Adactio: Links—Tagged with characters

In 1979, two books shaped my formative years • Supernatural Detective’s Field Guide

This is such a great project from Jon—a mashup of two books from his childhood!

Put that RSS feed in your feed reader.

Punctuation Personified (1824) – The Public Domain Review

Taking the child on a tour through punctuation, Mr. Stops introduces him to a cast of literal “characters”: there is Counsellor Comma, who knows “neither guile nor repentance” in his pursuit of “dividing short parts of a sentence”; Ensign Semicolon struts with militaristic pride, for “into two or more parts he’ll a sentence divide”; and The Exclamation Point is “struck with admiration”, his face “so long, and thin and pale”.

Why William Gibson Is a Literary Genius | The Walrus

On the detail and world-building in 40 years of William Gibson’s work.

What are “unusual characters” – Terence Eden’s Blog

Be liberal in what you accept:

Basically, if your form can’t register Beyoncé – it has failed.

HTML Symbols, Entities, Characters and Codes

For all your copying and pasting needs:

A delightful reference for HTML Symbols, Entities and ASCII Character Codes

The World’s Writing Systems

What a lovely timeline of civilisation. This site makes for a nice companion piece to that database of dimensioned drawings—they’re both delightful to explore.

᚛ᚈᚑᚋ ᚄᚉᚑᚈᚈ᚜ and ᚛ᚑᚌᚐᚋ᚜ - YouTube

When is a space not a space?

Tom talks about ogham stones and unicode.

The Complete CSS Demo for OpenType Features - OpenType Features in CSS

Every single font-feature-settings value demonstrated in one single page.

Password Tips From a Pen Tester: Common Patterns Exposed

I’ve been wondering about this for quite a while: surely demanding specific patterns in a password (e.g. can’t be all lowercase, must include at least one number, etc.) makes it easier to crack them, right? I mean, you’re basically providing a ruleset for brute-forcing.

Turns out, yes. That’s exactly right.

When employees are faced with this requirement, they tend to:

Choose a dictionary word or a name

Make the first character uppercase

Add a number at the end, and/or an exclamation point

If we know that is a common pattern, then we know where to start…

Life plus Linux: Look before you paste from a website to terminal

The (literally) hidden dangers of copying code snippets from the web and pasting them into the command line.

This cautionary tale backs up a small tip I heard for getting to understand how found code works: deliberately type it out instead of copying and pasting.

Typography Wars: Has the Internet Killed Curly Quotes? - The Atlantic

Glenn Fleishman on the war of attrition between primes and quotation marks on the web.

Google Noto Fonts

Google’s Noto (short for no-tofu; tofu being the rectangle of unicode sadness) is certainly ambitious. It has glyphs from pretty much every known alphabet …including Ogham and Linear B!