The Christmas songs I love most tend to be more somber and haunting, at least to me: “In the Bleak Midwinter,” “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” (I love this rendition), “Coventry Carol,” and especially “What Child Is This?” (On that last, there are at least two variants on the melody that I’m aware of. I prefer the one here.)
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Spanish Book of Mormon reader’s edition
Today I’m releasing a Spanish version of the Book of Mormon reader’s edition, freely available in EPUB, Kindle, and PDF:
Recent reads:
Good to Great, by Jim Collins. I enjoyed this much more than I thought I would (having previously had a bit of an aversion to business books). Recommended.
Atomic Habits, by James Clear. Some good ideas here, particularly the push to focus on systems and processes and identity instead of goals.
Quiet, by Susan Cain. Changed how I think about myself and others.
The Light Between Worlds, by Laura E. Weymouth. A lovely, wonderful novel. One of my favorite books ever.
Dark Money, by Jane Mayer. Fascinating book, though the material was disheartening and frustrating.
Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck. My first time reading this. Definitely darker than I expected (I hadn’t heard about the ending). Not really sure what I think about it.
New poem (a sonnet): The sight of you.
Latin New Testament study edition
To go along with the Greek New Testament study edition, I’ve just posted a wide margin study edition of the Latin New Testament (the 1914 Clementine Vulgate). It’s available for free download as a PDF.
Finally got around to trying CSS grid layout. It’s amazing. I’m very much looking forward to learning it in depth — it seems so much easier for desktop-size layout.
Came across Cal Newport’s phone foyer method this morning. My wife and I tried it out today and what do you know, it really does feel different. Who knows whether we’ll actually end up sticking with it, but at this point I hope we do.
Tectonic is an intriguing modern TeX engine written in Rust and powered by XeTeX.
What exactly that last bit means, I’m not entirely sure. But what I do know is that Tectonic is a much smaller install than MacTeX, and my initial tests came out with no problems whatsoever. Also, by default it doesn’t write out those intermediate .aux/.log files. I’m planning to use it instead of MacTeX going forward.
New poem: Bernadette.
Last year I posted a note about Curves, a Python type design library I was working on. At the time I’d given up on it, but I recently had some new ideas on how to make it more ergonomic. It now stands resurrected:
Since I don’t think I mentioned it in my earlier post: the idea is that programming language constructs (functions, variables, source control, etc.) may make it easier to design a typeface, given the parametric and repetitive nature of that work.
It’s still a work in progress and very much an experiment — placing points in code rather than in a GUI will always have some friction to it — but it seems promising enough now that it’s worth finishing it and trying to use it for some actual type design.