Charlie Harvey

Blog

424 Blog articles in total, showing 131 to 140

  • September 2014 Reading

    September 2014 Reading cover image

    Diamond’s epic look at what we might learn from how non-state traditional societies work. I am not well enough read in anthropology to be able to critique Diamond fairly, but to an amateur it sometimes seems a little reductionist. Neve

  • How to make an adblocker with BIND and Apache on Debian

    How to make an adblocker with BIND and Apache on Debian cover image

    There are a few approaches to blocking ads. Adblock Plus seems to have become the most popular. It uses Firefox’s content policies interface and you can read more about how Adblock plus works on the FAQ.I have been playing around this week with another approach to Ad blocking, which is do

  • Font of the month: EB Garamond

    Font of the month: EB Garamond cover image

    This month I have gone for a font which revives Claude Garamont’s 16th century humanist typeface. There have been many variants of Garamond, but not many high quality versions that are free software — URW++ Garamond No. 8 is open source but doesn’t quite rate as free software be

  • Javascript: the weird parts

    Javascript: the weird parts cover image

    Javascript. Love it or hate it it seems to have become the defacto virtual machine of the internet that Java was supposed to be. And it is odd. Like properly odd. This is a short collection of some weird things that I have noticed about it. I keep a little list of these by my desk for my ow


  • August 2014 Reading

    August 2014 Reading cover image

    I am an huge Charles Stross fan. So when I saw the latest installment of the Laundry series in Blackwells, I had to pick it up. The story's hero is an applied computational demonologist in the bureaucratic laundry, a division of the secret service

  • N shades of #XXXXXX: An HTML5 book-cover maker

    N shades of #XXXXXX: An HTML5 book-cover maker cover image

    E L James’s lightweight pornographic novel Fifty Shades of Grey was a publishing sensation a few years back. I am told there will even be a film soon. It has spawned many imitators. Hence this tool which allows you to make your own homage to Fifty Shades. With any colour available in the

  • Font of the month: Montserrat

    Font of the month: Montserrat cover image

    My inaugaral font of the month is the work of Julieta Ulanovsky, who lives in Buenos Aries. She drew the inspiration for the font from the urban, hand-drawn lettering on old posters, signs and other letterforms in the neighbourhood where she lives and works, Montserrat. The typeface evokes th

  • Font of the month

    Font of the month cover image

    I developed an interest in typography some time around the time when computers first started to be able to display characters in different typefaces. It has grown into something of an obsession, especially since watching the wonderful Helvetica documentary a few years back. There are so many grea

  • Infographic: Facebook Vs the Stasi in numbers

    Infographic: Facebook Vs the Stasi in numbers cover image

    Some time ago, OpenDataCity made a map visualising the relative size of data held by the Stasi and NSA, you can view it below. Partly inspired by that, I thought it would be interesting to compare the Stasi with another vast data collection operation — Facebook. Here, then, is Facebook Vs t