Kit·Blog Notes

Ocean’s Thirteen (7.3 on IMDB, trailers) is a manageably boring movie with a cool setup, SF props and very nice actors. If there’s absolutely nothing better on your radar, indulge.

“Each time I have tried to communicate with someone, love has disappeared.” Michelangelo Antonioni dies at 94. Read the four-page obituary in The New York Times. [Via D.O.]

Times (New) Roman and its part in the Development of Scalable Font Technology by Charles Bigelow, initially posted this article to the Usenet in May 1994 in response to the question: What’s the difference between Times Roman and Times New Roman?

The man who — during the beginning of the nineties, right after the Revolution — thought us about the great rock music via his radio show, passed away: Florian Pittiș. Rest in peace.

Horrible, horrible weather in Bucharest today — sabotage it by peeking at Jan von Holleben’s Dreams Of Flying and you’ll automagically remember how to smile. I even laughed loudly at the ninth. Fuck the rainy day. [from Vudu Cat]

Apple zigs again when they zag, launching the new iMac in a sexy aluminum-and-black-glass enclosure. Design substitutes advertising and sells.

Following Apple’s announcement, today my .Mac iDisk capacity indicates 10GB. Thank you.

“A wide-reaching ban on smoking in enclosed places just went into effect on July 1st in the UK, and in the two weeks following, carrier Orange reported that 7.5 million more messages were sent on its network than in the two-week period the month prior.” It has a name — smexting.

How come Anthony Hopkins is always so breathtakingly majestic? Fracture (7.1 on IMDB, trailer) may not be much o a classic, but the actor is awe-inspiring. See it.

The Bourne Ultimatum (8.7 on IMDB, trailers) is a masterpiece of the genre, according to its IMDB score. Poker-faced genre, I guess. But it surely is relentless and full of shards and fists flying around — see it, it’s good fun on a weekend night.

Hilarious design-gangsta rap video. It kinda makes sense after all — isn’t our professional ethos minority-like? Ghetto-like?

Design issues in mainstream media: The New York Times runs an article on typography — “a minor technicality of civilized life” — with the occasion of replacing Highway Gothic with Clearview on road signage. Read The Road to Clarity and don’t sigh wile reading quotes like “I’ve always thought that design can be a form of social activism.”

To find out how Gobierno de Gerpaña got a nice logo — and why — read Erik Spiekermann’s blog post Viva España or what?

Microsoft font rendering vs Apple font rendering — what do you respect more: the pixel grid, or the font designer? Read Respecting The Pixel Grid. [via DF]

I just discovered Town Frames — an intriguing collection of fossilized, anachronistic signage from Bucharest — too bad the blog itself gathers dust since february 2006, just like its inhabitants.

Advanced tech, indistinguishable from magic — “this new method of image resizing looks for seams (not simple columns or rows) of pixels with the ‘least energy’ both vertically and horizontally in the image and then uses this to enable resizing without losing important image content such as human subjects or other detail.” [via DPReview]

Good magazine: “There are only three countries that do not use the metric system: Liberia, Myanmar, and the United States.”

X-Rite announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to buy Pantone — Mac Observer. [via DF]

“If there is something good in the world then we copy with pride.” Anssi Vanjoki — Nokia’s Executive VP & General Manager of Multimedia on Nokia copying the iPhone. Read Nokia’s iPhone — no, seriously at Engadget.