The Unicode Consortium, in its ∞ wisdom, decided a long time ago that the Fraktur script—that weird old-fashioned German style of text—should not be encoded in its own block, but rather considered a font in which standard latin text can be rendered. That has some implications for ligatures, but that’s beyond the scope of this […]
Tag Archives: germany
On “A Defense of the German copycat”
Over on his personal blog, my buddy Peter Bihr has come to the defense of that most reviled breed of start-up — the German copycat. And while the whole thing’s a bit tongue-in-cheek, he’s actually right about some of the benefits that so-called “copycats” offer; they are in a position to make marginal changes and […]
Privacy, public transportation, and Berlin’s Touch&Travel program
NPR Berlin reported today that Berlin’s public transportation authority, the BVG, launched the Touch&Travel program [de] earlier this month, which allows Vodafone and Telekom customers to use an Android phone or an iPhone to pay for their transport tickets. Participants “check in” while boarding, and confirm their location either through continuous GPS data directly from […]