Hm, Shapeways has an API. If I were a skilled Web programmer I’d make a page where you can choose the size and frequencies of a Klein bagel model …

I made some progress on an old project: to make outline fonts based on some favorite old bitmap fonts, by automatic fitting of smooth curves to the sequences of dots.

(The image above is in Scalable Vector Graphic format. If you see nothing, you may – dare I say it – need to update your browser. It works in Firefox 5, Safari 5, Chrome 12, Kindle.) ( . . more . . )

I miss the popup menu of recent pages in this tab, that was beside the back/forward buttons in Firefox 3.

The bar at the bottom of the window has gone away, to save space for content; status notices now appear in floaters over content, in the same place. I’m not in love with this behavior.

Apple’s TextEdit refuses to save as .txt. What’s up wit dat?

I’ve long had an idea to design “outline” typefaces which, at appropriate low resolution, would mimic certain bitmap fonts that have sentimental resonance.

The orange discs are the original dots, of course. The blue arcs are least-squares fits (linear, quadratic) to subranges of the dots. The arcs are blended with a weighting function that favors longer arcs, as well as the middle of each arc. Finally, the stroke is thickened by adding ±i/2 to the parametric variable.

This is the first version in which the stroke-ends are neither brutally stiff nor (in some cases) grotesquely exuberant. I don’t know yet whether the lumpiness, here and there, reflects a flaw an opportunity to improve the blending function or a limitation of the cubic splines used to simplify the final curve.

(I previously made a TrueType version of Apple’s “Los Angeles” font, by a much more ad hoc approach.)

I just noticed that, in the time shown for posts and comments, the month-number appears in place of the minutes. From the format settings it seems to be a WordPress bug. It’s not the host or PHP, because in WordPress admin pages the time is correct.

I got AT&T DSL because it’s a third the price of Comcast. Suddenly things go wrong: I can’t write here, or back up this site; I can’t save my edits to a Wikipedia article; and an article at the New York Times never loads. (I’m writing this on Comcast.)