Here is indie band The Pains of Being Pure at Heart previewing their upcoming album “Days of Abandon” at local station WNYC this week. At first blush, the songs sound terrific, even if the audio quality in the video is not the best.

The new album is released on 13 May and features this gorgeous cover from South Korean artist Lee Jinju. It has the look of an iconic album.

I guess something like this was inevitable, right? This new gadget snaps onto your best friend’s collar and “measures your dog’s activities, giving you a new perspective on day-to-day behavior and long-term health trends. Check in from your phone, share memorable moments with family and friends, and make informed decisions with your vet.” The device looks like this:

Though I sound a bit disdainful, I’m pretty sure I would have bought one of these for my dog when he was alive.

In his article “The Dollar-and-Cents Case against Hollywood’s Exclusion of Women,” Walt Hickey of Five Thirty-Eight looks into the numbers behind films that feature prominent roles for women. His team researched 1,615 films released over the past twenty-three years that passed the famous Bechdel Test, which determines whether a movie’s female roles are substantial or not based on the following criteria:

• There are at least two female characters with names
• The two female characters talk to one another
• They talk about any subject besides a man

The results make a surprisingly clear economic argument for making more films that meet these criteria.

We found that the median budget of movies that passed the test… was substantially lower than the median budget of all films in the sample. What’s more, we found that the data doesn’t appear to support the persistent Hollywood belief that films featuring women do worse at the box office. Instead, we found evidence that films that feature meaningful interactions between women may in fact have a better return on investment, overall, than films that don’t.

The Bechdel Test originated in 1985 in an installment of Alison Bechdel’s comic strip “Dykes to Watch Out For.” Its simplicity has proven consistently powerful over the years; even people I have known with no sympathy for feminism take note when these criteria are suggested to them. Still, I would be in favor of adding one more rule, one that addresses an aspect of feminine ideals that I have become acutely aware of as a parent of a young daughter:

• Neither of the two female characters are princesses

In fact, Hickey cites the recent blockbuster “Frozen” as an example of a movie that passes the Bechdel Test. That one does feature strong, well-written female leads, and I suppose we should be grateful for that — but they are also princesses. Where others might find it innocuous, I find the ideal of a princess — generally, in fiction, a female who can only either be born or married into her character attributes — to be pretty retrograde and not all that healthy.

Last weekend I found some time to make some tech improvements to our house which are probably only mildly interesting to most people but hey, that’s why I have this blog.

The headline item was probably replacing our generic thermostat with a Nest thermostat. The physical installation was easy, but I was surprised by some bugs getting the Nest thermostat to successfully connect to our AirPort wi-fi network.

I routinely connect new devices without a problem, but the Nest just couldn’t make it happen on its own. Ultimately, some combination of removing the AirPort’s guest network (which we never really made use of at our home), creating a DHCP reservation for the Nest’s MAC address, turning off the security protocols (and later turning them back on), and entering the router’s lengthy WPA2 password repeatedly via the Nest’s elegantly designed but less than optimal password entry interface worked.

Now the device is running quite smoothly and I’m very happy with it. Lots of nerds have already made the switch to Nest thermostats and so I have nothing really interesting to add — but coming late to the game, I found the novelty of a genuinely well-designed, technologically advanced appliance to be a revelation. I’m eager now to see what new products Nest will roll out; I’d be more than happy with a house that’s fully outfitted with automated systems courtesy of this brand.

Improvement number two was taking out a couple of hours to conceal a good deal of the wires snaking around our living room with Wiremold — plastic cable raceways that seamlessly attach to the mouldings at the base of your wall. I discovered Wiremold at my local Home Depot and was surprised that I had never heard of it before. It installs fairly easily, though cutting it is a bit of a pain unless you have a good saw or cutting setup, and it’s visually indistinguishable from the details of our real wall moulding. Wiremold isn’t a complete remedy to the deathly rat’s nest of cables that have collected around our house, but it does improve the picture significantly.

Finally, I bought a pair of D-Link Powerline adapters to see if I could get them working with my AirPort network. Powerline, in case you’re not familiar with it, plugs into standard wall sockets to make what is essentially a network out of your house’s electrical wiring. I’d been aware of it for years, but was always skeptical about whether it really worked or not — it sounded like hokum to me.

I finally decided to see if it could supplement our wireless network and reach some of the areas of the house that weren’t getting good, strong wi-fi signals, and after some light research, decided to give D-Link’s hardware a shot. By god, they worked, and really well, too. Setup was easy and the extension to the network was seamless. This coming weekend I will probably hook up one of the Powerline adapters to an AirPort Express to get a signal broadcast to our back yard, just in time for warm weather.

From type foundry The Northern Block: Rein Grotesk is an attractive, sharply modern typeface “with a strong, neutral personality. Its tall structure and open counters make Rein Grotesk a versatile typeface which is both readable at small sizes and legible in any display environment.” Northern Block’s PDF specimen for the typeface is also more playful than most, and free to download.

It’s on sale through 19 Apr at You Work For Them for a song: the desktop and webfont versions are going for just US$39 each (full disclosure: affiliate link). Sadly, there are no oblique versions, which limits its usefulness somewhat, but I bought both versions for myself nevertheless.

Designer Craig Rozynski decided that hating Comic Sans wasn’t enough — he wanted to do something about it, too. So he set about reinterpreting the core promise of Comic Sans — a typeface that is distinctly casual and widely accessible — and created Comic Neue, a new typeface that “aspires to be the casual script choice for everyone including the typographically savvy.”

It’s a worthy effort for sure, and I acknowledge that it is an improvement over its inspiration. But we’re talking about degrees of nausea here; Comic Neue makes me less queasy, but it still makes me queasy.

You might feel differently, of course. If you like it, Rozynski has generously made Comic Neue free to download.