Longtime readers have probably seen the odd post about my getting fed up with Firefox and migrating my workflow (and much of my online data archive) to Chromium, which has been significantly faster if nothing else than Firefox lately.  Of course, due to Windbringer's screen resolution I immediately ran into problems with just about every font size being too small, including the text in the URL bar, the menus, and the add-ons that I use.  On a lark I went back to my font sizes in Keybase article and give it a try.  Lo and behold, when I used --force-device-scale-factor …

icon blindness - noun phrase - The state of mind in which you search your desktop for minutes on end for one particular application's icon but don't find it.  You give up and open it from the application menu, whereupon you have no trouble remembering which category it's in or what the name (in text) of the application is.

Some time ago I wrote an article about what Keybase is and what it's good for.  I also mentioned one of my pet peeves, which is that, by default the fonts used by the Keybase desktop client are way, way too small to see easily on Windbringer.  A couple of days ago somebody finally figured out how to blow up the fonts on the desktop, so I can finally see what's going on without putting my nose on the display (and making the mouse cursor jump around because Windbringer has a touchscreen).  While I wish that this would be a …

On most of my desktop machines I use a system monitoring application called GKrellM to keep an eye on the amount of memory in use, aggregate network activity, swap space, and battery life. It's a handy utility and is very configurable. I have a couple of tweaks that I like to make to my settings to make its output a little more useful by increasing the granularity. I'm going to assume that you're interested enough in GKrellM to play around with the settings (right click on the GKrellM panel, Configuration). In the interest of full disclosure, I also intend on …

While upgrading Windbringer's systemware yesterday, I suddenly ran across a rather odd problem: all of the icons on my Gnome desktop suddenly turned into the default Gnome "blank page with a corner folded down" icon, which meant that Gnome wasn't able to figure out what sort of file a launcher really was. Even more oddly, the names of the launchers themselves turned into (for example), "gtkpod.desktop" rather than "GTKpod", which meant that double-clicking on anything resulted in the contents of the launcher being opened in a text editor. Everything inside of the Gnome application menu could still be executed …

Now that I've metabolized the caffeine from the two-and-an-unknown-fraction pots of coffee I've drunk today (don't ask), I have it together enough to write about an unusually annoying glitch that plagues Linux users from time to time: Automatic mounting of USB storage devices stops working after you tinker with the systemware, usually after recompiling something or upgrading a package. I ran into this a few days ago but didn't think much of it because I've mostly been using Windows XP for work (yes, yes, you may now all laugh) but I decided to sit down and figure out what happened …