of type foundry exljbris, which offers a number of high-quality, beautifully-crafted fonts for free. Designer Jos Buivenga just announced his latest release, a gorgeous serif text face called Calluna. Calluna includes ligatures, old style and lining figures in both proportional and tabular styles, superiors, anteriors, and a number of other goodies, all using OpenType wizardry to take (much of) the guesswork out of typesetting for non-professional typographers. Also make sure to check out iLT, where Buivenga wrote about his inspiration (Museo) and design process for Calluna.

did you know that the easiest way to peel a banana is by pinching the tip of the banana? Not cutting or pulling at the stem area, as most of us have likely grown up doing. Really. Just pinch the tip, and the peel comes right apart. It’s amazing! This apparently is how monkeys eat bananas. No lie.

My colleague blew my mind when he told me about this last week. What the hell have I been doing my entire life? Man…years, wasted eating bananas the wrong way. Sigh. What else have I been doing wrong?

Props to the careful editing, as well, without which the video would lose much of its impact. (via, pointed out by Matt)

this is pretty fucking cool. Straight out of a movie. And yes, the obscenity is fully warranted. Now, if we could get stuff like this wired directly into our optic nerves, we’d be golden. (via)

on the XHTML 2 working group; it will stop meeting after the end of this year, when its charter expires. I can’t say I’m happy about this, but I’m hoping the XHTML 2 folks will join the HTML 5 WG and help to work out some of the kinks there.

Update 2009/07/15 18:06—Here’s reaction from Keith and Zeldman.

Ran into this one today, in somewhat unique circumstances: I had a hover style where buttons inside a table row only appeared when the mouse was over the row, and if you clicked on one of the buttons but moved the mouse into another row before releasing the mouse button, the previous row would stay highlighted.

The authoritative writeup of the bug, and most others, refer to the problem happening with dynamically-displayed submenus, but make little mention of my particular problem. There was some hope that triggering hasLayout would fix the problem, as it’s the closest thing we have to a magic bullet, but it (shocker!) didn’t work for me.

What did work for me was reverting back to the brute-force method one had to use for older versions of IE: using JavaScript onmouseover/onmouseout events to trigger a hover style¹ rather than the :hover pseudoclass. So much for IE7 implementing :hover on non-anchor elements. Sigh.

¹ See the first comment. And shame on you, Webmaster World, for not having permalinks to the comments. Get a load of their generated source, too: they’re still using font tags. Seriously?! And this is a resource for webmasters? Come on.

H&FJ will be numbered among the recipients of the 2009 National Design Awards. Well, they better. Gotham was used in the Obama campaign branding.

So I had a bit of an adventure tonight. My cousin was doing a hit-and-run visit, and after hanging out this evening, I had to drop her off to meet up with the rest of her party so they could head back to Sacramento for their flight out tomorrow morning. It turned out that the rest of her party was having a late dinner in Sausalito, so we made the trek over the Golden Gate to find them.

Ever tried to find your way around Sausalito’s labyrinth of ridiculously winding streets? Not a fun prospect in full daylight, but at night, it’s nearly impossible. On the way there, I had my cousin to navigate for me, and we still made a few wrong turns. On the way back, it was just me…by some miracle, though, I only made a single wrong turn. So now I’m safe and snug in my own apartment, but I would still be wandering around Sausalito if it wasn’t for the iPhone, which saved my ass on several occasions tonight. Without Google Maps and the triangulation function (mine’s the 2G edition without the GPS), we’d still be trying to find the restaurant. Three cheers for the wonders of modern technology. Banzai!

A photo from my recent trip to New York City:

I’m not super happy with the shallow DOF in this shot, but I liked the feeling of this image. Check out the rest of ‘em!

In these times of effectively unlimited quotas, there’s no need to ever delete email. And I don’t—all my various accounts’ inboxes combined add up to somewhere around 20,000 emails. Having all your emails is great, but accessing them quickly is at least as important as having them on hand. However, of late, I’d been experiencing some severe performance problems in Mail.app—it was taking literally on the order of minutes for Mail to start up and shut down for me. Just brutal.

Today, in an effort to alleviate some of that pain, I stumbled across a solution that worked magnificently for me: cleaning up Mail.app’s SQLite database.

Here’s how you do it:

1. Quit Mail.app.
2. Launch Terminal, then type cd ~/Library/Mail/.
3. Back up Envelope Index in whatever fashion you prefer. I did cp Envelope\ Index EnvelopeIndexBackup.
4. Open Envelope Index with SQLite: sqlite3 Envelope\ Index. At the sqlite> prompt, type: vacuum subjects;. Once the prompt returns, type Ctrl-D or .exit to quit SQLite.

This reduces the size of Mail.app’s database and cleans it up, usually to dramatic effect. I reduced my database from ~34 MB to ~22 MB, and Mail now starts up in seconds, not minutes. Boom!

References: procedure and information about the vacuum statement.