Via Alphabettes, a link to Beyond TYPO, a whimsical new font that’s free to download:

The Beyond TYPO Font is a hybrid creature, mixing hand-made letters and amœba. A high saturation of OpenType makes the font come to life: auto-shuffling characters, fun alternates, crazy ligatures, and plenty of initial and final forms that grow one-celled creatures, trunks, legs, and miscellaneous biomorphic extensions at either end of your words and sentences.

Here’s an example:

Among the maps in the Island Imagined collection at the University of Prince Edward Island, my favourite are the Charlottetown Fire Insurance maps from the turn of the last century.

One of the great things about the digital versions of these maps is that it’s possible to experience them in great detail; here’s part of our block, for example, showing the Hickey & Nicholson tobacco factory:

While the digital has its distinct advantages, sometimes having an analog map in your hand has its own particular benefits. And so on the weekend Oliver and I, with an hour to kill out by Staples, decided to make some printing Charlottetown Fire Insurance maps of our own.  Here’s how we did it.

You’ll need a USB flash drive to copy map images onto.

First, we commandeered one of the display computers at Staples. We selected a MacBook, but there are many computers on display, and any of them will do. We went to the IslandImagined.ca site, and located the map we wanted to print first, the index map:

There is, unfortunately, no mechanism in the IslandImagined.ca viewer to request a high resolution suitable-for-printing version of the map, but it’s possible to obtain one through a little bit of manipulation:

Don’t zoom in: work from the map as it loads initially. With your mouse pointer over the map image, right click and select “Open Image in New Tab”:

In the new tab that opens up you’ll see a URL in the address bar that looks like this:

http://137.149.200.109:8080/fedora/get/imagined:208604/
ilives:jp2Sdef/getRegion?
uid=
&level=3
&region=0,0,505,429

You need to edit that URL to produce a higher-resolution version of the entire map by:

1. Change level=3 to level=10.
2. Remove the &region=0,0,505,429 entirely.

The resulting URL is:

http://137.149.200.109:8080/fedora/get/imagined:208604/
ilives:jp2Sdef/getRegion?
uid=
&level=10

Load up this URL and you’ll receive a very high resolution image. Copy this to image onto the USB stick, eject it, and take it over to one of Staples colour photocopiers in the print centre (be sure to look at the copier labels: only a couple of them are colour).

Insert the USB stick in the standalone terminal that’s beside the copier and follow the instructions to print a file from a USB stick; select the file you just copied, and, for best results, print on 11x17 inch paper.

Staples charges about $1.00 per copy, and the results are very impressive. We repeated the process 4 more times to get good coverage of our block and down to the Charlottetown waterfront.

You’re not limited to Charlottetown Fire Insurance maps, of course: there are over 1,000 maps in the Island Imagined collection to choose from, from very early maps to more recent ones, like Atlas of Province of Prince Edward Island, Canada and the World from 1927.

And of course you should note any rights restrictions in the map metadata (click the “Description” tab for any map) — many maps are labelled “This material is provided for research, education, and private use only. For all other uses, please contact the Prince Edward Island Museum and Heritage Foundation,” which shouldn’t prevent you from printing them for your own use, but likely means you shouldn’t print them on T-shirts and sell them.

While we’re on the topic of my eyes, here’s a snazzy scan of my left eye that Charlottetown Vision Care sent me after my last eye exam:

My optometrist Dr. Judson helpfully took me on a tour of what information is communicated here during my exam; I was distracted enough by the fact that I was looking at a detailed scan of my eyes with those same eyes themselves that I retained very little of what she told me, save “there’s nothing to worry about here.”

Here’s a selfie I took yesterday, retouched by my father; it’s becoming my new avatar, replacing the one that stood me in good stead for a year:

I’m wearing my new eyeglasses, just arrived Friday from Gaudet Optical in Halifax where I ordered them a couple of weeks ago. I ordered a pair of “computer glasses” at the same time, to use while I’m at my workstation, and I’ve been alternating between the two pairs over the weekend.

As the bifocal prescription in the glasses above — my “everyday” glasses — is someone increased, and the shape of the glasses is round as opposed to rectangular, and as the computer glasses have a completely different lens designed specifically for viewing a computer screen, my brain is exhausted at all the rewiring it’s having to do. I need to take a day and sit in a dark room just to give it a rest.

The “everyday” glasses come from the French company Anne & Valentin; the model is called “On the Wave,” a model that a Japanese website describes like this (in translation):

Full of handmade feeling like carved from stone texture features. A sense of volume that stand out with precisely machined edge, of Anne & Valentine unique to stick to handwork, our eyewear that captures the essence of beauty.

Something gets lost in the translation, but there are elements of truth there.

Something I hadn’t noticed until now — it’s hard to notice things on your eyeglasses when you’re wearing your eyeglasses — is a thin metal strip inlaid into the left arm:

I’ve no idea what the meaning of this is. But I’m the kind of guy who likes having mysterious symbols hidden in his eyeglasses, so it works for me.

Beyond the wonky brain adjustments required, and the secret inlay, the new glasses are something of a bold departure from the “get as innocuous a pair of glasses as possible” approach I’ve taken to eyewear selection in the past. The Gaudet Optical slogan is “fine eyewear from functional to outrageous,” and while these are by no means on the outrageous end of their spectrum – I saw some pretty amazing eyeglasses that hover around or beyond that end — they are by no means wholly functional either. They say something – I’m not sure what – and that’s a completely foreign concept for me. Needless to say, it took some gumption to go out of the house for the first time.

I was sad to learn this morning that architect Zaha Hadid has died.

My first experience of her work was when, in 2010, Oliver and I visited the Phaeno science museum in Wolfsburg that she designed. It’s a remarkable building: somehow it’s both round and jagged, existing on a single level and yet very deep. We’ve visited many, many science museums over the years and Phaeno was, by far and away, my favourite of the lot.

Later that same year we took a family trip to Basel, Switzerland and hopped across the Rhine one afternoon to visit the Vitra furniture factory where Hadid had been commissioned to design the fire station; it became the first of her buildings to be realized.

She was a great architect — perhaps the best of her generation. I’m so sad we won’t get to see what the next 30 years of her career would have produced.

It gives me no end of joy that what The Guardian describes as the “younger wing of the talented fiddling family,” the Chaissons, have stepped up to keep the Rollo Bay Fiddle Festival going. If you’ve never been to the festival, this year would be a good year to start: it’s July 15th to 17th, 2016.

And of course you should also go to the PEI Bluegrass and Old Time Music Festival, on the same grounds, from July 1 to 3, 2016; that this festival can live on at the same location is another spin-off of the youth wing doubling down.

We’re a family that uses the built-in Text-to-Speech capabilities of Mac OS X more than most: Catherine, Oliver and I all have different uses for it, but we all have our Macs reading to us every once in a while.

Macs have been able to speak for a long time, and the capability got a lot better when the new “Alex” voice was introduced in 2007 with the release of  Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. And it’s been Alex that we’ve been using for our reading ever since.

It turns out that there’s an even better voice than Alex in recent versions of Mac OS X, a voice called “Samantha” that sounds remarkably similar to the one that Siri uses on iOS devices. Apparently Samantha has been lurking in my Mac for some time, but I didn’t know about her. Here’s how to enable this voice.

Open System Preferences and click on Dictation & Speech:

Click on the Text to Speech tab and then on the list of “system voices”:

From the pop-up list of voices, select Customize…:

And in the pop-up list of customized voices, search for and then check the box beside Samantha:

Finally, select the Samantha system voice (it will take a few minutes to download):

Now, inside almost any Mac app you can select a passage of text and the, on the menu, select Edit > Speech > Start Speaking to hear Samantha read it to you:

But wait, there’s more! You can also have the Mac convert Samantha’s reading of any text into an audio file for later playback: just select the text, then right-click and select Add to iTunes as a Spoken Track:

You’ll see a pop-up asking you to select a voice and a filename:

A few moments later you’ll find a new track in iTunes:

Here’s what that I paragraph I selected sounds like:

Last week in Halifax we stopped in at DeSerres on Barrington Street and I bought a Buntbox, a two-piece (bottom and lid) cardboard box. 

Because they’re sold flat-pack, I’m thinking that I could print on the cover with my letterpress.

Turns out that Buntboxen can be ordered online from the manufacturer in Germany. Their website has a very slick widget for selecting the top and bottom colours that looks like this:

Ordered direct they are 2.36 € each; last week I paid $3.49 for mine. Which happens to be, at today’s exchange rate, exactly the same price. In other words, a good deal.

I love watching TV. I love talking about TV.

Somehow I’ve ended up with a group of friends who, mostly, have interest in neither watching TV nor talking about TV. I need to find a way of fixing that.

In the meantime, here are the shows that are keeping me up late at night these days:

• 11.22.63 — Based on a Stephen King novel and starring James Franco. Scratches my time travel itch and my 1960s nostalgia itch both.
• Billions — Stars the great Paul Giamatti and the equally great Damian Lewis: reason enough to watch. But there’s a great supporting cast and it’s tightly shot and edited with an compelling, pulsing sound track.
• Broad City — Sweary and otherwise profane and too much for some in the household. But I love it.
• Colony — Science fiction from the LOST team and starring Josh Holloway from that series. Aliens invade earth. There’s a shimmering wall around Los Angeles. Hijinks ensue. It’s better than he average cable sci-fi.
• Madam Secretary — There are some strong Téa Leoni feelings, pro and con, in my sibling community (pretty well the only people who will engage me in talk about TV these days); I’m on the pro side. This ain’t no West Wing, and it’s a little too much like The Waltons from time to time, but it’s got enough to keep me watching.
• The A Word — Currently airing on the BBC. Inevitably controversial as it portrays the life of a family where one child is on the autism spectrum, and how can you get that right. It may or may not be an accurate portrayal of life on the spectrum, but the first episode at least suggests it’s a pretty good approximation of life of parents of someone on the autism spectrum.
• The Americans — Just started back up after a long hiatus. More deliberative than I generally like, especially in recent episodes, but I enjoy the 1970s spy nostalgia. Could go either way this season.
• The Blacklist — James Spader. That’s all you need to know. Confusing by times, and dragging a little these days, but still, James Spader.
• The Catch — Mireille Enos (The Killing) and Peter Krause (Sports Night, Six Feet Under) star. It’s got shades of The Thomas Crown Affair. I love a good caper series.
• The Night Manager — Hugh Laurie and Tom Hiddleston star in this BBC series written by John le Carré. Locations are delicious; supporting cast is talented, and Laurie and Hiddleston are a joy to watch.

Filling in the gaps otherwise are Modern Family, Scandal, and The Big Bang Theory.

And I’m waiting for new seasons of Casual, Catastrophe, Homeland, Mozart in the Jungle, Mr. Robot, Narcos, Sherlock, Shipping Wars, The Affair, The Code, The Man in the High Castle, UnREAL and You’re the Worst.

Oh, and that crop of comic book-derived shows that I watched a lot of last year – Agents of SHIELD, Agent Carter, Arrow, Flash, Gotham: I’ve completely lost interest in them. To the point where I wonder how I ever had any.

When I was 10 years old, in 1976, I had a radio in my bedroom that, in addition to receiving on the regular AM and FM bands, also picked up the audio of TV broadcasts. And so, perhaps unbeknownst to my parents, I would often go to sleep with the radio under my bed, a single earphone running up to my pillow, listening to whatever TV show it could pick up.

The show I remember most was All’s Fair, a politically-themed sitcom starring Bernadette Peters and Richard Crenna. What’s most remarkable, looking back, is that I never actually saw the show on a television: I only listened to it on the radio: I had no idea what the actors looked like, or where it was set. And, at 10 years old, I likely had little idea of the dynamics of “she’s a liberal, he’s a conservative” relationship at the core of the plot. But I was, nonetheless, a regular listener.

The show only lasted a single season; apparently it wasn’t remarkable enough to others to have made it into syndication or a Netflix revival as other shows of that era have. The only video evidence of the show that survives digitally is the opening credit sequence on YouTube: