Hi, folks, a little personal news. In mid-November, I'm getting my aortic valve replaced via open-heart surgery. As scary as that sounds, my prognosis is excellent. This is fairly personal health news, and I'm posting publicly for two reasons. First, I am so grateful for the friendships and collegial connections formed here. In the unlikely event that something goes wrong, I wanted to say thank you. Second, of course, is the sad issue of money and American healthcare and disability support.
My convoluted path to streaming Jeopardy! to my child in London. @npub1kyyr...8sng Really, an excuse to talk about Jeopardy! streaming rights, NAT traversal, and Tailscale, my favorite new company/product of the last few years for solving a particularly irritating problem with such aplomb and elan.
AOL is shutting down dial-up. I wrote an article for The Economist, “The slow death of dial-up”—in 2007! 📄.pdf I think the “slow” part was correct.
Fresh from the press, my new book, Six Centuries of Type & Printing: a brisk and thorough history of how we put ink on paper! It’s a cloth-bound hardcover and comes with an expanded ebook. You can add letterpress bookmarks or an audiobook, or just buy the ebook or audiobook!
Apple doesn’t let you access iCloud storage using third-party sync or backup tools. How do you handle creating your own backup of iCloud Drive and iCloud Photos? Some thoughts @npub1kyyr...8sng in my “Help Me, Glenn!” column:
Women typesetting in Germany in 1894 (illustration). Caption reads (translated from German): “A modern profession for women—typesetter. Original drawing by Colanus.” Just acquired an original printed version of this after seeing various lower-res versions online. image
My book Six Centuries of Type & Printing is on track to ship late this month. You can still pledge and get all the stretch-goal extras for a few days longer: an audiobook, an extra ebook, and (for print books) letterpress-printed bookmarks! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/glennf/six-centuries-of-type-and-printing After that, a la carte.
Bill Atkinson had a unique vision. Someone else just as unusual would have had to come along to encode the ideas he had into graphical expressions. They were not there for the taking, obvious in retrospect. Apple had several such people, unique in their realms, who somehow were able to align what they created into singular products.
How Comics Are Made is out TODAY in bookstores! Tracing the steps and telling the stories between a cartoonist’s pen and the newsprint page, my book travels across over 130 years of artistic and technological development.
Lovely to get coverage in The Seattle Times, my hometown paper, of How Comics Are Made, which hits bookstores June 3: https://www.seattletimes.com/entertainment/books/seattle-writers-new-book-shares-how-comics-are-made/ I’m doing a (free) book-release event at Ada’s in Capitol Hill at 6 pm that night! Books for sale & signing!