We (daughter and me) went to Europe in June. Invited to be part of an Erasmus+ exchange by our fabulous Publishing Studies colleagues in Lithuania (and who came to Vancouver this past winter), we made the trek way, way east – the other side of Poland! – to Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital. (Typographic geek note): I loved that our flight from Frankfurt to Vilnius was aboard a Lufthansa A321 painted…
The defining characteristic of publication design in the past quarter century or more has been the computer screen: the Desktop Publishing paradigm, invented at Xerox PARC in the 1970s and brought to market by Apple and Adobe in the late 1980s, utterly changed the printing and publishing industries. PostScript, a language originally developed for controlling laser printers, provided a uniform…
If we think seriously about intelligence for a little while, we recognize that it isn’t just a random thing in the world, a trait like other traits, but rather a genre of order in the universe. At its most immediate, intelligence is supposedly the way we human beings have evolved to survive in the world: as we like to think of ourselves, it is our intelligence, as opposed to other traits like,…
Earlier this year I attended an all-day symposium on “Teaching and Learning with AI” hosted by my Faculty. There were various sessions and workshops, led mostly colleagues of mine, exploring both the affective and pragmatic concerns about the current “AI moment.” There were talks on the environmental costs of datacentres, the crisis in copyright and creative fields, and some attempts to widen the…
I first posted this recipe in 2023 so that I could share with friends and people out there on the internets. I’ve continued to make this bread – weekly – since then, and I’ve tweaked a few things and also picked up some new techniques since then. I think the version I’m making now is quite a bit better than I was making in 2023, so here’s the new recipe. Gluten-free bread Some significant changes…
Last summer I spent a lot of time with Typst (at that point v0.11) and Pandoc, working on a flexible and reusable workflow to typeset markdown-formatted articles to PDF. I designed a Pandoc template for Typst that would do nice things with layout and typography, and I posted about that here . Fast-forward to spring 2025. In the intervening months, Typst has been upgraded twice (to v0.13) and…
UPDATED Aug 1, 2025: The following, which reads partly as an apology for Spotify, has me feeling icky, now that I’ve learned about Spotify’s CEO’s investments in AI-driven weapons tech . I am much less “of two minds about Spotify” now, and actively exploring alternative ways of finding and managing digital music. I got thinking about this after reading a number of pieces lately about Spotify –…
I dug this up and reposted it from way back, because the ideas here keep coming back around. This was written in 2013, I think. It still makes sense to me. As I cuddled our youngest cat Jeremiah the other night, I marvelled at how utterly luxurious he felt, and it occurred to me to wonder—this was an entirely new thought for me—what’s a cat worth? What would people be prepared to pay for these…
I’ve had trouble sleeping lately. My wife suggested I try her sleep app (one of the well-known ones), and she offered me a “sleep story” to listen to. Apparently there are a lot to choose from, but my sense is that the basic formula is a person with a soft voice blabbering about nothing very interesting in a fairly monotonous voice. There may be some background music: twinkles and diddles to…
The Radavist today ran a “Dust-Up” column on the psychology of bad interactions between cyclists and drivers, and by extension (so the argument continuted) cyclists and hikers. Radavist editor John Watson argues that driving a car leads one into an inward-focused, egocentric mindset that inhibits consideration for others and community mindedness; cycling, because it increases both a sense of…
Here I am writing a blog post, like it’s 2004! And what am I writing about? I moved in to a new email app. This really feels like blogging circa 2004. Partly because blogging, but also 'cause I haven’t felt like I needed to think about email applications in about that long. But – web apps being web apps, and the internet of today being what it is – here we are again. Over a decade ago, I moved…
Edie Cats are animals. I mean, cats are fucking animals. Don’t get me wrong, we have had many a cat in our house and our household over the years, and I’ve loved them all dearly. But don’t kid yourself about their nature. Unlike a dog – a species which chose to align with us humans some forty thousand years ago and who became part of our culture and our wellbeing – cats remain wild, untamed,…
UPDATE MARCH 2025: This post, and the template attached, were written for Typst v 0.11 – Typst has upgraded twice since then, and this template will not work with the newer versions of Typst. Please see the new post (Mar 26, 2025) at A New Typst Template for Pandoc I recently responded to someone on Mastodon who asked about producing decent-looking PDFs from markdown. I replied eagerly with “OMG…
Last November I wrote a post about my experimentation with Typst – a new (as of last year) open-source typesetting software that aims to (a) effectively replace LaTeX in its niche and also bring a modern, free tool to a broader set of use cases. I’ve been playing with it more this spring for various things, and last week I stumbled into a small project where I put it through its paces properly: a…
I just want to sing a bit of praise for our heatpump. The big heat exchanger fan under our stairs In spring of 2022 we decided to take the plunge: our 60yr-old house had its original gas furnace (in a lovely two-tone green), and our big old hot water tank was well into its second decade. That, with my rising consciousness of the problems of methane (er, ‘natural gas’) made us take this seriously:…
In honour of International Women’s Day, here’s a book review. I found this serendipitously, browsing through the Z 250s in my campus library – I was after Fred Smeijers’ Counterpunch , which I found, but I also spotted this tall, slim volume with nothing but carol twombly on the spine. Now, Carol Twombly is a person I’ve long been vaguely aware of, and even a fan of, sorta, except that I knew…
The Lindisfarne Matthew . It says ‘Liber,’ but it’s more than that: a good starting point for this course. T his coming June, at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI), I’ll be teaching Text Processing Techniques and Traditions . I taught this course at DHSI from 2015 to 2019, until the pandemic interrupted DHSI, and I had been meaning, since 2019, to re-write the course and offer an…
Sometime in early 2023 Typst appeared: a new, from-the-ground up open-source typesetting engine designed to replace the superannuated LaTeX that so much scientific publishing still relies on. LaTeX, for those who don’t know, is a set of “user-friendly” macros, dating from the early 1980s, for driving TeX, a mathematics-friendly typesetting and document prep system dating from the 1970s. TeX was…
I watch the weather. I’m semi-obsessive about it, actually: we have a multiple thermometers around our house, and I look at Environment Canada’s forecast a couple of times every day. I’m constantly trying to stay on top of what it’s going to be like out there. And climate change makes me extra interested/concerned/obsessive. What the usual weather services don’t give me much of is “what…
Keep Your Silver Shined Devon Sproule Tin Angel Records 2007 americana • jazz • folk • bluegrass I thought I’d have a go at some music criticism after listening to this album for the first time in about a decade. Keep Your Silver Shined is Virginia-based folksinger Devon Sproule’s third studio album, from 2007. I was very much enamoured of it when it was new, and listening to it again now I find…
Amazingly, the Mellon Foundation’s Public Knowledge program invited me to their ‘all-projects’ meeting in New York this fall. Though surprising to me, it wasn’t entirely random; I had written a couple of reports for Mellon—on scholarly communications infrastructure projects [1] —but I haven’t had much to do with them since before the pandemic. I was pretty pleased to be invited, and it turned out…
In September I joined up with a dear old friend and we drove all the way around the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State, a get-together we’d been talking about for some time. It turned out we both had some time and relative freedom, and the idea of a road trip seemed like a good one: it would give us both a tiny vacation, and it would be an terrific opportunity to catch up. I began by riding the…
2023 is the year, apparently, of “enshittification” [1] —of the internet, of platforms, of all sorts of things in our digital lives. This is also my sabbatical year from SFU, an opportunity to stand back and think a little more than I normally would. And it’s also a year when some bits of the digital world started to fragment and peel off in interesting (if not hopeful) directions. Partially…
Dante, La terza rime (aka The Divine Comedy ), 1502 Aldus is building a library which knows no walls save those of the world itself. – Erasmus of Rotterdam This fall I am on sabbatical, and it’s time for me to talk about one of my major projects this coming year: the digital remediation of SFU Library’s world-class collection of 15th- and 16th-century editions from the press of Aldus Manutius.…
Updated: June 2025: This recipe has evolved since I posted it. I’ve edited this into a new, updated post (June 2025) at Gluten-free Bread 2025 Gluten-free bread: oats + buckwheat + tapioca + sorghum Here’s my current GF bread recipe. This is my summer version, a little lighter than the winter version. The difference is simply in the proportions: in the winter I use relatively more oats and…
Catalinbread Belle Epoch tape echo effect pedal* I just received Volume 4 in the mail… On the occasion of—well, on the occasion of a bunch of things, but for starters—learning of Penguin’s publication (in 2002) of a new translation of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (an edition featuring different translators for each of the seven volumes of this colossal novel), I began reading Proust, for…
Tree of Heaven. Ghetto Palm. Ailanthus altissima . Where this particular story begins is with my son, who was writing up a project for his urban geography class in which he examined our nearby Macauley Park, a small triangular sliver of green formed where Kingsway, the diagonal thoroughfare through East Vancouver, intersects with the regular cartesian street grid. McCauley Park features a bus…
for Arley McNeney [1] You Are in a Room… You are in a classroom. A mishmash of worn-looking tablet arm desks almost suggest the idea of rows. At the front of the room, a projected image shines on a screen: a terminal window and a blinking command prompt, green on black. Professor_Metaphor says, "Welcome to Text Processing 101" Rainbow_Guest says "OMG, this is my first time here. I don't know…
On Mastodon, Mekka Okerke mused : Do bicycles create empathy? Or do people that care about other people, tend to care about bikes? Why is there such a big overlap between “bike infrastructure radicalized people,” and “people that care about people that are different than themselves?” Why is there such a low overlap between “people with trash hateful takes” and “people that want more bike…
To be honest, this took some brain-numbing trial and error – trying to get the remote git repo on the Reclaim server to become the _site folder on my website build locally, so that then I could build into it and have that be the actual site for deployment. I admit I am no whiz when it comes to git. I got hung up in what was pointing where, and then I got a bunch of changes on the remote end (the…
Welcome to my new blog. This is built using Eleventy, using as simple and low-tech an approach I could muster: markdown content, a handful of templates, and a simple git push direct to my webserver (at Reclaim , natch). For many years now I have been writing – everything – in markdown, in plain text, and using Pandoc to do most of my publication things. At the same time, all of my web presence was…