Typographica

This was a surprisingly interesting and fun read. Contrary to what my assumption is, the switch to Linux was not chosen for being cheaper, as they projected the cost of migration to be more expensive than upgrading the Microsoft machines from NT/2000 to XP. The fact that a "conservative" city council went with Linux based on the strategic long-term is pretty impressive...Assuming that they aren't all tech engineers, it would be natural to stick with a computing platform that you yourself have been using your whole life, rather than impose an entirely new (and more expensive) one on your constituents.

Also, at least in the American market, the money poured into sales people to wine-and-dine for government contracts provides even more compelling reasons for politicians and bureaucrats to not rock the boat. And in Munich's case, Steve Ballmer himself flew out, in person, to try to convince them not to quit Windows (and, in the OP's assessment, that apparently was an unwise tactic for Microsoft).

OT: The body font of this article, Roboto (http://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Roboto), stuck out to me as being both legible and distinctly different than Helvetica...I was reading the article on a tablet but went to my desktop just to see what it was...I think I've seen Roboto before on Google Fonts but not used as body text...I kind of like it, more than some of the common Helvetica replacements (Open/Ubuntu/PT Sans)...even before I started reading the article, I thought, "this is…

You got it! By approximate category and in no particular order:

## MISCELLANEOUS

- [Low Tech Magazine](https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com), a solar-powered website showcasing the amazing low-tech things you can do with a little ingenuity,

- [Stephen Wolfram's Blog](https://writings.stephenwolfram.com) on math, compsci, and everything else,

- [Cool Macrophotography](https://www.barrywebbimages.co.uk/Images/Macro/Slime-Moulds-Myxomycetes) for amazing pictures of tiny things (WARNING: Time Sink!),

## COMPUTER SCIENCE

- [While-True-Do](https://blog.while-true-do.io) has lots of stuff on Linux administration and self-hosting,

- [Backend Banter](https://www.backendbanter.fm) for a great podcast on backend development,

- [Two Wrongs](https://two-wrongs.com) for statistics and functional programming,

- [Math ∩ Programming](https://www.jeremykun.com/) where math and programming intersect! Written by a Googler...

- [Paul Bourke's site](https://paulbourke.net/) where you can get happily lost exploring old pages on every topic CS touches,

- [Jason Punyon's blog](https://jasonpunyon.com) for some fun algorithms and things,

- [Yossi Kreinin's blog](https://yosefk.com/blog) for C, Python, and plenty of non-technical topics,

- [Adrian Sampson's academic blog](https://www.cs.cornell.edu/~asampson/blog) for an academic's perspective,

- [Cool polyhedra viewer project](https://georgehart.com/virtual-polyhedra/vp.html) if you like geometry,

- [Another academic blog on…

Shades of FF Chartwell, which is one of those amazing things you just think to yourself "well, this is going to take over the world of design and GUI's and so on", only .. for some reason, it doesn't:

https://typographica.org/typeface-reviews/chartwell/

"FF Chartwell is a set of three fonts* that together create a remarkable set of tools for creating bar, line, and pie charts. It uses OpenType ligatures to perform its magic – a series of numbers can be transformed into clean, perfectly rendered graphs, as you type."

Having used Chartwell for a few projects, I'm fairly convinced that this ligature trick is the way all GUI's should be done. In fact I've got this hypothesis going, that every GUI toolkit/method is eventually just going to re-invent ligatures and type... ;)

This is a great idea and I concur with your line of thought - there is room for expression in the realm of number representations .. have you considered building an ImHex plugin that would illustrate your point? The use of octants is particularly intriguing ..

One thing I often ponder on, along similar lines, is whether I can write some clever plugin that would put FF ChartWell - a font which uses ligatures to render useful graphs out of boring numerical data - into use, within ImHex. Seen how ligatures can be used this way?

https://typographica.org/typeface-reviews/chartwell/

Your idea of discovering new means of representing numeral data put me in mind of ligature hacking, in any case ...

This is enabling the piracy of typefaces. It takes significant skill and time to create a typeface, and creators should be paid for their work.

Instead of pirating typefaces, please see:

https://fontstand.com/

https://fonts.adobe.com/

https://typographica.org/on-typography/my-favorite-font-sources-a-shortlist-of-trusted-foundries-and-retailers/

Many foundries also offer trial versions of their typefaces. For example:

https://www.grillitype.com/free_trials

If you don't want to pay for a typeface, there are many very good open source options available. For example:

https://github.com/IBM/plex

http://www.latofonts.com/lato-free-fonts/

Wow, with the exception of Adobe’s Source Code, those fonts are pretty dreadful. I’d say they’re worth exactly the price their creators are asking for it.

For lists of good new webfonts, try MyFonts’ monthly ‘Rising Stars’ newsletter: http://webfonts.info/webfonts-know-how/november-rising-stars-webfonts

Also, Typographica makes an superb list every January: http://typographica.org/features/our-favorite-typefaces-of-2011/

And for some inspiration, you can always check the most popular fonts at TypeKit: https://typekit.com/lists/favorite-fonts