Fonts for Conscripts on FrathWiki

FrathWiki is a MediaWiki-based site for conlangers. I use it to host the documentation for Khangaþyagon and iljena. One drawback, however, is that it was difficult to use a conlang's native script, as this requires a custom font. My friend David Peterson created a font for Bukhstav runes before he was famous, but short of uploading a lot of .png files, it would have been very difficult to make use of it on the wiki.

But no more! I've looked up how to use web fonts in CSS, and created a couple of templates that should allow the use of any conscript you have a font for on FrathWiki. Behold!

http://www.frathwiki.com/Templates_for_using_web_fonts

One of my Fantastical Devices is on PyPI

I've mentioned in previous posts that I've been working on a Python library for Hidden Markov Models. I've been encouraged to put this up on the Python Package Index, so, after a little while getting the hang of registering and uploading a project here it is. It's alpha, or course, so there are probably plenty of bugs to be found in it, but if you want to play with something I've made, all you have to do is type

sudo pip install Markov

, and try it out. If you feel you can help me improve it, contact me and I can add you to the Google Code project.

The Lego Movie

My children had been wanting to go to The Lego Movie for ages, so this afternoon we finally gave in and took them. I wasn't expecting to enjoy it much myself, but I did. Good children's stuff is just as enjoyable for grown ups. Without giving too much away, it's a bit like a U-rated parody of The Matrix. However, if it's a parody, it's better than the original. And the moral of the story, "Don't just follow the instructions, be creative" is pretty much the point of Lego. One of my proudest moments as a dad was when my son took his Millenium Falcon to bits so that he could build other things with it. Talking of which, I was amused by the Star Wars minifigs being voiced by the original actors.

A bonus is that it may have got my daughter interested in Lego, in a way that Lego Friends never could.