Helsingin Sanomat is launching (in Finnish) some changes on Monday. Aside from the changes to the paper’s organization and section, the biggest change will be in the typefaces used. The new types, The AntiquaHS and QuaText, have been designed by Lucas de Groot, the man behind Calibri and Consolas.

Conspicuously missing is the big change that everyone’s been waiting for: switching from a broadsheet to a tabloid format.

I wish I could take a look at the revised paper, but I guess that’ll have to wait until I visit Finland next time.

I sent my friend this sudoku puzzle, billed as the world’s hardest. I didn’t tell him where I got it from, figuring I’d reveal it once he was stumped.

Today he sent me back the solution. When I asked him how he’d found it, he said he solved the first half while sitting on the toilet, and the second half amidst work. It’d taken him just 30 minutes!

Update: Well, one of sharper eyed friends noticed that the puzzle illustrating the USA Today story isn’t the one the story’s about. Shame on me for not reading the fine text. This takes the oomph out of the whole thing.

An interesting tidbit from Thomas Fuchs’ Extreme Javascript Performance:

~~(1 * 12.5) is faster than parseInt(12.5).

The ~~ is a double bitwise not, and the multiplication by one forces a string into a float.

Via Janne’s Delicious stream.

To my online shoe shopping experience, I’ll add that I received a letter from DHL today, notifying me that they’d paid my VAT, and that I’d need to pay them back. The bill is straightforward, and the administrative fee they added on top of the VAT is reasonable (£1.25).

(In Finland, your package either gets stopped at the customs, where you pay VAT on pick-up, or it doesn’t.)

So, when comparing overseas prices online, this also should be taken into account.

So you think you can tell Arial from Helvetica?. I got 18/20. There’s one which is really hard, and one that I just don’t see.