Asterisms in LaTeX

Another trick this week: asterisms. Asterisms are typographic devices used to separate or to call attention to a piece of text without resorting to using a section or chapter. While its usage in modern English (and French, for that matter) is now rare, it is still an interesting device to structure text.

The usual manifestation of an asterism is the ⁂ symbol (U+2042) but the single character asterism may not be suitable for all occasion. In HTML, and in these posts, you have seen it quite often. With , getting an decent-looking asterism is not that easy.

It made my day

IMMD: Being cited in http://tinyurl.com/4du575o

1968–1993

You know you’re old when you find stuff that commemorates something that happened 43 years ago and it was around the time you were born. Rummaging through my game cupboard (the one where you stuff all the monopoly versions you received for Christmas 26 years ago), I found this playing card set celebrating Intel‘s 25th anniversary.

Sustainable iPod Rack

This week, I have a half-an-hour project for you: A sustainable iPod rack. All you need is a 50 mm × 50 mm × 70 mm (2in × 2in × 2½in) block a wood, a band saw, and a chisel.

OK, it’s not entirely made of wood; you may also need felt pads underneath to make it more stable and/or furniture friendly.

RetroComputing

There are plenty of web sites and museums dedicated to the computers of yore. While most of them now seems quaint, and delightfully obsolete, there are probably a lot of lessons we could re-learn and apply today, with our modern computers.

If you followed my blog for some time, you know that I am concerned with efficient computation and representation of just about everything, applied to workstation, servers, and embedded systems. I do think that retro-computing (computing using old computers or the techniques of old computer) has a lot to teach us, and not only from an historical perspective.