news – Page 9 – Shady Characters

The interrobang on 99% Invisible‽

July 15, 2018

Long-time readers will remember that 99% Invisible, the wide-ranging podcast hosted by Roman Mars and produced in beautiful, downtown Oakland, California, featured an episode on the octothorpe back in December 2014. It’s a great listen: 99PI producer Avery Trufelman managed to track down Doug Kerr and Lorne Asplund, two of the engineers at Bell Labs who were instrumental in placing the ‘#’ on the then-new telephone keypad and later christening it as the “octothorpe”, to get the story behind the mark’s rebirth in the computer age.

Housekeeping № 3: moving to HTTPS

June 24, 2018

A very quick note this week: Shady Characters now runs exclusively over HTTPS. What does this mean? Well, rather like my recent post about how references work here on the blog, my hope is that very little will change — other than an extra ‘s’ in the site’s address.

Miscellany № 85: you only have one *

June 16, 2018

We’ve visited Ampersand Mountain, with its eponymous creek and hotel, and we’ve heard tell of mythical San Seriffe Island; now, welcome to scenic Asterisk Pass in Oregon’s Smith Rock State Park! This excellent image was taken by Travis Kochel of Trail Type. Many thanks to him for permission to republish it.

Housekeeping № 2: citations at Shady Characters

May 29, 2018

Giving credit where it’s due has been an important part of writing for Shady Characters since I started back in 2010. Where I use an image that I don’t own myself, for instance, I try my best to find the owner, obtain their permission and then credit them in the caption for their work. Equally as important, I try to link to or cite all of the sources I use when writing about a given subject. That last part has given me no end of grief, and that’s what I’m going to write about today.

The Book at the BBC: Book of the Week

May 13, 2018

Some exciting news! The Book: A Cover-to-Cover Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Time is BBC Radio 4’s next Book of the Week! The first 15-minute episode will be broadcast on Radio 4 tomorrow, Monday 14th May, at 09:45 BST (it will be repeated again tomorrow night at 00:30) and will be followed by four more daily episodes to be broadcast and repeated at the same times for the rest of the week.