Tag: history
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Pen testing
When testing a pen, some people write their name, some people scribble, and some write something. Dan looks at the history of testing pens, and shares his thoughts on what we can learn from the way that people go about testing a pen.
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TIL that in 1916, a conman called Sir Edmund Backhouse, claiming to be working for the Chinese government, sold the UK six (non-existent) battleships and an (imaginary) flotilla-load of rifles.
[since originally being published on Reddit, the resource in question has been moved to http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-30513]
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Jersey
JTA, Dan, Ruth, and her mother take a long-weekend holiday to the island of Jersey, and nobody kills anybody.
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TIL that minutes before the Halifax Explosion (the largest ever non-nuclear, man-made explosion), a dispatcher named Vince Coleman returned to his station to send a warning telegram, saving 300 lives at the cost of his own.
Patrick Vincent Coleman
Patrick Vincent Coleman (13 March 1872 – 6 December 1917) was a train dispatcher for the Canadian Government Railways (formerly the ICR, Intercolonial Railway of Canada) who was killed in the Halifax Explosion, but not before he sent a message to an incoming passenger train to stop out of range of the explosion. Today … -
The men who really invented the GUI
The IBM PC is not alone in having a significant anniversary this year. It is 25 years since Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniac started flogging Apple 1 circuit boards from a Palo Alto garage. But it was not until 1984 that the first Apple Mac made its appearance, with its revolutionary mouse-driven graphical user … -
Open-Source Shaving, part 2
Two years ago, Dan wrote about his journey from electric shavers (via disposable razors and a cartridge razor) to a traditional safety razor, and how it was a great decision. Now, that journey continues with an exploration of a single-blade safety razor and a shavette, and a look at a razor blade honing tool.
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The Back Button
After reading about Torsion Pendulum Clocks on Wikipedia, Dan asks the immortal question of any Wikipedia-surfer: "how did I get here?" It's time... for the Back Button!
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Fonts of the Ancients
Dan adds UTF-8 support to the CMS that powers the Bodleian Libraries' websites, and ponders how he'd justify the scope of Unicode to a (hypothetical) time-traveling scribe from ancient Egypt.
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Cinco de Mayo
By dressing as a Mexican, Dan gets free beer and free burritos on Cinco de Mayo.
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Roman Typesetters
When ancient Roman typesetters or web designers were showcasing a design, and didn't want the content of the (dummy) text on their mock-ups to distract the client... what did they use for their lorem ipsum text?
These are the kinds of things that bother me most when I'm doing typographic layout. That, and Internet Explorer's consistently … -
A Cynical Timeline Of The Internet
Bookmarked via del.icio.us: A Cynical Timeline Of The Internet.