Uhoh. Wonder Pens sells pens — neato pens — and they are in Toronto. The Platinum Preppy they sent me free with my first order writes better than any $4 fountain pen should.
Blog
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Ten year blog anniversary!
I’ve been at We Saw a Chicken … for 10 years now. From a tiny first post to now, it’s always been filed firmly under “misc.â€: no theme, no ads, no plan, and (until recently) no readers ☹
It’s been on two different hosts and two different platforms. It’s still obscurely named. It took a brief orange-carpeted journey into the 1970s. Dave‘s picture of a tiny bunny in my hands still gets more hits than I can believe. There was the whole WindSave thing, and the whole other pointless and ugly megabins thing. Then there was Raspberry Pi and The Quite Rubbish Clock; I got more hits in a week than I got in the previous nine years.
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fixing firefox’s fugly fonts on Ubuntu
Update 2015-09: Better yet, install Infinality. It makes font rendering pretty.
Switching back to Linux from Mac is still a process of ironing out minor wrinkles. Take, for example, this abomination (enlarged to show texture):—
… No, I’m not talking about Mr Paul’s antics (or the typo in the TP post, either), but the horrid non-matching ligatures (‘attack’, ‘flubbed’, ‘targeting’) in a sea of blocky text. Almost every programme I was running had this problem. Mouse over the image to see how it could look if you apply this easy fix.
Create (or edit) the file
~/.fonts.conf~/.config/fontconfig/conf.d, and add the following lines:<match target="font" > <edit name="embeddedbitmap" mode="assign"> <bool>false</bool> </edit> </match>Log out, log back in again, and text is properly pretty. Yay!
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clean up your GnuPG keyring
For reasons too annoying to explain, my GnuPG keyring was huge. It was taking a long time to find keys, and most of them weren’t ones I’d use. So I wrote this little script that strips out all of the keys that aren’t
- yours, or
- signatories to your key.
The script doesn’t actually delete any keys. It produces shell-compatible output that you can pipe or copy to a shell. Now my keyring file is less than 4% the size (or more precisely, 37‰) of the size it was before.
#!/bin/bash # clean_keyring.sh - clean up all the excess keys # my key should probably be the first secret key listed mykey=$(gpg --list-secret-keys | grep '^sec' | cut -c 13-20 | head -1) if [ -z $mykey ] then # exit if no key string echo "Can't get user's key ID" exit 1 fi # all of the people who have signed my key mysigners=$(gpg --list-sigs $mykey | grep '^sig' | cut -c 14-21 | sort -u) # keep all of the signers, plus my key (if I haven't self-signed) keepers=$(echo $mykey $mysigners | tr ' ' '\012' | sort -u) # the keepers list in egrep syntax: ^(key|key|…) keepers_egrep=$(echo $keepers | sed 's/^/^(/; s/$/)/; s/ /|/g;') # show all the keepers as a comment so this script's output is shell-able echo '# Keepers: ' $keepers # everyone who isn't on the keepers list is deleted deleters=$(gpg --list-keys | grep '^pub'| cut -c 13-20 | egrep -v ${keepers_egrep}) # echo the command if there are any to delete # command is interactive if [ -z $deleters ] then echo "# Nothing to delete!" else echo 'gpg --delete-keys' $deleters fiFiles:
- clean_keyring.sh (SHA-1 checksum: 8c71dabca84c33201184fe348ae35310622d2be6)
- clean_keyring.sh.txt — gpg signature.
