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Mystery font identified!

Mystery font

Update: It's identified! Thanks to the commenters who quickly identified the font as Textile. This was a font Apple distributed with OS 9, but never OS X. When I last upgraded my machine, I didn't bother to reinstall Classic, since I never used it. However, I did keep a disk image of Classic around on a backup, so I'm now set once again with Textile--thanks again for the fast response!

About five years ago, I created a project for an event at my wife's employer. What started as something small and simple grew into (of course) something large and complex. But the event was a success, so the efforts were worth it.

Fast forward five years, and the company would love it if I could update the presentation to cover their latest five years. No problem, I think, as I've managed to keep all the project files intact over the years. But I can't say the same for my Macs. I believe I've upgraded twice since I originally created the project (in iMovie2, as a reference point). And whatever font it is I used in the project has long since vanished.

Now that I'm updating it, however, I need to know what font I used--I'm sure it's on a disk around here somewhere, but I have no idea what it might be called. Since I'm far from a font expert, I figured I'd ask for some assistance. How about it? Anyone have any thoughts on what font family I might have used?

Thanks!



How not to rename your TV network

Over the last week or so, I've been watching a fair bit of the Tour de France on OLN TV. When OLN launched a few years back, it was The Outdoor Life Network. As their programming expanded, they shortened that (thankfully) to OLN TV. But as of September, as they've seemingly been telling me every 10 minutes for several hours each morning, they're becoming Versus. Quoting from their press release:

Versus was the name that consistently rose to the top in focus group after focus group. Sports fans felt it was not only strong, but that it conveyed an idea and an energy that suggests a network experience centered on competition.

While I certainly don't disagree with the fact that the name suggests a network experience focused on competition, I'm not so sure that makes it a great name for a network. Personally, I think it just sounds silly, and it will make watercooler conversations more difficult. "Hey, did you catch that NHL game on Versus last night?"..."Is Versus going to show the Tour today?" Maybe it's just me, but Versus as a network name just seems wrong, somehow.

What's really sad is that they probably spent a fair bit of money on the research and focus groups to find their new identity. Add in the costs of rebranding all your merchandise, print ads, and online graphics, and we're talking about a huge investment of capital. And all of that for Versus? If we're going to use full English words, why not Compete or Battle or Strive or Match?

Perhaps I'm old fashioned, but I prefer network names that aren't full-on words. Give me ABC, NBC, ESPN, TNT, etc. over Discovery (though as words go, that one's pretty good), Lifetime, or Biography. Why? I'm not sure, other than they're easier to work into conversation without worrying about context, and they're much quicker to type :).

I guess I'll have to adjust, but Versus will always probably always be OLN around our home. And speaking of OLN, I have to get back to the time trial now!



Site upgrade (basically) done…

We're now running on WordPress 2.0.3, and most everything is back to how it was pre-upgrade. There are some exceptions (no more 'latest unread comments'), and I'll be tweaking things over the next few days, but the main stuff is done. Ahhhhh.
-rob.



Just the iPod facts, ma’am

Macworld logoLast Friday, a relatively huge article in the Living section of The Oregonian caught my eye. As you can see in the picture at right (hover and click for a larger version), it was hard to miss this article.

Paper imageExpecting to find a shocking exposé on the hidden faults of the iPod, I started reading...and started getting angry. The article was nothing more than a writeup on one user's connectivity issues between her iPod nano and a Toshiba laptop. That alone would have been fine. But the article attempts to bring in other "evidence" of iPod nano flaws, and that's where I feel it overstepped the bounds of reasonable journalism (even for something in Living).

So I wrote up my thoughts for Macworld's site, as I felt it was unfair to let something like this sit without some form of response. I have also sent the paper a copy of my writeup, though I'm not expecting much in the way of follow up.



Why isn’t macosxhints.com a wiki?

A couple mornings back, while browsing my collection of feeds in NetNewsWire, I came across this entry about macosxhints.com in Chris Clark's excellent blog, decaffeinated. Chris writes:

MacOSXHints is a community-driven site operated by Mac Publishing LLC (of Macworld and Playlist renown) whose sole purpose is to collect and archive--wait for it--hints pertaining to Mac OS X...little tidbits you probably won’t find in the help files or product pages.

... ... ...

What we have is a thriving community site that houses a great number of hints, some percentage of them broken or redundant, most of which could be improved upon (and are, if you bother to read the comments) with the aid of a few dozen eyes.

This isn’t what blogs are for. This is what wikis are for.

So why isn’t MacOSXHints a wiki?

An interesting question to read, especially just after waking up. And it would have been interesting to reply in a comment on Chris' site, but...it seems there's no ability to do so. (Perhaps I should post a story about why decaffeinated should really be a blog that takes comments? :) ). So I'm posting my reply here, in case anyone's interested in the answer to the question.

The question about macosxhints.com is a valid one, and one that's potentially even more interesting when asked at a higher level...

Important note: The following thoughts are my opinions (and historical knowledge) only. They are in no way associated with any official MacPublishing, LLC company policies or plans. Anything I write about what I'd like to see on macosxhints.com is just that--what I'd personally like to see happen to the site going forward. They are not statements of official plans by MacPublishing for the macosxhints.com site (but we are discussing many of these same things internally).

[continue reading…]



Good riddance, haunted house!

We've lived in our present home for a bit more than two years, and we're generally quite happy with it. However, the floor has always been very squeaky, especially in the carpeted areas. When someone was walking around, it really did sound like a haunted house at times, what with all the eery squeaking from the floor.

Although the noise annoyed me, it never did so enough to merit moving all the furniture, pulling up the carpeting, and fixing the problem with some nails. Nor was I much interested in trying to solve it from below, in our roughly 18" tall crawl space. So I just put up with it. Until this week.

A while back, someone told me about this ingenious device that would help you fix squeaky floors without pulling carpet or entering the crawlspace. I was doubtful, and just never seemed to have enough time to investigate further. But with some time off the last couple weeks for the new child (and family in town to help babysit), I finally tracked down the device at Home Depot. It's called (I am not making this up) Squeeeeek No More, and it looks like this (click for a larger version):

Squeek tool

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You’re downloading what?!

Firefox download

I saw this as I was downloading Firefox for Windows XP (running in Parallels Workstation on my Intel mini). Needless to say, given the horror stories I'd heard about Windows' security, my first thought was 'my XP box has been hacked!' A bit of research, though, proved that this is a legit Firefox mirror...albeit one that may cause issues for those downloading from, say, government agencies, large companies, or anyone else likely to have an Internet filtering solution in place.

BTW, if you have an Intel-powered Mac, do yourself a favor and check out Parallels--it's really pretty amazing being able to run any number of guest operating systems at near-native speeds, all within the friendly confines of OS X. I wrote about my experiences with it for a recent Macworld piece, and included a video that shows XP's speed on the Core Duo mini. Today's release of Parallels beta5 included basic USB device support (flash drives only for now), as well as the beginnings of a nice shared folder solution for sharing data with the host OS X machine.



An April Fool’s Day reject

Tiny iPod imageFor the past few years on April Fool's Day, I've run some sort of prank announcement on macosxhints.com--everything from switching to WindowsXP hints to the triple-CPU G5 Cubed to running OS X on an iPod to this year's 30th Anniversary Mac.

When thinking about what to do for this year, the Apple Music/Apple Computer lawsuit was getting a lot of press. Using that as the setup, I thought I'd run a cool story about a new Apple/Apple agreement that would finally put Beatles music on iPods. I even went so far as to mock up a line of special edition iPods created just for the occasion. Ultimately, I trashed the concept and went with the Intel/PowerPC Mac, but I thought I'd share the Beatles Special Edition iPod designs here (click the image for a larger version):

Beatle iPods

I had written up most of the story, too, but that's long since gone. The only other thing I have left is the sales flyer sheet I put together with some specs on the units--you can see the full-size flyer by clicking on the small image at the top right of this story. You'll see a full view of each iPod, along with some tech notes about the units. Be aware that the full-size image is a 173KB PNG file, so those with modems (are there any of you?) may wish to avoid doing that.

In the end, I felt the Intel/PowerPC thing would be more interesting, so that's what I went with. But when I look at the custom iPods, I think "geez, if Apple offered some sort of custom iPod image silkscreening feature, I'd probably buy one." I think they'd look much more interesting than the current plain black or white versions, based on looking at even my relatively poor Photoshop work. And it'd be a nice way to customize your unit, by including an image of your choice directly on the machine itself.



Strange things afoot at the San Luis

weird waterI was playing around with Google Earth (a recent Pick of the Week over on macosxhints) tonight, when I stumbled across the very odd image you see here.

For those of you who have Google Earth, here's a location file that will take you right to the spot. It's the San Luis reservoir, located in California off of highway 152, between Highway 101 and I-5. (I used to drive this road often when making the trek from San Jose to Los Angeles.)

The oddity is--what's with the bottom third of the reservoir? Has it really frozen solid along an arrow-straight line? Has it been converted into salt flats? Some strange cover to prevent the satellites from seeing what's hiding in the lake?

If you zoom in using Google Earth, you can see that the odd fill color runs precisely along the edge of one particular 'piece' of the overall image, so it's clearly just a glitch in the satellite or the software that processes the images. It definitely caught my eye, though.



This is going to take a while…

Expander box

2,023,406,814 hours! Wow! By my calculations, that's roughly 84,308,617 days, or 230,824 years, give or take a half-year or so. I hope the dual dual-core Intel-based Pro desktops are released soon; it seems I really need a faster Mac!

In all seriousness, this archive actually expanded relatively rapidly. However, I think the structure of the archive really messed up StuffIt's estimating abilities. The archive was a 220MB file containing Italian scenery files for the X-Plane flight sim. After expansion, it contains about 1,350 files, spread across 74 folders. While that doesn't seem overly excessive to me, apparently it's enough to greatly confuse StuffIt!