Liberation fonts in Jaunty

Is it just me, or do liberation fonts included in Jaunty look a lot better than the used to under full hinting? A little digging shows that the fonts are still being worked on. The package version is up to 1.0.4.93. Changelog doesn’t say much, except the occasional “fix bluriness for X” entries. In any […]

Fixing Firefox slowness on Ubuntu

Yes, yes, we all know that Firefox under wine beats Linux Firefox for javascript performance. That’s not what I’m talking about though. I’m talking about the UI performance. Things like switching tabs and scrolling. To me, the Linux version of Firefox in Intrepid or Jaunty was always inexplicably more sluggish compared to the Windows version. […]

Half yearly fvwm fun

Got the FVWM itch this time. If you’re gonna use Linux on your desktop, then it’s lame to try to use one of the “canned” environments. I mean, you’re giving up all that application compatibility and workingness by going to Linux, so you might as well try to get the most flexibility and programmability you […]

Victory?

I had a little time, and I was getting fed up with the slowness of Vista on my X60, which is now three years old. It runs fine once it’s booted, but it’s the boot process that’s annoyingly slow.. and with the battery starting to die, I have to cold boot more and more. Anyhow, […]

Quad monitors

My office mate is on hiatus, so I decided to steal his monitors and do a quad-mon setup. Productivity is definitely increased, but I seem to be straining my neck as well. My desk is not deep enough to be able to down four monitors, and curve them around in a way that prevents me […]

The Mac Pro is not a desktop

I’m pretty much over my Mac itch, but I wanted to write this down to really try to convince myself. The Mac Pro is not a desktop, in the traditional PC sense of the desktop. It’s easy to fall into this trap… it looks like a desktop, it has desktop-like hardware, it’s by far the […]

Wheel emulation on a Thinkpad X60 on Ubuntu Intrepid

In the newer Ubuntu’s they’ve moved to evdev, which is a much more dynamic system for configuring input devices. Unfortunately, it doesn’t quite seem to understand that I want wheel emulation on my Thinkpad’s trackpoint. Fortunately, there seems to be a way to set it explicity. I use the following script: #!/bin/sh DEVICEID=3 xinput set-int-prop […]

Outlook 2007 performance

Outlook 2007 is starting to choke my laptop again. I implemented some of the filtering tricks that you can find around the web, and that made it better for a while.. but perhaps my unfiltered folders got too big again. While re-researching the problem I came across the Microsoft KB on the issue. The interesting […]

A little Vista WTF

So far, I’ve actually been pretty OK with Vista. It probably has something to do with the fact that I didn’t touch it for the first 2 years. Maybe that was wise. Or maybe that’s just something you learn to do once you know how software is really made. Anyhow, due to some really unfortunate […]

vm.swappiness

I got fed up last week because of Linux’s I/O scheduler. Or so I thought. When I started a background I/O task (in my case, a large file being served up by samba), the responsiveness of the desktop would go to crap. Googling a bit led to a bunch of mention about the vm.swappiness sysctl […]