Simon Cozens

I wrote an image vectorisation tool which tries to do point placement and node handles the way type designers would: smooth curves, horizontal and vertical alignment, balanced handles.

It's called glyphtracy
https://github.com/simoncozens/glyphtracy

I keep thinking about camcorders. Imagine being a videographer for the first 10 or 20 years after camcorders went on sale. You'd go through the following thoughts:

"Everyone can make movies? This is going to kill my job."
"Haha, this is trash. My job is safe."
"Quality is getting better but it's still trash."
"It's trash but people are kind of happy with it? For recording memories and having fun it does what they need."
"OK, quality is actually getting decent, you could maybe shoot a pro movie on this. Worried about my job again."
"What is my job? Now that anyone can shoot videos, it's obvious that it's not just pointing a camera and making a movie. It's knowing light, angles, sound, timing. Both the camcorder, and my job, have their place."

Anyway, back to coding.

Today's favourite Unicode codepoint.

We really need a plan to decarbonise the world's energy infrastructure. Ideally by Tuesday.

What I love about limework is not just that it's satisfying but it's also so, so forgiving. Like, I am useless at almost every practical task but lime doesn't care. Screwed it up? No problem, lime dries slowly and cures over months. Come back tomorrow and fix it. Really screwed it up? Just rake it out with a chisel and try again. Put too much on and it looks messy? That's a "sacrificial layer" which will protect against weathering. Brush it off in a couple of months. Not put enough on? "Natural shrinkage". Beat it with a churn brush and slap some more on. Absolutely and utterly Simon-proof.

It is the 26th of April, 2026. Forty years ago, the Chernobyl nuclear reactor exploded. Fittingly, I've just finished reading Serhii Plokhy's "Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy", which traces not only the explosion and its immediate aftermath but shows how political and ecological activism against the government disinformation campaign surrounding Chernobyl led directly to the movement for an independent Ukrainian state.

Today is Friday, the 2239th of March, 2020.

Spent far too long tracking down a VF instancing bug only to discover my test case said `wdth=700,wght=75`. Code did what I told it, not what I wanted.

I've been wanting someone to make a nice JavaScript version of Inglenook Sidings, and here one is: https://beaver.games/shunting/

This is a lovely little logic puzzle with thousands of possible variations.

Weekly takeaway last night. In the queue behinds us me there was a man with his daughter, maybe 6 years old, deciding what to have. "Shall I have chicken kebab or doner, darling?" "What's doner, daddy?"

At which point I leaned over to my son, said loudly "Isn't Doner the name of one of Santa's reindeer?", and left.

I really wish I could compose branches in git. Like, give me a branch which is *dynamically* the effect of feature-brach-a plus feature-branch-b.

Lots of talk about making Andy Burnham an MP so he can take over as Prime Minister misses the point that Labour would need to win a by-election in the current political climate. Lots of luck with that, folks.

Order free sofa cover swatches for coasters.

@davidallengreen@mastodon.green Nice to see you here again.

A fun puzzle for type designers. My brain filled in 1 and 3 automatically.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/mar/30/can-you-solve-it-r-y-clvr-ngh-t-rd-ths-sntnc

@davidallengreen@mastodon.green Better than that - they have now gone from negotiating an end to the blockade of the Straits of Hormuz to... um, blockading the Straits of Hormuz.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2026/apr/12/middle-east-crisis-live-us-iran-pakistan-peace-talks-jd-vance-delegation-leaves-without-a-deal?CMP=share_btn_url&page=with%3Ablock-69db9a008f08dd4830774b67#block-69db9a008f08dd4830774b67

@tuqtuli@typo.social