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frugal technology, simple living and guerrilla large-appliance repair

Regular blog here, 'microblog' there

Many of my traditional blog post live on this site, but a great majority of my social-style posts can be found on my much-busier microbloging site at updates.passthejoe.net. It's busier because my BlogPoster "microblogging" script generates short, Twitter-style posts from the Linux or Windows (or anywhere you can run Ruby with too many Gems) command line, uploads them to the web server and send them out on my Twitter and Mastodon feeds.

I used to post to this blog via scripts and Unix/Linux utilities (curl and Unison) that helped me mirror the files locally and on the server. Since this site recently moved hosts, none of that is set up. I'm just using SFTP and SSH to write posts and manage the site.

Disqus comments are not live just yet because I'm not sure about what I'm going to do for the domain on this site. I'll probably restore the old domain at first just to have some continuity, but for now I like using the "free" domain from this site's new host, NearlyFreeSpeech.net.

Fri, 25 Jan 2013

Tweaking my Ode body type settings

I've been changing my Ode body type settings over the past few days. I've switched fonts, sizes and line height.

I did take some inspiration from Rob Reed's Ode blog, especially on the line-height property in the css.

While I liked the Carme font I pulled from Google, it looked better on some devices (newer iPod Touch, systems running Linux) than others (older iPad, systems running Windows), and I wasn't crazy about the noticeable delay in text showing up on the screen while the client device pulled the font from Google.

So I went with Helvetica Neue, though I also like Arial and Verdana. Even plain sans-serif looks good. I might keep switching things up.

I still haven't yanked the Droid Sans Mono font I pulled from Google for code blocks. Since the rest of the type shows up on the page without delay, I don't think a late-blooming code font is much of a distraction. And I really like Droid Sans Mono.

The body type font size has been changing day to day. I went from 14px to 12px and now 13px.

I bumped the post headline font up six pixels to 22px. I could go bigger. I could go bold. Not just yet.

Fri, 18 Jan 2013

Fedora 18 with Xfce: My first impressions from live media

Fedora 18 has finally appeared in its final form after many delays. Largely responsible: a new Anaconda installer that has seen much criticism, mostly from users who like complicated manual partitioning. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

I've always liked Ananconda. As far as I know, it's the only installer that can create any number of encrypted partitions -- in or out of LVM (logical volume management) -- and allow me to unlock them with a single passphrase typed once during boot. It also appears to be the only installer that can create a fully encrypted LVM installation while allowing another operating system -- like Windows -- to remain on the same disk.

What I'm trying to say is if the Debian installer would do these two things, I'd be a happy, happy camper.

Back to Fedora 18, aka "Spherical Cow." (I do like funny distro names more than serious Fedora names or stupid Ubuntu animal ones.) F18 offers a whole bunch of desktop environments in relatively (to very) new versions: GNOME, Xfce, LXDE, KDE and now MATE and Cinnamon. No Unity. A pity, perhaps. Or not.

I downloaded the network-install ISO, from which I could theoretically install any one of these environments.

I also downloaded a live image of Fedora 18 with Xfce 4.10. For the past many months, I've been using Xfce 4.8 rather heavily in Debian Wheezy. Debian Wheezy is never, ever going to get Xfce 4.10, even via Backports, as far as I know. Not that there's all that much difference between 4.8 and 4.10.

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