A while ago I submitted a font I've been working on to dafont, a site that makes fonts freely available for download. They screen submissions before placing them on the site, so today I checked back to see if they'd accepted it. They have, and you can see it here.
The fonts on the site use a wide range of licenses, depending on the author, representing pretty much the full gamut of licenses that don't require payment up front. If you want to see ones you have to pay for, there are other sites, but dafont has the distinction of being the first result when you search for the word "font" on Google, so I thought that would make a good starting point for distribution.
In the case of Blooming Grove, I have released the font into the public domain. Personally I feel that this makes the font more useful, since it removes restrictions that might otherwise prevent it from being used in unanticipated ways. A lot of custom font licenses, for instance, are not compatible with @font-face embedding. In some cases (e.g., Larabie) that's a deliberate choice, which is the author's prerogative, but in other cases it's probably inadvertent. Jos Buivenga (of exljbris) has included special provisions in his license to allow @font-face embedding, which is very nice, but ultimately there's no telling what future use will come along...
Not wanting to face this issue with Blooming Grove, and particularly not wanting to potentially have to rewrite license terms as future needs arise, I have chosen to release it into the public domain, which should cover all the bases in one fell swoop. Need to add a cedilla so you can use the word "facade" in full-bore pretentious mode on your website and display it in a @font-face embedded slightly-modified version of the font with the little mark under the c? No problem. Need to bundle it with your application that uses the GPL version 4 with the anti-bundling clause? No problem. Currently, there's no GPL version 4, and even when there is, it very probably won't prohibit bundling with differently-licensed fonts. But you never know what the future holds. With public-domain material, it doesn't matter. You can use the font for whatever you need to use it for, no restrictions.
Oh, and I'm working on a bold variant, for which all of the main letters (both lower and upper case) are now complete. Once I get the numbers and the major symbols and punctuation done, I'll be putting it up alongside the regular weight.
And if the Open Font Library ever gets their upload facility working again, I'm going to put them there too.
Blooming Grove font picked up by dafont.com
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Canning Season
It's that time of year again.
First, you get a few bushels of these things. We used, when we lived in Canal Fulton and had a large back yard, to grow them ourselves (mainly the roma variety, which give a higher yield of thicker sauce per bushel). These days we buy them, usually from the Amish. Roma tomatoes are preferred, but romas cost 70% more per bushel this year, so we went with the regular kind. Romas are worth more, but not 70% more.
Oh, you'll also want some of these and some of these.
You wash the tomatoes, 
cut them up, 
put them in the hopper, turn the handle, 
and run them through. I put up a short video of this on YouTube.
Out comes the juice, 
which you boil down for a while.
At some point you cut up the onions and peppers, 
then put them through the blender, with a bit of the tomato juice just to make them blend easier. They then get added to the rest of the tomato juice (no photo of this step yet), along with possibly some tomato paste for added thickness. (The tomato paste isn't necessary if your tomatoes make a good thick juice in the first place, another reason the roma variety are preferred.)There are a couple of other ingredients as well. Maybe I'll post up our recipe at some point.
You put the sauce in jars (no photo of this step yet), then load them (again, no photo yet) into the
waterbath canner.Outcome:
beautiful, glorious canned spaghetti sauce. Server over vermicelli, with grated parmesan on the side. It's also good for rigatoni, lasagna, practically any pasta, really. We were almost out when the tomatoes came into season this year, so we hope to do seventy quarts or so. You can't buy this stuff at the store. I mean, you can buy stuff that says spaghetti sauceon the label, but you don't want it.
Oh, here's a photo of my mom's new wooden stirring spoon. The old one broke, so we got this one from that place in Winona Lake that sells wooden kitchen implements.
How to drive a dog right out of his mind
In the photo, you can only see one. We don't know exactly how many were living under there, but we do know that at least three of the little ones where white, and at least two of the little ones were black.
Zeke (the dog) couldn't reach them, but that didn't stop him from agonizing. They were able to get clear back up against the edge of the house behind there, and also there was a space directly under the steps (to the left in the photo). So every time we let him out, he went crazy sniffing and sniffing all around the porch and refused to have any part of doing anything else (such as, for instance, the business a dog normally takes care of when you put him out, if you know what I mean). Sarah ended up taking him elsewhere, on the leash, a couple of times a day, for fear he'd destroy his kidneys holding it
.
He didn't want to leave the bunnies and come indoors, either. We pretty much had to drag him in, and thirty seconds later he'd be whining at the door. We'd tell him no, and thirty seconds later he'd be whining at the door, every thirty seconds, all day, every day, for weeks.
They've moved on, now, thank goodness. (The photo was taken a couple of weeks ago.) I guess the youngins got old enough to move from the nest. We're very glad.
Dark Alley
We have, in Galion, an extensive system of alleys. Basically, these are poorly-maintained streets that run parallel to the regular ones, but in the middle of the block, between the back yards, rather than between the front yards and sidewalks. This one is always a bit dark, due to various shade-casting objects on both sides of it.
So yeah, this is what passes for a dark alley around here. Batman, eat your heart out.
This is another shot I took while experimenting with aperture settings, but this time, there's a wider range of distances between the camera and the elements in the photo, so theres' a much
more noticeable difference between F 2.5 versus F 6.4. This, if I haven't got the order I took them in mixed up, is the shot taken with the former setting. The other one is significantly less clear when you zoom in and look at the finer details.
Toothbrush Holder
This is a photo that I took while experimenting with aperture settings -- four otherwise identical photos (using a tripod) with four different settings. The shot turned out not to show off the effect very well, probably because a lot of the stuff in the shot is about the same distance from the camera as the main subject. I'll select a scene where that's not the case next time. So I cropped away the rest of the shot, and here's the toothbrush holder.
I suppose my sense of humor is a bit odd, but this toothbrush holder (which belongs to my sister, who got it because she likes turtles) has always tickled me. Clearly the design of this holder was based on the kind of toothbrushes that used to exist when I was a kid, the kind with the thin straight flat handles. But by the time this particular toothbrush holder was actually made and sold, those were a thing of the past; all the toothbrushes I've seen in the last fifteen years have contour-molded handles like the ones shown, so they don't fit. To me, this is a perfect example of product design not being revisited as it should be when the passage of time changes the circumstances in which it is to be used.
No matter; Sarah uses the toothbrush holder anyway, because she likes turtles. (And no, I didn't pose the one that's leaning against the wall. It's always like that.)
Esoteric Knowledge Quiz #4
Do your friends, family, and coworkers accuse you of being a repository of useless information? (Mine do.) Here's your chance to test your knowledge of obscure but interesting tidbits...
- Mt. St. Helens, the Alaskan stratovolcano that famously erupted in 1980,
was named for which person?
- Helena of Constantinople
- Helena of Skövde
- Alleyne FitzHerbert
- Helen of Troy
- Which of the following is not the title of a book by Lillian Jackson Braun?
- The Cat Who Wasn't There
- The Cat Who Ran Amuck
- The Cat Who Sniffed Glue
- The Cat Who Turned On and Off
- It seems all the cool kids these days are using SATA hard drives instead of the old IDE kind.
SATA stands for Serial ATA, and the old kind are sometimes now called PATA for Parallel ATA,
but what does the ATA part stand for?
- Asyncronous Tandem Attachment
- Asynchronous Throughput Attachment
- Advanced Technology Attachment
- Adaptive Terminal Attachment
- In the
standard model
of sub-atomic physics, which of the following is not considered to be a lepton?
- photon
- electron
- muon
- tau neutrino
- 2nd Timothy chapter 3 gives a list of character traits people will have in the last days. Which of the following is not on the list?
- disobedient to their parents
- stingy
- ungrateful
- lovers of pleasure
(Wording taken from the NIV translation.)
I'll post the answers in the comments at some point.
If you have questions to contribute to future quizzes, send them in to jonadab@bright.net with the phrase Esoteric Knowledge Quiz
in the subject line (or. if you are on the Wheeitology list, you can just post them there). Thanks!
Succulent Cabbage Rolls
Ingredients:
cabbage leaves, as large as possible
1 cup onions & peppers (chopped)
2 medium carrots, diced
1 stalk celery or more (with extra leaves if available)
garlic powder to taste
½ lb ground beef
¼ tsp basil, divided
1 cup tomato sauce, or more
1 cup beef broth, or more
½ cup of the water left from boiling the cabbage, possibly more
½ cup brown sugar
1 cup diced tomatoes (not drained)
1 cup pre-cooked rice
½ TBSP corn starch
½ TBSP worchestershire sauce
Preparation:
Boil the cabbage leaves enough to soften them, so that they can be rolled. Save enough of the water for the sauce.
Filling:
Saute the onions, carrots, and peppers in olive oil or vegetable oil until the carrots begin to soften. Add the celery (chopped) and the beef. Sprinkle with garlic powder and half the basil. Cook, stirring occasionally. When the beef is done, add the diced tomatoes (with their juice), half the basil, and the rice. Simmer and mix.
Sauce:
Combine broth and tomato sauce in saucepan on medium heat. Add the water, brown sugar, worchester, the other half of the basil, and the corn starch. Whisk thoroughly and heat, stirring enough that it does not stick, until it bubbles significantly. Remove from heat.
Assembly:
Preheat oven to 350F. Add some of the filling to each leaf and wrap as you would a burrito, but with both ends closed. Place in glass or ceramic baking pan with the loose edge down. When all the rolls are in the pan, pour the sauce over the top, covering the rolls as well as possible. Bake and serve hot.
A QEMU screenshot for your edification
Heh, heh, heh.
Easier to use, more reliable, faster, and more entertaining. That was some good marketing copy, there.
There were some improvements in Windows 98 (versus Windows 95 OSR2, I mean; comparing it to later systems would be unfair), but these weren't them.
Reliability was basically the same; Windows 98 crashed just as often as Windows 95 and was at least as likely to corrupt the filesystem when it did.
Faster is a joke; Windows 95 performs better every time on the same hardware. (This is normal; newer systems are made for more recent hardware, and they do more, so older systems are always faster. That's true in the open-source world as well, with a few rare exceptions.)
Easier to use and more entertaining? I guess they must be referring to the fact that Windows 98 introduced Windows Media Player, the most impossibly unusable media player EVER (except, possibly, for Apple QuickTime). The only way that's entertaining is if you're watching other people try to figure out how to make it do what they want and laughing at them.