Isolationism

So I haven’t written anything since New Years.

That isn’t entirely accurate—I’ve tried to write the same story twice, but given up both times after a couple paragraphs. It suffices to say that despite having spent a very painful week trying a variety of combinations, I still can’t get fonts to render the same on two different Linux distos. They look pretty good on Gentoo now, though, after a lot of hassle—Long story short, patch Freetype 2.2.1 and Cairo 1.2.4 with the ‘FIR Filter’ patchfiles, then recompile with the -bindist USE flag for Freetype, then use the essence of my previous post for configuring your ~/.fonts.conf to disable autohinting between pixelsizes 10-12 for everything, then make font-specific changes for Arial, Verdana, and the like to render crisply at common resolutions.

Some other stuff has happened since the new year, too—but not much. I’ve barely touched Windows (except a few VMWare sessions where unavoidable), which is a good feeling. I bought a couple cheaper 19″ LCD monitors so we could use my old screen for the computer in squeaker’s room, which is now on a desk thanks to a kind gift from Bex’ father while he was visiting last weekend, and got them both working properly in Linux (after a struggle with my Matrox card, which was quickly replaced by my older ATI adapter, which was replaced a whole day after getting it to work properly with a welfare GeForce card I had placed an order for a couple weeks ago as (A) nVidia cards work annoyingly better than ATI cards in Linux, and (B) the card is completely fanless, which means my corner of the office stays nice and quiet.

Of course, yesterday I noticed I have a stuck pixel in a prominent location on one of the screens, so I’m going to try to return it this weekend and get an exchange (and hope the exchange isn’t worse than this one). I’ve had good luck with Samsung monitors to date, but I guess my luck ran out. I’ve tried all of the tips and tricks to unstick the pixel, but no-go: It is without a doubt caused by a manufacturing defect and is quite permanent in nature.

I did have a very positive customer service experience today, though, after a traumatic discovery a couple days ago: My Aeron had a big fissure in the seat pan, which looked like it would eventually crack and make the chair unusable. I phoned Ottawa Business Interiors to get a hold of someone to come look at it—and today, a kind gent by the name of Barry showed up at my door with a replacement seat, and I was back up and running in a half hour as he performed the service on-site, as promised when I bought the chair years ago. If only all businesses had customer service (and under warranty, too, after four years!) like these guys!

I stayed up late last night compiling Beryl for Gentoo, just for shits and giggles. Amazingly, it “just worked” right off the bat—it was even less of a pain under Gentoo than it was to get running under Kubuntu, if you can believe that—and it’s easier to disable this time, too, so I can get some actual work done when I get bored of the eye candy. The video overlay works across both monitors simultaneously (I didn’t even think it was possible to do, but apparently it is) and of course 3D acceleration too — although performance is significantly reduced when rendering simultaneously to two monitors at 1280×1024. I have yet to set something up so I can selectively disable one of the monitors for higher performance on a single display (presumably an alternative xorg.conf file), but since I have no games I can play under Linux to speak of, it’s not a very high priority right now anyway.

Well, that’s about it for my update for now. Hope the next one is sooner than three weeks away.