Category: From the Desk of Reverend Munk

Typecasts from the desk of the Right Reverend Theodore Munk

IBM Model 85: A Weird Mashup Indeed

Quick, name an IBM Typewriter that takes normal 96-Character Selectric III typeballs monospaced in 10 and 12 pitch, and *also* prints in proportional spacing using special “round dot” proportional typeballs? Give up? How about if I told you it was a weird mashup of the IBM Selectric III and the Wheelwriter? Yeah, it’s sort of […]

How the Gacillia Nut saved me a sh*tstorm of grief…

Hey, it’s been a slow summer, so when an email comes in promising a high-dollar job for what looks like simple HTML formatting of existing content, I give it consideration despite the prospective client’s atrocious command of the language.  Not *much* consideration, though. Sounds suspiciously like a certain Nigerian dialect common to form letters distributed […]

Polaroids: 10 Years Expired

I found a pack of Polaroid 600 film the other day at Deseret, and having had no luck getting a vintage 1981 pack I found some time ago to work, I was only mildly hopeful that this pack, which expired in 2005 might actually work. I dug up my One Step Flash and tried it […]

Nothing good is ever easy: Timelines and TWDB Part 2

Well, after 3 tries at finding a visualization library capable of timeline display that is both simple and flexible, it ended up being kind of a Goldilocks situation – Google’s libraries were too dependent on off-site resources and couldn’t do point data display (like a single date such as “company formed” or “merged with so-and-so”), […]

Timelines in TWDB

So, I was playing around a bit with various APIs last night and found out I could utilize Google’s Visualization API to do stuff like this fairly easily, given data changes I’m planning for the TWDB. How useful would you think this sort of thing might be?

IBM Typecasting Circa 1968

Here’s a gem of a paragraph, pulled completely out of context from the 1968 edition of the “IBM Journal”. This issue was composed of articles from the team that developed the IBM Selectric Composer, and the articles explain in painstaking detail the entire design philosophy and describe the minutia of every unique mechanism of the […]