Weekender #22

• Still no changes in myna bird land. As usual, Handsome comes by a few times a day for his snacks. Today was the anniversary of his former mate, Myna 2’s passing. He spent a lot of time doing his myna bird calls for long periods on top of various telephone poles around the neighborhood. I wonder if it’s his way of trying to find a new mate?

• Last weekend, we decided to take a break from our normal routine and watch a movie. I heard about the new Pixar film Luca, but had no idea what it was about, nor where it was being shown. I launched the Fandango app (which was a strange feeling, as I hadn’t even thought of it for an entire year) and searched for the movie there. I quickly learned that there were a few movies playing at select theaters that were open on the island, but I didn’t know any of those movies, and Luca wasn’t one of them. A quick search, and I found it on Disney+! Without giving away any spoilers, I’ll just say that it was the perfect summer movie and maybe the closest Pixar has gotten to the feel of a Studio Ghibli movie.

• Incidentally, the last movie I saw in theaters was Knives Out, which I really, really enjoyed.

• This week, Google announced updates to some Google Drive file links that will probably break things for a lot of organizations that use their services. This will apparently affect YouTube users as well. Read more about the changes here.

• I went looking for some of the fonts that I created back when I was in college because Adobe is ending support for Type 1 fonts soon.

  • I wanted to make sure I had TrueType versions of them to ensure that they would still be usable and survive this coming change. TrueType fonts were pretty new when I started making fonts in the early 90’s. I still recall debates about which was better. At the time, I decided to convert all of my fonts to TrueType just to be safe. Luckily 3 out of 4 fonts that I created were already converted to TrueType.

  • The one that wasn’t converted was the very first font that I created. It was the very unique handwriting style of my girlfriend at the time. The font was called Sassy. But, there was a problem other than the missing True Type font: the Type 1 font and suitcase bitmap files in my archive both read as zero bytes in size, meaning the files were empty of any resources and were pretty much useless. I kinda recall that during the transition from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X, there was a bug when transferring files via ftp (or some other copy method I can’t remember) that could cause the contents of a Mac OS 9 file to lose their resource fork. I’m fairly sure this happened to a lot of my fonts from this time period.

  • My only hope for recovering this font was to check my backup archives to see if one of my backups had the whole untouched files. I had recently moved a majority of my hard copy CD archives to external spinning discs since CDs tend to deteriorate over time, and many of my backup CDs were from the early 2000s. Also, external spinning storage is dirt cheap!

  • I found multiple backups in the archive, but most of them were in the same state as the files I already had and were missing the resource fork. I did find a file that might have all of the fonts I created compressed into a single archive! The issue with this file was that it was compressed with an app from pre-Mac OS X called Stuffit in a the .sea (Self Expanding Archive) file format, which was Stuffit’s proprietary compression method that allowed files compressed with Stuffit to be decompressed without Stuffit being installed. Unfortunately, in 2021, Stuffit isn’t software that anyone uses anymore.

  • I tried the “modern” version of Stuffit, but could not get the .sea file to open. It seemed like the only way I’d ever be able to extract what was inside this .sea file was to either find a time machine and tell myself not to use Stuffit Self Expanding Archive format, or find a Mac that can run Mac OS 9.

  • I was about to give up hope, when I came upon a link about where someone made it easy to run Mac OS 9 on OS X / macOS! The link leads to a fully compiled instance of SheepShaver that runs Mac OS 9.0.4, but with the ease of transferring files to and from the Mac OS 9 installation. Opening the .sea file was as simple as downloading the binary, launching it, and copying the .sea file over to Mac OS 9 and double-clicking it.

  • I was able to restore the Type 1 font, and my work from 1991 was saved! Now, I need to figure out how I’m going to convert this Type 1 font to True Type or another format…

• Conan signed off from TBS this week after an 11 years. He’s had a great run. I’ve watched Conan since his debut 1993, when he took over the Late Show after David Letterman departed for CBS. While the first few seasons were shaky, I loved Conan because he was always the underdog and was never afraid to poke fun at himself… and he was genuinely hillarious! The one moment that always sticks in my mind was Conan’s final farewell after his seven month run in his dream job as the host of The Tonight Show in 2009. I still think about his words to this day.

• As far as music goes, this week was mostly old favorites. This week’s pick is Eliot Sumner’s debut album Information (2016). If the voice sounds familiar, it may be because Eliot has a famous dad named Sting. Listen: Apple Music