I thought about this the other day, and I thought it’d be fun to share this internal tool I made over a decade ago to aid with exploring options for Medium’s typographical redesign.

It’s called Fontificator. You can play with Fontificator here (desktop browsers only), or watch the likely confusing video below:

The motivation for building Fontificator came from two observations:

font previews on type foundry sites were generally too limited to get a real sense of how a certain typeface feels, and it was best to see a font in situ,
often an extremely tiny nuance – like adding some letter spacing, or messing with line height – was what separated something that was promising from something that seemed very far from working.
With Fontificator, I was aiming at this Doug Engelbart-esque notion of one hand on the keyboard + one hand on the mouse, and the UI where it was only necessary to point to an element, and the keys under your other hand would start working immediately – no clicking needed:

F and G to change the font,
– and + for font size,
← and → for letter spacing,
↑ and ↓ for line height,
< and > for opacity (for all the above you can hold Shift for bigger moves),
and, there are a few more shortcuts you can see at the top.
This way, we could move really, really fast. To accommodate that, Fontificator always tried to keep the current item under the cursor by counter-adjusting scroll position as needed.

On top of it all, a few more shortcuts:

⇥ and ⇧⇥ move very quickly between different types of stories so you can preview that,
Space compares to the original/​current version,
1–9 allow you to switch to different “slots” so you can have various presets ready to compare,
Esc hides the toolbar for maximum immersion,
⇧R resets.
You can also edit any text if you are so inclined, and also drag in any font file from your computer onto a paragraph – then that font becomes part of the F/G stack. (Bernino Sans and Freight Text were the starting fonts before the redesign.) On the left, you can also see a naïve mobile preview – there was also more sophisticated on-smartphone preview, but I removed it from this restored version.

Background I’ve been using the excellent lazy.nvim package manager for more than three years now, and I’ve been super happy with it. But with Neovim v0.12.0, vim.pack was shipped: a built-in (but still experimental) plugin manager that manages plugins using Git, with no third-party dependencies required, implemented by Evgeni Chasnovski (see neovim/neovim#34009), known for his work on mini.nvim. This piqued my interest, as I’ve found myself creating abstractions and isolations with lazy.nvim that don’t harmonize with my grug brain. So I figured I wanted to see if I could simplify by moving onto vim.pack.

Osaurus is the AI edge runtime for macOS.

It runs local and cloud models, exposes shared tools via MCP, and provides a native, always-on foundation for AI apps and workflows on Apple Silicon.

This is just a fork of Helix. All claims rest with Helix maintainers and its copyright holders. I am just maintaining a fork. For more information, please see Helix's readme file.

Do you worry about the effectiveness of your writing style? As emerging scholars, perfecting the craft of writing is an essential component of developing as graduate students, and yet resources for honing these skills are largely under utilized. Larry McEnerney, Director of the University of Chicago's Writing Program, led this session in an effort to communicate helpful rules, skills, and resources that are available to graduate students interested in further developing their writing style.

20 years ago, in college, I worked at the uni library's special collections department. One of the things we would do was check leather-bound books for 'red rot', which is when the tanning of the leather starts to fail, and the leather starts crumbling to produce this really characteristic red dust. It's treated with a product called cellugel.

I told my parents about this cool job.

'Oh,' they said, 'can you do something about this old book from your great-grandmother's collection?'

Benieuwd naar het geluidniveau in jouw omgeving? Doe mee aan de Nationale Geluidmeetdag op 30 april! Download alvast de Klankbord App. 🔉

Na de meting van 30 seconden in de buitenlucht, volgen vijf vragen over hoe het geluid ervaren wordt.

Download nu alvast de Klankbord App en zet de pushmeldingen aan. Je ontvangt dan een pushmelding op de dag zelf met het verzoek om je directe buitengeluid te meten. ⏰

ℹ️ <https://www.nationalegeluidmeetdag.nl/>

[#Geluidmeetdag](https://social.overheid.nl/tags/Geluidmeetdag) [#SamenMeten](https://social.overheid.nl/tags/SamenMeten) [#CitizenScience](https://social.overheid.nl/tags/CitizenScience)

Virtualize macOS 12 and later on Apple Silicon, VirtualBuddy is a virtual machine GUI for macOS M1, M2, M3

Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines?

Jevin West and I have spent the last eight months developing the course on large language models (LLMs) that we think every college freshman needs to take.

<https:thebullshitmachines.com>

This is not a computer science course.

It’s a humanities course about how to learn and work and thrive in an AI world.

Neither instructor nor students need a technical background. Our instructor guide provides a choice of activities for each lesson that will easily fill an hour-long class.

The entire course is available freely online. Our 18 online lessons each take 5-10 minutes; each illuminates one core principle. They are suitable for self-study, but have been tailored for teaching in a flipped classroom.

The course is a sequel of sorts to our course (and book) Calling Bullshit. We hope that like its predecessor, it will be widely adopted worldwide.

Large language models are both powerful tools, and mindless—even dangerous—bullshit machines. We want students to explore how to resolve this dialectic.

✨ Friends, I've recently been laid off, and I'm looking for my next role.

With 7+ years of leadership experience in non-profits and startups, here is a summary of my skills:

📊 20+ years [#rstats](https://hachyderm.io/tags/rstats) programming expertise
🔧 Data pipeline development
☁️ AWS infrastructure management
📚 Creator of widely-used data science curricula
🛡️ GDPR compliance implementation

For the full version, including my resume and testimonials from colleagues: <https://francoismichonneau.net/hire-me/>

[#GetFediHired](https://hachyderm.io/tags/GetFediHired) [#DataScience](https://hachyderm.io/tags/DataScience) [#Jobs](https://hachyderm.io/tags/Jobs)

Simutrans is a freeware and open-source transportation simulator. Your goal is to establish a successful transport company. Transport passengers, mail and goods by rail, road, ship, and even air. Interconnect districts, cities, public buildings, industries and tourist attractions by building a transport network you always dreamed of.

Aragorn and Éomer meet, ‘though all the hosts of Mordor lay between us. Did I not say so at the Hornburg?’

‘So you spoke, but hope oft deceives. I knew not then that you were a man foresighted. Yet twice blessed is help unlooked for. Never was a meeting of friends more joyful.’

This is really nice. High quality text to speech from Python:
<https:github.com/rhasspy/piper>

You can also download the models locally, so they work on your own system, and with some Bash magic, you can have a better version of Apple's "say" command.

The entire 3-disc set of the Portal 2 soundtrack is still online to download for free if you need some mp3s to hear while you are working: <https://www.thinkwithportals.com/music.php>

I do not photograph architecture that often. But it is a lot of fun trying something new.

[#Photography](https://pixelfed.de/discover/tags/Photography?src=hash) [#Nature](https://pixelfed.de/discover/tags/Nature?src=hash) [#Projekt1zu1](https://pixelfed.de/discover/tags/Projekt1zu1?src=hash) [#Project1to1](https://pixelfed.de/discover/tags/Project1to1?src=hash) [#Squared](https://pixelfed.de/discover/tags/Squared?src=hash) [#Architecture](https://pixelfed.de/discover/tags/Architecture?src=hash) [#ArchitecturePhotography](https://pixelfed.de/discover/tags/ArchitecturePhotography?src=hash)