I just booted into a Fedora 27 live system on my HP Envy laptop with an HD screen, and already the fonts in Firefox look better than stock Debian, which is to be expected.

Just like with Debian, I'm astounded that everything works in Linux out of the box. This laptop is about nine months old, and I have been avoiding running Linux for that whole time, choosing to explore Windows 10 (which is not bad at all, in case you were wondering).

I'm very happy that Fedora (which I ran for pretty much the entire "run" of my old HP Pavilion g6 laptop, which is running F27 as we speak) is so good on what, for me is new hardware.

The improvement in font rendering on this HD screen (1920x1080) is enough for me to say that I could definitely make the switch from Windows 10 to Fedora. I'm not ready just yet, but it looks like I am able.

Maybe it's the new laptop talking, but GNOME 3 looks more polished and usable than ever. The first thing I did in the live environment (after pumping up my Firefox magnification to 140%) was installing GNOME Tweak Tool and changing to the Adiwata Dark Theme.

True for both Debian and Fedora: The laptop is running very cool, too.

Next up: A test of the new non-BIOS-bricking Ubuntu 17.10, where I hope the GNOME 3 experience will also be a good one.

I have been working steadily on the BlogPoster app, both tightening up the current "production" version and slowly coding the new "modular" version based on Ruby blocks.

Over the weekend I coded up a few blocks in what I hope will be a very atomized app in which all of the blocks do just about one thing and can be called upon in various combinations for different tasks.

Today I worked on the regexes for creating filenames based on post title. The hardest part is dealing with strange characters and website <title> text that contains lots of linefeeds. (Confession: This site did the same until I fixed it. Please don't put linefeeds in your <title>.)

I got rid of the extra linefeeds, but I was ending up with occasional doubled underscores (my go-to replacement character for the space between words). I came up (i.e. Googled and stole) the regex for "match two or more of this character," which in this case is __+, and I was off to the races. I also figured out that in HTML titles with extra lines, I was inadvertently adding an underscore to the beginning of a string, and I used ^_ to find that and kill it out. Regex is fun and profitable.

Hopefully I'll get back to working on the "new" version. I'm coding it slowly and deliberately because I don't want it to be a mess. Next version will be more object-oriented (i.e. will use classes) if I can figure that out. First we'll see how this version turns out,