Tiny Little Life

Google searches on this subject were not very enlightening, but I can now say from experience that an 800-watt inverter attached to a car battery is able to power 2 oil burners (furnace and hot water heater), with enough juice left over for a sump pump, cable modem, router, hub, and laptop.

It helps if the car is idling; my car has been idling for at least 6 hours and I still have more than half a tank. With the car off, I’ve read that you’ll only get 20-30 minutes of power.

I can make no claim on the suitability of inverted power for your oil burner over the long term. Also, rewire your house at your own risk.

I built a pedalboard for the guitarist in my band, based on a “best of” from designs I found online.

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I’ve expanded FontClustr to be an interactive Javascript application.

Bear in mind, this HTML was generated by running the clustering algorithm on my specific computer — your installed fonts will be different if you check this out on a non-Ubuntu machine. In fact, if you don’t have ALL of Ubuntu’s font packages installed, you may see a lot of fonts that look the same; your system is switching to a default font.

On the other hand, if you have access to an Ubuntu machine, you’ll be able to experiment with the sample text, its size, and colors.

I will try to get access to a Mac so that I can do some final checks on the code. The next hurdle will be trying to get Python modules installed in a Windows machine.

My thanks to John Maeda for getting the word out on twitter! Follow me here.

My font clustering project (originally called Fontr) is now called FontClustr. If you found this page via a search engine, the page you want is probably one of the ones in the FontClustr category.

Something has always bothered me about fonts: I have to pick one alphabetically.

I have over 1200 fonts on my computer. Why am I forced to pick the perfect one by going through an alphabetical list? Not even the major font families (serif, sans-serif, condensed, cursive, fantasy, etc) are grouped together.

No longer. I’ve written a program in python that can hierarchically cluster fonts based on their appearance. For your enjoyment, I’ve picked 35 of the best clusters (this is actually more than 80% of the total output) to illustrate how powerful this technique is. Hit the jump for those.

If you are a software company that makes a product with a font selection dialog (like Word, Photoshop, Gimp, Inkscape, Illustrator, Powerpoint, etc), PLEASE START DOING THIS. I WILL BE HAPPY TO HELP YOU.

Let me stress this again, the screenshots you’re seeing here were from an automated font comparison and clustering program.

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There’s a big magnet on the back of your subwoofer. Here’s how you get it off.


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A light misty rain produced these large drops.

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Back when I was in Scouts, everyone loved throwing wood on the campfire. There were only benefits to doing that: more flames to stare at, more warmth, and if fuel ever ran short, more chances to use bladed tools on wood. To discourage that, the Scoutmaster used to say “The white man makes a big fire and sits far; the Indian makes a small fire and sits close”. Of course, that adage is useless when the fire pit is already made, 3 feet across and with big rocks — sitting close was a physical impossibility.

I still thought of it every time I made a campfire; I was always bothered by the fact that that I had never actually been given instructions on how to make a small fire that could self-sustain.

In July of 2009, I discovered how. (I got the idea from a Jim Jarmusch film).

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Also from December 2008 - a speaker cabinet for my truck. It beats trying to wire in good speakers to the crappy radio deck; this way, I put the amp under my seat and plug my mp3 player into it directly.