Keith Houston's Blog, page 11
July 15, 2018
The interrobang on 99% Invisible‽
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 t...
June 24, 2018
Housekeeping № 3: moving to HTTPS
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.
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June 16, 2018
May 29, 2018
May 13, 2018
The Book at the BBC: Book of the Week
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.
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April 8, 2018
Housekeeping: your data at Shady Characters
Readers in the EU may have heard about something called the GDPR, or “General Data Protection Regulation”. This is an upcoming change to EU law that clarifies and expands on prior rules relating to how organisations (even one-man-bands such as Shady Characters) obtain personal data such as email addresses and how they manage that data once obtained. As such, I’ve updated my page on Privacy, Cookies & Personal Data to make it clear how I handle personal data. I’d encourage you to take a mo...
February 5, 2018
Miscellany № 84: zut alors!
Happy new year! Here’s a post that I certainly did not expect to crest 1,400 words.
There have been a rash of recent news stories from Brittany, the westernmost region of mainland France, concerning parents wishing to give their children traditional Breton names. In September 2017, for example, Agence France-Presse published an account of whose parents were told that per government rules their son could not have a tilde in his name. As the French government’s website...
December 19, 2017
The 2017 Shady Characters gift guide
The year is coming to an end and that can mean only one thing: it’s time for me to promote my books!
I’m kidding. Sort of, at least. Fatherhood has occupied most of the time that, in previous years, I would have spent hunting down punctuation-related gifts for you, the discerning reader. That said, I’ve been interested in the comings and goings surrounding emoji (“picture writing”, or symbols like “
November 25, 2017
Miscellany № 83: Thomas Jefferson’s ivory polyptych
“An ivory what?” you may well ask. In the process of researching and writing The Book (which is, need I say, available from all good bookshops), I came across any number of tidbits that lay just fractionally below the interesting-ness threshold required for inclusion in the book. One discovery in particular, though, has had me kicking myself since I first handed in the manuscript back in 2015, and I still wish I’d found a way to incorporate it into the narrative. Here it is!
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November 5, 2017
Miscellany № 82: the Future (and the Past) of Text
On Monday 11th September I gave a talk at Southampton University for the 2017 edition of a yearly symposium called “The Future of Text”. I’ve known Frode Hegland, its organiser, for a few years now (we first corresponded back in 2014, as I was finishing the manuscript for The Book, and he’s a fellow immigrant here in South London) but I must confess to having been a terrible conference tease. Each time he has asked me to participate, I’ve made positive noises and then subsequently had to back...
