Here’s my round up of the latter half of February.

I’ve been a long time fan of Plantin and really like Klim’s new metal Plantin inspired typeface – Martina Plantijn. As usual the design information makes for excellent reading. I wish I had more excuses to buy and work with fonts, there’s so much good stuff out there. The design notes also mention the Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerp, which looks like it would be fun to visit.

We went to Swindon to stay with Bec’s fam and help her sister chop down some severly overgrown hedges in her garden, it was hard work. It was a reminder that plants/trees need looking after, leaving them for too long causes a lot of trouble.

We had two great evenings at my favourite pub The Wenlock Arms down by where we used to live. On the Sunday afternoon we were there, they bought around to all the tables a free plate of roast potatoes with gravy. Such a nice idea.

Noah Kalina has started posting videos regularly on Youtube and they’re really great. They’re funny and really well made. I’m a big fan. They feel like a continuation of his newsletters he did a while back.

I’m still practicing typing in the Colemak layout, I’m definitely improving not ready to switch yet though, my best “score” so far is accuracy: 92.09% and WPM: 19.85.

I really enjoyed this post on AI, or more specifically the debacle with Google Gemini recently. I liked the bit specifically about how these companies creating (and selling) these AI tools don’t really know what they’re good for.

In fact, at some point Google and OpenAI will have to face that the actual best uses for chatbots (summarizing chunks of text and some easy programming tasks, so far?) diverges from what many enthusiasts want the chatbots to be (computer demi-gods).

Speaking of AI, whilst I am deffo pretty sceptical of it and quite sick of all the hype. I did back Matt Webb’s kickstarter for his AI powered poem clock. He’s doing something interesting with the medium. Plus it looks nice.

Robin Sloan’s newsletters continue to be a joy, he’s got a new novel coming out soon - Moonbound. I can’t wait to get my hands on it.

The leap day was fun. We had a couple of incidents with our platform at work, I tried to blame it all on the leap year.

It also means that my birthday is the solstice, rather than the usual June 21st. All my 36 years I’d known that some years this did happen but only this year have I actully understood why. I just thought it was like some random celestial blip.