Unicode fonts and the symbols they contain

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Can you see that character? If you can, it's because you are using a font in the sans-serif font-family that supports unicode to display this text. Check out all the other awesome unicode symbols. Evil Chuck said that I should try to make the css do its best to get your browser to use a unicode-compliant font somehow. Hopefully, I'll get around to that soon.

Until then, make sure you have a unicode-compliant font like Helvetica installed and rock that link. It seems that the variety of characters are endless. Helvetica appears to contain the entire Chinese caligraphy word list.

[ Link ]

M. Ward: "Medley: Rag/Duet for Guitars #3"

Watching M. Ward play at the SXSW La Zona Rosa party on Friday was a real treat. This must make it like, the 3rd or 4th time I've seen him play, and he just keeps getting better and better.

Even though it was a small set, all the songs he played were ones I count in my favorites of his. Which of his many instrumental songs he started with, I cannot remember, but he seems to like to get straight to it in his solo live shows and his albums. Here's a solid example of one of his original instrumental songs:


Watch him play his song "One Hundred Million Years" off his new album Hold Time live at SXSW, must've been Thursday at Auditorium Shores Stage (Lady Bird Lake).


Update: It looks like he started out that La Zona set with "Duet for Guitars #3" after all. Somebody who must have been standing five feet away from me got an excellent video. Makes me wish I had smuggled my camera in.

Conan O'Brien's favorite clip from Late Night

Laughing that hard makes me get a little teary-eyed.
[ via //beconfused ]

Infant gangster clothing line

Do you want your brat to look like a little hood rat gangster from LA? Here ya go.

[Aw ain't he cute?]
Why anybody would put so much Adobe Macromedia Flash behind a store for a toddler clothing line to make your kid look like a Yakuza is beyond me.

Red Video

Red Digital is a camera maker that specializes in high quality professional cameras. In 2007 they released their camera, Red One which is capable of recording at resolutions up to 2048 horizontal by 1152 vertical pixels at 120 frames per second, directly to flash or hard disk.

Here's an example of some of the video that can be recorded using the camera. The footage is slowed down and the effect along with music by the Icelandic band Bang Gang is pretty hypnotizing.

skate - shot on red #1347 - 120 fps from www.theglobules.com on Vimeo.

A mysterious inscription in Lincoln's watch

This is pretty much the most popular story on NPR.com right now so I'm sure most of you have already heard about this. Here it is though, just in case you haven't.

President Lincoln was given a pocket watch and it broke soon after his election. He took it to a watchmaker to have it repaired and the rest, as they say, is history.

Did a repairman really engrave a secret message on Abraham Lincoln's watch the day the Civil War began?

That's what watchmaker Jonathan Dillon told his family in the late 19th century. He claimed he was working in a posh jewelry store in Washington, D.C., in April 1861, just after Lincoln was elected. And he was assigned to fix the president's beloved gold pocket watch — reportedly the first watch the humble Lincoln had ever owned.

I was listening to this story on the radio last night, in which a descendant of the watchmaker narrated his opening of the famous watch, and settled the mystery once and for all. I thought that was so cool, even though I'd never before heard of this watch or the mystery surrounding it.

This morning I noticed the same story on the Times' website so I figured NPR must have the audio on their website. Sure enough, there it was. Check out the NPR audio story about Lincoln's watch.

And then mosey on over to the New York Times and their check out their story on Lincoln's watch too.

No wonder I keep seeing Jesus in my toast

Middle-aged? Working a lot? British?

You're probably a going a little bit fruit-loops, according to The Telegraph in an article about a study of middle-aged over-achievers in Britain.

Extreme tiredness and stress could be as bad for the brain as smoking, according to the study.

As bad as smoking maybe, but there's no second hand smoke when you're working too hard -- unless you have this job.

Dinner with a stranger story

Here is an interesting little picture story about a fellow who invited himself to dinner in exchange for the promise to donate $200 to charity.

Kutiman Thru-You playlist on YouTube

Kutiman's website is so popular right now that none of my friends are actually getting to see the videos. Update: So Kutiman is posting them all on his YouTube at this very moment.

Here's a playlist of all the music videos for Kutiman's Thru-You project:


Track 5 is my favorite because the girl Kutiman samples vocals from, Sarah, has such a beautiful tone to her voice, and her original song is actually pretty damn good. Track 3 - I'm New features perhaps the coolest freestyle rap I have seen in a long time.

[ via #coredevs, btw, ftw! ]

Abandoned town in Ukraine

These are amazing photographs.

[ Link ]

Kutiman mixes YouTube

Kutiman mixes YouTube



There have been many amazing videos on YouTube that use video mixing to produce awesome results, like this acapella video mix cover of Michael Jackson's "Thriller" by François Macré.

Not quite the same thing, but still amusing is the Family Guy sketch, "The Four Peters".


But Kutiman simply takes the cake by composing original songs using actual YouTube videos for audio/visual samples. Wow. Wow!

[ Link ]

Another Rummage

I found another blog that calls itself "Rummage". The site has a captivating series of photographs of gardening. Whoever runs the website seems like a pretty interesting person and I am honored by the coincidence of sharing a name for our blogs.