A Detailed & Illustrated Compendium of Recent Designs (1921-present)
San Francisco’s signature street signs have gone through a number of subtle revisions in design and typography. I’ve written at length about the complete history of street signage in the city going all the way back to the Gold Rush era, and even created a font based on my favorite sign lettering style.
In this article, I’m going to go into a bit more detail on just the variants of signage and typography. To make the comparisons clear, I’m going to use the examples of signage taken from just one street…
Some of the art works chosen in the 1990 heist have puzzled analysts. The Museum’s own self-published Guide offers some uncanny clues to the haul.
When I was a kid growing up in the Boston suburbs, we lived next door to the family of would-be art thief Brian McDevitt. He was briefly a suspect in arguably the most spectacular modern art heist: the overnight robbery of Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in March of 1990. McDevitt almost certainly wasn’t involved, but even as a kid we heard whispers about it. The caper was a big deal.
Want to recap an original Naim NAIT? Here’s what the authorized shops use.
Warning: extremely niche-audience post ahead.
I’ve recently had the opportiunity to perform a service and calibration on an original Naim NAIT integrated amplifier (new capacitors and bias adjustment). Fortunately I have also been able to look inside an identical model that had a dealer service and recap in 2018, so I could see what was used then.
I based my service component choices off of the dealer-serviced model and also off of the incredibly detailed post on Hi-Fi AF about recapping the very similar NAIT 2 (1988)…
If you’re eligible for the shot, just go ahead and take it.
Over the past month, I’ve spoken to more than one friend who has become eligible for the covid vaccine, signed up to get it, and then come down with a case of ethical self-doubt. These friends are what you would describe as generally healthy middle-aged people, and not directly in the line of medical fire. But for various reasons (the nature of their employer, body mass index, etc) they have become eligible. …
Digital art and collectibles are a rich vein of opportunity, but this isn’t the way.
I don’t live under a rock, but I’d never even heard of “NFTs” until about a month ago, and now they are absolutely everywhere. Mainstream artists and pop acts are “minting” digital collectibles, artists are auctioning off image files for tens of millions of dollars. Very few trends emerge so widely this without pointing toward some problem that wanted solving. But the current ecosytem springing up around NFTs is a confusing mess, slow and expensive.
I spent some time as a total normie trying to…
San Francisco streetscapes feel fun and weird and creative and human now
Sometimes good things don’t require a decades-long policy process. Most good things, I’d venture. The Covid-19 pandemic upset business-as-usual everywhere, and San Francisco’s bureaucracy was no exception. The city fast-tracked temporary dining parklets and an aggressive “Shared Spaces” program (weekend street closures for pedestrians) breezily, reallocating chunks of public space away from cars and in turn hugely improving civic life.
Who knew people like eating and hanging out outdoors?
It’s crucial now to recognize that although these programs (and others like them) were created to be nominally temporary, San Francisco should embrace the deep good in what it’s managed to…
Designer Jerry Manock clarifies the Apple II’s color and production history.
I recently published a fairly well-circulated investigation on the origins and specific color known as “Apple Beige,” based on a surviving jar of original touch-up paint from the 1970s. This was the shade of the first Apple computer to have a case.
My conclusions, based on available written sources, were wrong. Or, in any case, incomplete. Jerry Manock, the original designer of the iconic cases and the person most closely associated with Apple Beige, was kind enough to respond in detail to my inquiries following the article. …
.rgba is the dumbest possible image interchange format, for your programming pleasure.
TL;DR
Join me in supporting this dumbest of all possible bitmap image formats to make writing little tools and programs with images easier for everyone. It’s called RGBA and it stores your RGBA data. Here’s some free code if you want some, but the whole spec is up there in the scribble. Have at it.
Why this revolutionary idea?! and why now?
It’s time for a bitmap image interchange format that you can read and write comprehensively with the barest minimum of code and zero edge cases. The RGBA format I am proposing here is the…
The startup’s opportunity is not conference calls, it’s never-ending drive-time radio
Remember when the back of everyone’s toilet had a pile of magazines on it?Those magazine piles vanished with the advent of the mobile internet. Today, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are never-ending sources of content you can tune into in those spare moments, to occupy that part of your brain. Clubhouse — the new darling of Silicon Valley and the extremely online set — may have hit upon a rich vein of similar desperation, and if the company navigates it correctly, could become just as essential.
Stratechery’s Ben Thompson wrote about Clubhouse’s opportunity last week. Economics of podcasts and blogging aside…
Help me solve a linguistic mystery. Does that question sound right to you?
I grew up in New England, and when I go to sleep at 10pm, that’s how I say it: “I went to sleep at 10 last night.” Sleep, as a verb, only describes the action over a time span, as in, “I slept for a full 8 hours.”
But in the years that I’ve lived on the west coast of the US, I’ve heard many people say things like “I slept at 10 last night,” meaning that that was the time they went to sleep. Similarly, they…
