Viewing profile — damieng

You can get nicer 5x5 fonts amd it was not that uncommon back in the day. 4 wide is not too bad if you make the center of M and W just two pixels inset from top or bottom respectiv…

I remember when these first started appearing in Windows was around the time toolbars became popular. I think the idea was the most common ones had icons which matched the toolbar …

I also went with an Xfinity cable and Frontier fibre combo in about 2018 I think. I just bought a Synology RT2600 router at the time and plugged each provider in then set it to loa…

If you use LINQ and have ever used areay Contains youre about to find out it's not going to be smooth. They knew about this for a year but decided coercing to span in an expression…

Even better download it, subset it then base64 encode it into your CSS for zero FOUC. https://damieng.com/blog/2021/12/03/using-variable-webfonts-...

I'd argue putting CloudFront on top of S3 is less complex than getting the permissions and static sharing setup right on S3 itself.

In my experience the type of developer using JS for their Web apps rarely overlaps with someone comfortable doing high performance C++ runtime work.

I wrote a LINQ provider (.Net) for Elasticsearch. Was quite the challenge dealing with the sorts of quirks and subtle differences between the two. Case sensitivity and the tokeniza…

It's a trade-off. Have every single instance of m look squished vs it might touch another m or w somewhere else and look odd. I've done fonts in both categories.

My own collection of free 8x8 fonts might suit your needs at https://damieng.com/zx-origins Looking forward to trying this exciting rust tool in my chain as well to see what additi…

https://youtu.be/rf5o5liZxnA?feature=shared&t=542 has a demonstration of NextStep 3 (released September 1992) that clearly shows a computer icon that Steve refers to as "My Compute…

"NeXTStep had its Dock, but that doesn't have menus or a status icon." NeXTStep not only had menus but tear-off dockable menus/sub-menus that are superior to any menus we have in a…

"The task bar, the Start menu, the system tray, "My Computer", "Network Neighbourhood", all that: all original, patented Microsoft designs. There was nothing like it before. " Apar…

Surprised an article of this depth didn't mention that the Topaz font changed between Kickstart 1 and 2.

I'm in PAL land so it's almost 1 :)

Cool, thanks! It took longer than I care to admit. They're redrawn on the fly and it also means the 2x and 3x options can render it without upscaling blur.

Most of the 8-bit machines had quite square pixels (Spectrum, Commodore 64) but machines with multiple resolutions often had modes that doubled the horizontal res (C128, PCW, BBC M…

Fantastic book, has a place on my shelf in my office and I've been lucky enough to shoot the breeze with the author on Zoom!

I thought about setting up my camera and pointing it at my Princeton 15" multisync CRT and scripting a live screenshot of every font but that seemed... overkill.

The process involves me creating a raw 768 byte "ch8" file for the Spectrum then running it through a bash script that creates the .psf and .bdf using psf2tools. https://gist.githu…

There are many of them. The one that comes with Artist II seems to be very popular. That said I have a few of my own takes of the magnetic/ocr fonts there.

The simulated stuff is all custom code for reading the raw binary font file and then custom drawing it over the screenshot using canvas. Nuxt is just used as a static site generato…

Copyright and fonts is a minefield. Hoping a credit isn't too much to ask for all the work.

Chrome uses Skia which - on Windows - uses DirectWrite which is basically native however... DirectWrite has a whole bunch of flags that configure sub-pixel and anti-aliasing as wel…