Towse: views from the hill

September 24, 2007

A collection of typography links

Filed under: blog,design,URL — Towse @ 11:32 pm

Typographic Collaboration | Typophile

Typographica a journal of typography featuring news, observations, and open commentary on fonts and typographic design.

typography a photoset on flickr

viaLetter Spell it out

Jules Vernacular Lettres oeuvrières & incongruités typographiques. French signage and lettering from Jack Usine.

Triborough’s photos of NYC Transit Authority Graphics Standards Manual = a flickr photoset

Zuzana Licko and Rudy VanderLans at Emigre

Typetester – compare screen type

FontFeed a font blog

Citroën ad

Filed under: blog,culture,media,URL — Towse @ 10:30 pm

[via the brilliant collection of advertisements at I believe in advertising]

July 19, 2007

Visuwords™ online graphical dictionary

Filed under: URL,wordstuff — Towse @ 9:51 pm

Visuwords™ online graphical dictionary

Visuwords™ online graphical dictionary — Look up words to find their meanings and associations with other words and concepts. Produce diagrams reminiscent of a neural net. Learn how words associate.

Enter words into the search box to look them up or double-click a node to expand the tree. Click and drag the background to pan around and use the mouse wheel to zoom. Hover over nodes to see the definition and click and drag individual nodes to move them around to help clarify connections.

* It’s a dictionary! It’s a thesaurus!
* Great for writers, journalists, students, teachers, and artists.
* The online dictionary is available wherever there’s an internet connection.
* No membership required.

Visuwords™ uses Princeton University’s WordNet, an opensource database built by University students and language researchers. Combined with a visualization tool and user interface built from a combination of modern web technologies, Visuwords™ is available as a free resource to all patrons of the web.

I popped in “errata” and … nada. “brigadoon” … nada.

I popped in “graffiti” and made two connections.

… then I popped in “giant”

How fun is this?

“literature”

And “encomium” begets “panegyrist” and “prosody” begets “hypercatalectic.”

Fun!

July 11, 2007

Added del.icio.us cloud tag

Filed under: app,URL,web2.0 — Towse @ 1:17 am

Added my del.icio.us cloud tag over in the righthand sidebar ’cause I think it’s purty.

(Yes, I know that tag clouds have been called the new mullet, but I like having it there. Of course my blog-based cloud tag means that even your grandma has one and it might be time to take yours off your site.)

Most of the bookmarks I imported from Firefox to del.icio.us are still in the “needs to be looked at before they’re added” stage but I decided 500+ were enough to make a decent tag cloud.

total links @ del.icio.us: 3509 links (and counting).
“still need to be looked at”: 2970+

Some of those links go back to April 1995, back when Yahoo! was just a wonderful collection of links on akebono.stanford.edu, back when I was thrilled to watch the cam pointed at the Trojan Room coffee pot at Cambridge.

Eventually almost all the links will be available on del.icio.us, but it’ll take some time. I’m checking each link to see if it still works and still goes somewhere I care about, adding tags, &c. and so on.

What an exciting life I lead.

June 29, 2007

StumbleUpon – SalT’s Web site reviews

Filed under: app,life,URL,webstuff — Towse @ 5:47 pm

StumbleUpon – SalT’s StumbleUpon Web site reviews

Since I started with StumbleUpon umpty ump (March 17, 2004) years ago, I’ve rated 1777 sites and, must admit, sometimes spend months without checking in. These days I not only put links on my blog but also put links on Tumblr and links on del.icio.us and, sometimes, on StumbleUpon.

I’m not dutiful about my StumbleUpon duties.

Obviously. …

Just came across starspirit, who has rated 124,289 sites.

Zounds. Even gmc has only rated 17962 but then he’s been busy building SU into something eBay wanted to buy.

June 27, 2007

FOIA – CIA releases the "Family Jewels"

Filed under: history,politics,resource,URL — Towse @ 12:48 am

Available online at the CIA FOIA site

Two significant collections of previously classified historical documents are now available in the CIA’s FOIA Electronic Reading Room.

The first collection, widely known as the “Family Jewels,” consists of almost 700 pages of responses from CIA employees to a 1973 directive from Director of Central Intelligence James Schlesinger asking them to report activities they thought might be inconsistent with the Agency’s charter.

The second collection, the CAESAR-POLO-ESAU papers, consists of 147 documents and 11,000 pages of in-depth analysis and research from 1953 to 1973. The CAESAR and POLO papers studied Soviet and Chinese leadership hierarchies, respectively, and the ESAU papers were developed by analysts to inform CIA assessments on Sino-Soviet relations.

According to ABC News The recruitment of mafia men to plan the assassination of Fidel Castro, the wiretapping and surveillance of journalists who reported on classified material, and the two-year confinement in the United States of a KGB defector — those are just a few of the past CIA activities revealed in documents released Tuesday. [...]

Update:A more in-depth look at some of the “activities inconsistent with the Agency’s charter” from The Seattle PI.

June 25, 2007

[URL] Swivel

Filed under: information,resource,URL,webstuff — Towse @ 5:17 pm

Love data and mashups and obscure weird factoids and coincidences?

Check out Swivel.

For a taste of what’s on-site, check out Tasty Data Goodies

June 15, 2007

Badgers! Foxes! Rabbits!

Filed under: app,life,URL,webstuff — Towse @ 11:13 pm

Badgers! Foxes! Rabbits!

New tumbleblog for stashing interrrrresting stuff. Between del.icio.us (still processing thousands of bookmarked URLs) and tumblr and stumbleupon and twitter … I’m getting all Web2.0′d out.

[URL] morguefile.com Where photo reference lives.

Filed under: photographs,resource,URL — Towse @ 2:12 pm

morguefile.com Where photo reference lives.

A place to keep post production materials for use of reference, an inactive job file. This morgue file contains free high resolution digital stock photography for either corporate or public use.

The term ‘morgue file’ is popular in the newspaper business to describe the file that holds past issues flats. Although the term has been used by illustrators, comic book artist, designers and teachers as well. The purpose of this site is to provide free image reference material for use in all creative pursuits. This is the world wide web’s morguefile.

Amazing resource. (Oooh. Shiny! Pretty pictures!) Thanks, SourGrapes.

June 14, 2007

An hour with Gavin and next year’s budget

Filed under: libraries,San Francisco,URL — Towse @ 9:12 pm

Found a link at the Sentinel to a video of Gavin presenting the 2007-2008 budget. Scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on the photograph of Gavin to commence viewing.

The video (and the presentation) clocks in at just under an hour. Luckily, with a video you can click on the pause button if you just can’t spend an hour watching him go over his proposed $6b budget.

If Gavin hasn’t had a speech coach, he doesn’t need one. If he has had one, that person should crow. I love watching Gavin in action. Smooth, so very smooth. Even those who don’t like his message usually admit he speaks well. Watch the hands. Watch the movement back and forth with the microphone. Watch the facial expressions and listen to that roughened voice with just a bit of folksy drawl. Self deprecation. Public nods to the good things done by those rascally supervisors. Thanks, Tom Ammiano. Thanks, Ross Mirkarimi. Close your eyes and you can almost picture Clinton (that’s Bill Clinton, not Senator Clinton) up at the podium.

If you don’t have the patience to listen to Gavin ‘xplain the budget, he did mention something cool near the very end of his presentation. This year you can access the proposed budget on line, hot links and all.

Well, that’s all very well and good but I couldn’t for the life of me find the proposed $$ for the public library. (Shouldn’t the library be under Arts and Culture or somewhere like that? I searched everywhere) I finally had to break down and pull up the Mayor’s Budget Book to find the answers to my questions.

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