Assorted Bits of Nerdistry

Bullet time!

  • I had a maddening problem with my iMac on Saturday that I was only able to resolve by wiping the drive and restoring it from the backup. Overall I was impressed with how Time Machine came through for me, and luckily someone else wrote a nice wrap-up the the process so I don’t have to bother. (My two cents: I still wish Time Machine could make a bootable backup.)

  • I was glad to see that Microsoft Office 2008 was finally making the ClearType fonts available to Mac users. I dropped into the Apple store yesterday to have a look, and saw that even though Word is using Cambria as the default font, it’s wasting a huge chunk of what Cambria can do. Unfortunately, the Mac version isn’t using the spiffy math engine used by the Windows version — it’s still using the clunky old Equation Editor that defaults to Times New Roman. I can’t say that I love Cambria very much, but after all that research I did about what it can do as math font, it’s a shame to see that potential wasted for Mac users.

  • I went to go see the Breaking the Rules exhibition at the British Library yesterday, and realized how badly spoiled I’ve gotten after my time at Reading. We get to spend so much time examining books and stuff up close, using our own hands, that it’s incredibly unsatisfying to look at printer material under glass now, no matter how exciting the exhibition may be. Books are especially frustrating to see from the other side of a glass case, since you lose the whole sense of rhythm from page to page, and you can’t inspect the little details of how the ink sits on the page.