Clagnut’s Problems with Font Rendering on Macs article is a good resource when weighing font usage against browser statistics in your next web design.

Clagnut’s comprehensive findings and comparison of five font formats across four browsers (Camino 1.2, Firefox 2, Opera 9 and Safari 2), on both Mac and PC platforms, is codified into a quick reference chart with accompanying screen captures.

Yet even Clagnut’s study only scratches the surface of possible iterations if you add Internet Explorer to the mix. And as we all know Helvetica renders poorly on a PC. But the Clagnut screen captures and charts may still prove helpful to the conscientious web designer, if for no other reason than to render a reminder.

If, like most of us, you have no idea how many business-related miles you drove last year, check out Mileage Calculator, a mashup tool designed to quickly construct or reconstruct those elusive year-end mileage reports tax preparers clamor for each year.

Track Your Calendar, Track Your Mileage

Created by Recursive Function, developers of the popular Ponyfish RSS tool, Mileage Calculator uses Google Maps and your Google Calendar to pull your mileage records into a .csv file that can be downloaded into a spreadsheet.

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Another tidal event wreaked havoc this morning when an earthquake off the coast of Taiwan severed two undersea telecommunication cables cutting telephone and Internet connections to much of Asia according to the International Herald Tribune (IHT). The quake crippled banking and securities trading and damaged lines to the US and Europe as well.

Think Backup

The people of Asia could be inconvenienced for days, maybe even weeks, and disconnection from the world may become untenable both personally and economically. While a solid business or personal information backup strategy can’t impact the availability of the global pipeline, it can certainly mitigate individual and corporate risk.

With so many inexpensive backup and storage options available today, there really is no excuse not to backup information personally or corporately.

Peace of Mind Well Spent

For instance, a 160GB USB 2.0 / Firewire external device can be had for under $100US and resides in the same room with you. For Apple users there’s the comprehensive .Mac, guaranteeing a solid remote recovery of nearly everything. Or consider the free, or nearly so, online browser-based file management and storage of Box, or the internet-based backup capability of Super Duper. Even Amazon is getting into the server farm-for-rent business with Amazon S3.

Looking for a 2007 New Year’s resolution? Consider being more resolute about getting backed up.

On occasion, I enjoy reading French news sources like LCI. However, my ability to read French has waned—okay, nearly dissipated altogether. Translator, a Firefox add-on, promised to change all that with a click, and it did. Translator currently supports several online translation services including: Google Translation, Yahoo! Babelfish, PROMT, freetranslation.com, Altavista and Im translator—in a host of locales. Give it a try.

Brainstorm principal Bart Caylor has been invited to address the Taylor University trustee board in Orlando, Florida in late January, 2007. Caylor did a topical presentation on Web 2.0 at the Taylor Technology Summit earlier this month. He discussed exactly what Web 2.0 is, how it has evolved and, most importantly, what impact it is having–and will continue to have–on higher education admissions strategies.