu.
Show a picture of some text
Sometimes, you really do need some text to appear exactly as you intend it to. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that you were trying to demonstrate the phallic qualities of the R in Helvetica. All of that penis-y goodness would be utterly lost on somebody whose browser had fallen back to, say, Arial. By showing a picture of some text, you can make it show up exactly as you would like, garish pink gradient and all. With appropriate alternative text, you can even make it mean the same, semantically speaking. Of course, it won’t be resizable or selectable or any of the other useful things that text is, but such is life. By the way:
XII. In Which Simon Shares An Unsettling Discovery And So Contributes To The TYPO3 Community.
Sorry, I’ve been reading Around the World in 80 Days and every chapter starts like that; I think it’s pretty catchy though, no reason why it should just be Jules Verne’s thing.
Meanwhile, I’ve posted a code snippet up at Snipplr that describes how to create a simple navigation menu in typoscript with different classes for the first and last items. Why? Well, it’s the difference between this (which is wrong):
And this (which is right or, at least, less wrong):
See the difference? Of course you do. That final trailing vertical pipe in the top image just grinds my gears, it’s so… extraneous. Anyway, I spent far too much time trawling through German language mailing lists to find the answer to this (relatively simple) problem, and so I felt I should give something back. You see Richard Stallman? Do you see? I’m doing it! I’m doing it.
Have you ever said a word so often that it stops making sense? This is how I feel about the letter R. Over the past couple of years, I have spent far more time looking at capital Rs than anyone ever should, and it’s begun to dawn on me — this letter does not make sense.
Bonus points to anyone who can spot the difference between Helvetica and Helvetica Neue:
And for those interested in such things, today’s guests were — (top) Arial, Bell Gothic, and Futura; (middle) Gill Sans, Helvetica, and Helvetica Neue; and (bottom) Impact, Myriad Pro and Verdana.
This post is a little autobiographical — sorry about that. Since I last posted on here; I’ve finished university, got a job and moved to Brighton with the lovely Claire. We have a couple of kittens who are very cute. I’ll be writing about some of my own stuff soon (I had an awesome dream about a procedurally generated unicorn-flight simulator that I just have to code one day) but for now I thought I’d catch up on some of what I’ve been doing at 3ev since I started working there last August.
At the moment, I’m busily working on the new Twinings website. This is pretty excellent for me, as it combines my love of web development with my love of hot infusions. Previously on 3ev:
The Chemical Brothers: A Google Earth app which flies you through user-generated content by Chemical Brothers fans around the world. It’s a wonderful project, the second thing I ever worked on at 3ev, and it gave me an excuse to listen to Star Guitar over and over. Not many people seem to actually use it, but such is life. This is the project where I learnt the joys and frustrations of working with Google APIs.
Sing Up: A TYPO3 driven site for a government initiative to get children singing. The children sing about caterpillars, spaghetti and a variety of other jolly things. This is the first thing I ever worked on at 3ev and, as such, it holds a special place in my heart. Working on this site introduced me to the mighty behemoth of a CMS that is TYPO3.
Malvern College: For this private school we made an intranet and a public site, both of which use Involve (shameless flag waving ahead); a front-end WYSIWYG interface to TYPO3 developed by 3ev. These sites taught me to marvel at the fact that some people can build entire operating systems by making bits of free software (”free” as in Stallman) talk to each other.
For my final, big, worth-too-many-marks-to-mess-up, project; I’ve been making my own VOIP application. Like Skype, but for the sake of art. It’s been… tricky. Before I get into it too much though, here’s an MP3 sample of how it sounds.
If you listened to the clip, allow me to translate. I’m saying, “Hello, my name is Simon Grout and this is my project”; followed by some whistling. Obviously. There are two lots of reasons why the audio sounds like this; there are technical reasons and then there are critical / contextual reasons (which sound made up). (more…)
Here’s the animation I did for the narrative module a few weeks ago; this is my first (and most probably last) animation. It’s about a scientist who decides to see what happens if the Schrödinger’s cat experiment is carried out for real:
And so, the last module of the course is finished. Unless you count dissertation as a module. And the final project. But anyway, the last taught module is done!
My space project, titled Helvetica in Space now has it’s own page (which I really, really should test in a browser other than Safari); with a video and everything. And yes, it’s still got capital Rs in it…
