A Geek Goes Flying

Baskervville Glyphs Changing the name of a font Continuing to set up the Linux environment on the Chuwi MiniBook X , I needed the Baskerville * font to work with the templates I've lovingly hand-crafted over the years. I installed Baskervville (note the double 'v'), but since the font name didn't match exactly, Libre Office didn't use it, and instead I got some generic sans serif monstrosity. No problem, found an archived tutorial on how to change the name of the font . tl;dr version, using fonttools (which was already installed on this Fedora 40 machine), use ttx <font filename> to build a .ttx XML file for the font, then edit that XML file, using find-and-replace to swap, e.g., Baskervville to Baskerville. Then run ttx <.ttx file> to recompile the file back to a font file. Then, remove the old .ttf (or .otf or whatever) files from $HOME/.fonts and copy the recompiled files in. Done. Installing fonttools If you don’t already have ttx installed, you’ll...

Chuwi Minibook X Picked up a cheap ($281 on sale) Chuwi Minibook X to have something better than an iPad, but not as expensive or large as a MacBook Air, to tote with me. It has an Intel Alder Lake N100 CPU , 4 cores at up to 3.4 GHz (turbo), 12 GB of LPDDR5 RAM (4800 MT/s), a 512 GB NVMe SSD at a claimed “over 1500 MB/S read/write speed,” and a 1920x1200 10.5" display. In theory it has a 360° hinge and with the display flipped around, becomes a 10" tablet, but that functionality doesn’t (yet?) work in Linux. Chuwi is, I believe, an ODM out of Shenzhen who also sells their own hardware. I’m not sure I really trust the thing (first thing I did under Linux was setup a script to automatically back up my home directory to my fileserver whenever I’m on my home network, so it can die at any time and I won’t have lost anything). But the price and form factor is right, so we’ll see how it goes. (I’ve heard the batteries use shit chemistry and last about a year ...?) The unboxing exp...