Toluu

The Quality Without A Name

Rob Mayoff's Blog.

Kindle typography goes craptacularMay 17 2009

I have a Kindle 2. The built-in font used for book text is apparently Caecilia. I scanned my Kindle displaying a page of Cryptonomicon at the smallest font size. Here’s a picture that is actual size if you have a 96 dpi display. Click on it for a 600 dpi image.

Now I’m reading Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life on my Kindle. Here’s what it looks like.

Notice how the crossbar on the first character, a capital T, is barely visible? The Kindle is displaying five capital Ts on that page. Here they are.

How to ship a used CDMay 13 2009

I ordered a used copy of the old game “Full Throttle” from amazon.com. Today I received this envelope:

Here’s the contents of the envelope, as I received at:

Classy!

Talking to ghosts in movies these days oughtn’t be so crazy.April 21 2009

We just watched Ghost Town, in which (surprise!) Bertram Pincus (the main character) can see and hear ghosts. So he talks to them and of course in various scenes he gets funny looks.

All he need do is wear a bluetooth headset. It doesn’t even have to be turned on. Everyone will just find him annoying, not nutty.

Trying to remember how to fall asleepApril 21 2009

Every night of late I lie awake trying to remember how to fall asleep. I go through periods where I fall asleep easily and periods where I don’t.

When I was a senior in high school, one of my friends was a Japanese foreign exchange student named Tetsuya Toyoda. He was in orchestra. I can’t remember if Tetsuya was a cellist, but he invited me to go to a performance by a cellist (with piano accompaniment). So we went to some auditorium and listened to the cellist play. Well, Tetsuya listened. I listened for a while and had a very hard time staying awake. Eventually I just gave up and went to sleep.

Maybe I can hire a cellist to play me to sleep each night. Or maybe Delia would like cello lessons.

Typing ⟦ and ⟧ in MathematicaMarch 26 2009

Mathematica uses doubled brackets for indexing: “x[[1]]” means the first element of x.  It also supports special characters for indexing; they look like “x〚1〛“. The special characters are nice because they take less space (when displayed by Mathematica) and look quite different.

To type the special characters in Mathematica, you have to press ␛[[␛ and ␛]]␛. I found a tip for typing them more easily.  Add these lines to KeyEventTranslations.tr:

Item[KeyEvent["[", Modifiers -> {Control}], FrontEndExecute[{FrontEnd`NotebookWrite[FrontEnd`InputNotebook[], "\[LeftDoubleBracket]", After]}]], Item[KeyEvent["]", Modifiers -> {Control}], FrontEndExecute[{FrontEnd`NotebookWrite[FrontEnd`InputNotebook[], "\[RightDoubleBracket]", After]}]],

This lets you type control-[ to insert 〚 and control-] to insert 〛.

I don’t know why Mathematica uses 〚 and 〛 (which are characters x301a and x301b from the CJK Symbols and Punctuation range) instead of ⟦ and ⟧ (which are x27e6 and x27e7 from the Miscellanous Math Symbols-A range).