Category Archives: Network/Web

Webfont rendering on different browsers/platforms

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Yesterday, I updated my blog to use webfonts. As I was curious how they look on different platforms in different browsers I made some comparisons. I tried to cover all major browsers on various operation systems. As a rendering example I took my blog post about AirPlay Simultaneity as it uses three different fonts within the first paragraph.

For each browser/platform combination I made an image consisting of an overview of the rendering and a detail view. On the left side of each picture you can see a simple screenshot which is displayed in such way that it is scaled by one over device-pixel-ratio. That means, that all PC screenshots are displayed 1:1, where as the iPad 3 screenshot is display at 50 % and the Nexus 7 at 75 %. On the right side is a zoomed view of a few characters of each font used. It is displayed with a magnification factor of 4 for the mobile devices and 5 for the PC devices. Continue reading →

Finally: Webfonts and new layout

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It has been a long time since the last layout update of this site. Originally I planned updating the layout around July last year when I was experimenting with web typography for the first time. I tried several different themes with custom fonts and even almost finished a own layout based on bootstrap and some free fonts from the Google web fonts. I wasn't totally convinced of my new layout so I decided it to postpone after my trip to Costa Rica, but as usual I never reactivated the project again.

A few weeks ago, I read the #webtypobuch by Gerrit van Aaken which reignited my flame for typography and again I started to try different web fonts and changes to my layout. Yesterday I read an article about web typography from hukl which finally convinced my to get it done.

So here it is! I adapted the Twenty Eleven theme from WordPress which I like for its simplicity and did several tweaks to adapt it to my needs. I removed several of my self-written plugins for recent comments, recent posts and similiar posts to keep it clean. Although it requires a monthly fee I decided to give fonts.com a try for the webfonts. Right now, I'm using Neue Helvetica for the plain text in a 45 Light version and 65 Medium/46 Light Italic for bold/italic text. The headings are written in Avenir in 65 Heavy and 85 Heavy for bold. For quotes I use PMN Caecilia as an serif font in the 45 Light/46 Light Italic version. For monospaced text I use the Helvetica Monospaced Roman.

I tested the layout on OS X and Windows running the major browser (Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Internet Explorer) and all seem to work quite well. As the layout is responsive it also looks great on iPhone or iPad.

Edit: I disabled the webfonts in mid of June 2013, as I think that the monthly fees are still too high.

New Layout and flattr for twam.info

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twam.info @ iPad

During the last weeks I tried several themes and designs for a twam.info layout. Finally I decided to adapt a theme called Cool Blue by themelab. I changed a lot in the header and in footer of the theme to get a nice compressed layout.

My webpage user statictics say, that less than 7 percent of my visitors are using a display with a display width of less than 1280 pixels. As some of them are mobile devices like smartphones or tablets there is only a very small percentage of users who would not be able to display a theme with a fixed width of 1280 pixels without scrolling. So I decided to use a template width of 1151 pixels. The main advantage of increasing the template width was that the content column has now a width of 670 pixels allowing the display of 640 pixel width content without resizing. This is very nice to display videos, screenshots or full-size webcam images. Continue reading →

Ethernet bonding with Linux and 802.3ad

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2 NIC + SwitchNowadays, most desktop mainboards provide more than one gigabit ethernet port. Connecting them both to the same switch causes most Linux distros by default to get a individual IP on each device and route traffic only on the primary device (based on device metric) or round-robin. A single connection always starts at one IP and so all traffic goes through one device, limiting maximum bandwidth to 1 GBit.

Here comes bonding (sometimes called (port) trunking or link aggregation) to play. It connects two ore more ethernet ports to one virtual port with only one MAC and so mostly one IP address. Wheres earlier only two hosts (with the same OS running) or two switches (from the same vendor) could be connected, nowadays there's a standard protocol which makes it easy: LACP which is part of IEEE 802.3ad. Continue reading →