I was surprised to find that the frontlight can never be turned completely off while the Kindle is awake.

Also regarding the frontlight, I’m pleasantly surprised that, when it’s set at a modest level in a dimly-lit room, it has the appearance of not being lit at all, but merely of being more “white” than it is and as a result reflecting more ambient light, almost magically so. I didn’t expect to want to leave the light on all the time, but for this reason, I do.

When set too high, or when in a too-dark room, there is an appearance of unevenness with the lighting, but it’s not terribly distracting.

What is a bit distracting is how surreal it can look when something (like your thumb or head) is casting a shadow on the surface in certain lighting; the area around the shadow looks mostly illuminated by the ambient light, and the area under the shadow has an odd blue glow to it, since the frontlight’s effect is more apparent there.

Having fonts other than Caecilia is nice, although I can’t imagine anybody wanting to read for any length of time in Futura or Helvetica. Baskerville is of course classic for typesetting books, but because of its delicate letterforms and small x-height doesn’t really suit the (relatively) low-contrast and (relatively) low-resolution Kindle. There doesn’t seem to be an ideal “small” font size for Baskerville, at least not for my eyes. For these reasons I’ve so far stuck with Palatino, a font that I don’t really like very much, but which is less “artificial”-feeling than Caecilia, anyway.

The new UI elements (and the font in which they’re set, some Futura-like geometric I can’t identify) are really attractive. You can tell a lot of time was spent here and it gives the device a lot more personality and finish.

As expected, I’m frustrated by the lack of a hardware page-turn button, particularly while reading in bed, where (with the face of the Kindle pointed slightly downward) my thumb becomes a crucial support point, and is therefore not free to tap the screen to turn pages. In other interactions I’m also forced to use two hands quite a bit.

It was worth the upgrade even if only for the frontlight, and despite its small and few drawbacks, the overall improvement (over the Kindle 3, I should mention) make it a no-brainer.

I had to slow the Pac-Man theme down a bit to match these up, but otherwise:

Arrested Development / Pac-Man

Update: More at CelineTheFeline

My /home directory is on its own partition on a standard hard disk. The rest of the file system is on another partition on an SSD. In order to fully reap the speed benefits of an SSD, I symbolically linked as many non-personal directories as I could from /home to /var/jay on the SSD. These included ~/.local, ~/.cache, ~/.gconf, ~/.mozilla, etc.

I didn’t really know much about the way Linux/GNOME handles Trash. Files deleted from a third internal hard disk or from USB sticks would be moved to /.Trash-1000 on that device, while appearing in “Trash” in Nautilus. Files from a user’s home directory, however, don’t go to /home/.Trash-1000, or even /.Trash-1000 — instead, they go to ~/.local/share/Trash. Because in my setup this directory was on the SSD rather than the hard disk with the /home partition, GNOME refused to move it there, since that would require copying from one disk to another, which GNOME’s developers (smartly, I think) believe would be alarmingly time-consuming for someone who’s just trying to delete some files — they shouldn’t expect to see a copy dialog grinding away.

In order to try to fix this, I made ~/.local/share/Trash into a symbolic link itself, back to the /home partition at ~/Trash. After this change, things were getting trashed properly — at least, I wasn’t asked to delete them entirely — but they weren’t showing up in Nautilus’s Trash view. I don’t know how Nautilus makes itself aware of all the trash folders spread across different devices, but for whatever reason it wasn’t picking up on this one, even after several reboot cycles.

Finally I gave up and moved ~/.local back onto the same partition as /home, and now everything’s back to normal. But I’d still like to know if it’s possible to keep ~/.local on a separate disk while retaining GNOME’s and Nautilus’s ordinary trash behavior.

One idea that could alleviate a lot of the headaches of bug reporting while providing increased functionality is a desktop bug-reporting application. I won’t pretend to be familiar with any APIs that are made available by Launchpad, GNOME, Bugzilla, Trac, etc., but I have to imagine that some exist. I also won’t pretend that I’m the first to have this idea — it’s entirely possible that it’s been attempted and that those attempts have failed many times. But from where I’m sitting it seems like a near-perfect solution. Here are the benefits we’d get from a desktop bug-reporting application:

1. It can manage your bug tracker logins.
   Imagine having all your bug tracker logins stored in a little database for you on your desktop. More than that, imagine being able to register at a new bug tracker with just a few clicks using the personal information kept by the application.
2. It can identify the bug tracker used by a given application.
   This may actually be a bit difficult. It’s possible that this could be done by having applications make this info available in some way, although that puts a burden on application developers, and I assume there is no system currently in place for something like this. It’d require some creativity.
3. It can identify the package in the appropriate bug tracker against which to file a bug.
   Launchpad is probably the bug tracker with which I’m most familiar, and there in particular it seems to me to be plausible for a bug-reporting application to easily find the package against which a bug should be filed. How many people even know that Ubuntu’s default PDF viewer is called “Evince,” or that its default image viewer is called “Eye of GNOME,” or especially that the Eye of GNOME package is called “eog”? Imagine instead being able to choose from a list of running applications and having the bug-reporting application do the rest.
4. It can provide better search for duplicates.
   Launchpad only presents you with possible duplicates after you’ve entered the title of your bug report. A desktop application, on the other hand, could continue to search for duplicates as you’re elaborating on the bug in your description, updating on-the-fly and presenting you with relevant excerpts from the potential duplicates’ descriptions. And if it has a high enough confidence in a match, it can ask “Are you sure?” before allowing you to submit.
5. It can collect and upload system logs.
   Not only could a desktop application attach basic system logs and hardware info, but it could catalog which version(s) of your application’s depencenc(y/ies) you have installed, potentially saving hours of work per bug.
6. It can open an impromptu chat with others suffering from the bug, or with package maintainers.
   By checking the online availability of other bug sufferers or package maintainers, this application could integrate with Empathy, Pidgin, or IRC to put you in contact with them, if they choose to make themselves available.
7. It can search existing help avenues for potential solutions to your problem.
   Stack Exchange (Ask Ubuntu, Super User), Quora, Ubuntu Forums — searching all of these places takes time, and might not even occur to a large number of users. Searching these places on-the-fly as bugs are being described might prevent unnecessary bugs from being filed in the first place, or direct bug sufferers toward temporary workarounds.
8. It can look for PPAs that contain updated packages that might fix the bug you’re reporting.
   Many times the applications in official repositories are outdated, and many times the most common bugs have been fixed in more recent releases. Given adequate safeguards, this could be invaluable for people desperate for a solution.
9. It could integrate with the messaging menu.
   “Someone just marked one of your bookmarked bugs as ‘Affects me too.’ They are available for chat. Would you like to contact them?“
   “The bug ‘[bug description here]’ has a new comment.“

I’m sure with my limited imagination I’ve not even scratched the surface of what a desktop bug-reporting application is capable of. What else would you like to see in one? What would some of the pitfalls be? Is this practical or impractical, and why?

Here are the stages of bug reporting, and why each of them sucks:

1. Tolerating the flaws in the software because it’s better than filing bugs about them (time frame: 2 weeks to a lifetime)
   This stage is probably the worst, in the most insidious way, because although it is less tedious and frustrating than the following stages, it’s the one that inspires the most hopelessness in you. Unless you are completely enshrouded in ideology, you will begin to resent your computer more than Windows users do.
2. Figuring out against which package to file a bug (1 minute to 2 hours)
   We’re only in the second stage, and already you have to have a pretty deep familiarity with Linux and bug reporting in general to move forward. Say, for instance, that Flash is crashing Firefox. Holy hell do you have a lot of work to do! There are probably at least ten independent variables at play here, including the obvious culprits Firefox and Flash, but also your video card drivers, your Firefox plugins, and your window manager. If you don’t spend enough time experimenting with different combinations of these variables (remembering that this bug almost certainly isn’t reproducible on command), then you’ll be wasting everybody’s time by filing against the wrong package.
3. Figuring out where the culprit package tracks its bugs (2 to 10 minutes)
   Ooh, this is fun. First go to Launchpad, naturally. You might encounter several pages that look suspiciously similar; if that happens, just close your eyes and pick one. If your package isn’t on Launchpad, you might get lucky and find a link to some Bugzilla site or the project’s home page (“I hope the devs still own that domain!”), otherwise you are at the mercy of Google.
4. Remembering your password/creating an account at the correct bug tracker (1 second to 10 minutes)
   Oh right, there is no universal login for *all* Bugzilla sites, of course, so I’m going to have to create a new account. Oh, it says there already is an account associated with my email address. Huh. Ok, send me the link to create a new password. Did that go into my spam folder? Oh, ok, finally, here it is. Alright, click. Now to file a new bug. Oh wait, I’m not logged in? I thought that would have done it. Ok, “Log In.” Ok.
5. Looking for an existing report concerning your bug (0 seconds to 15 minutes)
   I have seen bugs with dozens of duplicates attached to them. Developers must love that. Launchpad does a pretty ok job here, searching for existing bugs based on the title you give. It’s not often that I see a match, and when I don’t, I’m not completely confident that there isn’t one somewhere in there. I usually resort to Google and use my own human brain to figure out other ways the symptoms of the bug might have been worded. I don’t want to be one of those dunces who files duplicates, after all.
6. Verbally articulating the symptoms of your bug in a way that is succinct, unambiguous, and thorough (2 readings of Strunk & White)
   Ok, I hope you’ve got a liberal arts degree. Oh wait, you don’t, because you are using Linux. Hell, even if you do, sometimes the subtle conditions that lead to the exposure of a bug are so difficult to describe that you end up with bloated sentences in which you’re mostly trying to convey something visual or with a far too complex linguistic parse tree:

   “So, then if I click on the button again, this time *after* clearing the .config directory, but without having restarted the program, the drop-down list (usually just the “Profiles” one, but sometimes all of them) will lose any entries that I created (except for the ones made before I upgraded to 0.0.2.11).“

   What you find yourself wanting to do is take a video of the problem occurring, but that would require subjecting yourself to the hell that is desktop video recording software for Linux, a path that will only leave you spiraling further and inescapably down into the toilet that is the bug reporting process.

7. You’re done! Oh oops, you’re not. Collect system logs and info (2 minutes to 30 minutes)
   One of my least favorite memories in life is the hours I spent diagnosing a problem with hibernation on my laptop. Or was it hibernation and sleep? Who the hell knows, the shit didn’t work and I banged my head against a brick wall of diagnostics and bug reporting and researching so furiously that by the end of it my roommate found me naked on the cold tile floor of our bathroom, shivering and blanketed in sweat. Oh, did the bug ever get fixed? Is there a difference between a bug getting fixed and your brain coping with the stress of it by making you numb to it? I don’t know. I don’t know. Oh anyway, yeah, be sure to grab some logs and shit, they’ll probably need that.

That’s it. Oh my god I hate it every time, it’s like pulling god damn teeth, and it’s a wonder anybody chooses to do this with their free time. What in the hell is wrong with me? And more importantly, how can we make this better? I have an idea, but I’m too emotionally exhausted right now to get into it.

Update: Part 2

Skip forward to about 2:20.

Update: Here is the original video from which Colbert’s clip was taken. More from O’Reilly about us being “lucky.”

It is so plainly obvious how deeply flawed O’Reilly’s reasoning is here, and these are more words than the subject could possibly deserve, but I can’t help but want to address it.

What’s really peculiar about it is that he doesn’t seem to be saying that the creation of the moon can’t be explained by ordinary, mechanical events. I’m sure he’d agree that it’s viable to theorize that a huge asteroid smashed into the earth a couple billion years ago and formed the moon. It has explanatory power, although there is no way to know for certain that that happened, because we can’t observe it directly. And that seems to be his point; it’s one thing for apologists to point to something that can’t be explained in order to suggest that there is a god — “Why is there something rather than nothing? Why is the gravitational constant what it is?” — but here he’s invoking something so trivial, something that can be explained, but whose explanation we can’t verify with absolute certainty, and suggesting that it has the same logical heft.

If you leave your dog in the living room, and come back to find that your wine glass is now on the floor — what do you conclude? That your dog knocked it over. “But wait,” O’Reilly should say. “How did he knock it over? With his tail, or with his snout? Maybe he bumped into the coffee table. You can’t know for certain.” The creation of the moon, like the knocking over of the wine glass, is not fantastical. It happens all the time. Dogs knock stuff over. Massive bodies slam into each other in space. That’s just what happens. But if O’Reilly’s logic were sound, it would mean that the dog and the wine glass have as much to say about the existence of god as the moon does, because we can’t explain with certainty the specifics of how either happened.

This is, of course, only if you take what he’s saying at face value. It’s possible, and I’m somewhat inclined to think, that he’s just not articulating his thoughts clearly. It may be that when he asks, “Where did the moon come from?”, he already knows some plausible theories, and that it’s a rhetorical question with “the moon” standing in place of anything in an infinite regress. If you told him that an asteroid is responsible for the splintering of the moon off of the earth, he would most likely say — if he agreed in the first place that that’s probable — “Where did the asteroid come from?”

Still, I think there’s more to what he’s saying than a poorly-communicated version of that old Prime Mover chestnut. I suspect that he would disagree that the moon and the wine glass are fundamentally the same, because the moon is important for life on earth. It is, of course, untrue that the moon is important for life, but it seems clear that he thinks it is for some reason. But I think part of what he’s saying (and this comes from seeing him “discuss” “philosophy” of “religion” several times in the past) is not only that there are phenomena that can’t be explained, but furthermore that some of these phenomena make life possible. And, he seems to argue, it is because those phenomena can’t be explained that indicates that there is a god. As he said to Richard Dawkins, “I don’t think we could have lucked out to have [this].”

This position is, of course, egotistical and small-minded. One of the mistakes he’s making, one frequently made by apologists, is to think that we did, in fact, “luck out,” with the sheer egotism to think that we are somehow “prior” to the universe — as though we would have been here anyway (not just “here” as in, “in the universe,” but “here” as in, “in the precise location within the universe that the earth happens to be right now”), and it is just fortunate that there is a planet under our feet with an atmosphere to prevent us from suffocating in the vacuum of space, let alone trees and rainbows and bunnies. Close call!

What’s also evident here is his inability to see that the universe could have been otherwise. If you were to say to him, “If the earth hadn’t been habitable, we just wouldn’t be here,” he would most likely say, “But we are here.” It is, of course, just an incidental property of the universe that there happens to be an earth with humans on it, but that’s such a subtle metaphysical point that I don’t think he could ever be convinced otherwise. It might be worth trying, however, to tell him that the other day you shuffled a deck of cards, and the ace of spades ended up on top. I’m sure he understands in that case that specific outcomes are not special merely by virtue of being specific, though I’m not sure the analogy wouldn’t be lost on him. He’d probably try to turn it around on you by asking you who, then, is the “Cosmic Shuffler.”

Of course, it’s also easier for him to see the shuffling of the ace of spades to the top of the deck as unremarkable, because he knows that the ace of spades is only significant because we’ve given it significance. We might have decided that the eight of diamonds should be regarded as the most “virile” card, or whatever characteristics we seem to give to the ace of spades. But people are different — they are intrinsically valuable, or so he would probably argue. Or at least, if not valuable, then “special,” “privileged,” or something along those lines. But it seems to me that this is a case of begging the question. If you were to ask him why we’re special, he might say that it’s because we have a soul. But once you have already taken as one of your premises that the universe contains soul-possessing humans, you’re at a place not far from your conclusion. The existence of human souls is something he is also burdened with proving. So to argue that there is a god because the earth is hospitable, and that a hospitable earth is remarkable because it allows humans to live comfortably on it, and that humans living comfortably is remarkable (even important) because they have souls — that’s pretty circular. He may want to point out that even if we don’t have souls, we produce art and literature and cure disease and fall in love. And, while those things are important to us, they surely aren’t “intrinsically” important. The universe couldn’t care less whether those things are going on.

What’s ultimately most frustrating about this is that it demonstrates such a profound degree of logical ineptitude. He is the type of person with whom it is quite literally impossible to argue. And I don’t mean this as somebody who doesn’t believe in god and who disagrees with O’Reilly politically — I mean this as a philosopher who can recognize poor logic when he sees it, regardless of the subject matter. Replace all the “there is a moon“s with “P“s and all the “God“s with “x“s, and it’s still shoddy reasoning. In other words, he’s not pitiful because he believes in a god, but because the reasons that he believes in a god are so logically destitute.

I’ve explored what feel like countless possible explanations — shutting the screen before shut down/hibernate had completed, the wireless driver, the wireless being on during shut down/hibernate, the “splash,” “quiet,” and “no_console_suspend” flags in GRUB (and their 8 permutations), two shut downs/hibernates in a row (rather than alternating), the particular version of the kernel, and, finally, some unidentifiable kink in my installation that resulted in me reinstalling Maverick entirely.

Nothing seemed to alleviate the problem. Even the third or fourth boot after reinstall (the first one after updating to the newest kernel, in fact) failed in the same manner.

But the cause for the problem isn’t the issue. The issue is that, even though I’ve (just now) gone through nearly a dozen successful shut down/hibernate and boot/wake cycles, the one time that it failed since the reinstall has left a tiny barb in my head, such that no matter how many times I may successfully boot or wake in the future, I will never, ever feel confident that the next cycle is going to work. The result of these failures is greater than their sum. You don’t easily forget when something goes horribly wrong, and you’re not supposed to notice when they go right.

Granted, this is only because I haven’t successfully identified the problem. I suppose if I were to read a blog or forum post detailing exactly the symptoms that I’m experiencing, including a solution that (a) makes sense and that (b) also eradicates the problem on my machine, I’d feel a little safer hibernating with a bunch of browser tabs and text files open. But that hasn’t happened yet, and I suspect that even then I wouldn’t feel entirely safe.

Instead, I’ve performed hours of trial-and-error problem solving, and filed a new bug (after spending a lot of time searching for duplicates) with descriptions and system logs. It’s been exhausting.

Don’t get me wrong; I understand that this is how it’s supposed to work. Supposing this is a legitimate bug, and not something I’ve managed to screw up myself, it’s up to someone to report and test on it, and for every new bug I’ve filed, I’ve benefited from the work of thousands if not millions of people doing just what I’m doing. But.

This isn’t alpha software. We should be able to expect — in fact, are told — that crucial system functionality (as opposed to, say, webcam or tablet compatibility) will work in Ubuntu, period. To say that it’s impractical to test every new point release on every conceivable piece of hardware is an understatement, to be sure. But I feel pretty confident that my bug report will sit quietly, unattended, until well after the problem has solved itself. And then I’ll carry on with anxiety, waiting for the next inevitable system-critical bug.

The “community” is often touted as one of the best “features” of Ubuntu. For every problem you might encounter, it’s likely that somebody else has encountered it before you, and that you can find a forum thread relevant to your issue, in many cases providing a solution. But psychologically, this has the reverse effect that it’s meant to. An active support community is only necessary when something doesn’t work. A person considering Ubuntu as their primary OS could very well be scared away by visiting those very forums, which frequently have two pages’ worth of active threads in a 24-hour period, punctuated by strings of question marks, vague wording such as “not working!!!!!”, and the very common preface “Help!”

The resulting feeling — coming from someone who’s been a part of this “community” for three or so years — is that it’s all we can do just to keep treading water. You’re suffering, but it’s alright because everybody is suffering just like you. And this sense of hopelessness is not in all cases the result of ignorance or impatience, though the prose of its sufferers may sometimes give that appearance. Those who consider Linux-based OSes to provide anything resembling a “problem-free experience” just have different values than the rest of us. They are hardened, cynical hacker-types for whom recompiling packages to better suit their hardware isn’t a “problem,” just a challenge.

All of this is to say that life as an Ubuntu user is psychologically taxing. I sometimes wake to find that my desktop has rebooted overnight; my laptop problems persist; and I can’t get my bluetooth keyboard or my old wireless adapter working on the Boxee box I’m starting to build. When no one’s around, I secretly fantasize about selling all my hardware and using the money for a MacBook and a Revo. Isn’t life too short?

[Windicators] would follow the same styling as Ayatana indicators: Semantically colored: with red for critical problems, orange for alerts, green for positive status changes and blue for informative states that are not the default or usual state.

This came as a real surprise given that I had (and still have) never seen a blue or orange indicator icon.

The obvious and primary objection is that four colors in a palette to convey meaning is far too many. Shuttleworth even said as late as April 1 — just four weeks before Lucid’s release — “Personally, my expectation is that green vs orange/red is as far as we want to go.” Two colors is an absolute maximum here — one for negative messages about something being broken, the other merely to notify you of something — although even one should suffice: “Something has changed; requesting your attention.”

If “orange is for alerts” and “green is for positive status changes,” then why do new IM messages turn the messaging icon green? Isn’t that an alert? What is “positive” about getting a new message? What if it’s your boss firing you? Your boyfriend breaking up with you? A spambot?

If red is “for critical problems,” why does your sound indicator icon turn red when something’s trying to play while it’s muted? Is that really “critical”? Doesn’t that deserve something more accurately described as “an alert” (orange)?

Furthermore, if it’s up to the application developers to specify the “severity” of an alert — which is not even an accurate description of the purpose of these colors, as they’re not a spectrum of severity, but rather a whole handful of messages — will this not result in a great deal of inconsistency? If one application feels that its behavior is more important than that of other applications, it can choose to make its indicator icon red rather than green (or orange or blue) on an event. And, more fundamentally, you’re placing a burden on developers who wish to use indicator icons for alerts to choose from among four different states, rather than just coding for “Alter the color of my [w]indicator icon to whatever the user’s desktop theme calls for.”

It even appears as though this “spec” isn’t complete; Rhythmbox’s indicator icon is black when playing, gray when not playing (under the Radiance theme). What does gray mean? Before I started writing this blog post, in fact, I’d have guessed it meant that Rhythmbox was minimized, as I frequently see a gray icon when Rhythmbox is hidden. Turns out I was wrong, and that’s after using Lucid and Rhythmbox daily for three months.

The intent behind the specification is flawed for those and probably other reasons, and the execution is flawed as well. If you inspect the colors of the green and red indicator icon colors — I couldn’t manage to turn any of them blue or orange, so if you have, please leave a comment — you’ll see that green is #4dcb00 and red is #dc0000. I imagine we’ll never know why these colors were chosen, but something is revealed in the choice of that green in particular.

“Ubuntu Aubergine” has a hue (in RGB colorspace) of 328. Just opposite that on the color wheel — the most basic color complement pair you can find — is a color with a hue value of 81: a particular shade of green. And not the shade being used by indicator icons.

That’s right: even though the indicator icon color spec called for a shade of green, and even though there is a shade of green directly opposite Ubuntu Aubergine on the color wheel, Canonical’s designers chose an utterly arbitrary shade of green with a hue of 95.

Astonishingly, the original proposal for a green coloring of a new indicator message was closer to the Ubuntu Aubergine complement than the final implementation (with a hue of 72, just 9 degrees from the “correct” hue). It’s worth noting, of course, that Ubuntu Aubergine had not been formalized and documented at this point (nor had it been as of April 28.)

It’s also worth mentioning that a green hue of 104 is triadically complementary to the pair of colors of Ubuntu Orange and Ubuntu Aubergine. So either of these two greens — 81 and 104 — could work in theory. But neither was used.

Finding red and blue complements is a bit more difficult, making stronger the case for a single notification color. Although “blue” is a complement of “orange,” Ubuntu Orange isn’t quite “orange” enough to have a 180° blue complement. The best I could manage is a hue of 191, which is a triadic complement of Ubuntu Orange with a 42° differential (the same as that between Ubuntu Aubergine and Ubuntu Orange). The “proper” red would be just between Ubuntu Aubergine and Ubuntu Orange, or a hue of 351. The current red has a hue of 0 — i.e., pure red — which should come as no surprise. Red = red, right Canonical?

Still, I contend that one color should suffice, and in that case, Ubuntu Orange is probably the way to go, if the plan is to continue with an Ubuntu Aubergine desktop wallpaper and Ubuntu Orange highlights in the GTK theme.

The important point to take away from this is that the current colors are symptomatic of a lack of concern for fundamental design practices within the Canonical design community. The hues of green I’ve mentioned, for instance, may be indistinguishable to most users in practice (even to designers, given the size of the icons), but that I’ve so easily shown them not to be “correct” is alarming.

Foursquare’s friend finder was straightforward and I was able to add three or four people. Gowalla’s, on the other hand, misled me into sending an invite to all 947 people in my Google contacts. This includes people I bought stuff from on Craigslist; old bosses; old girlfriends; co-workers; probably even prospective employers.

The trick was in mimicking a fairly standard “Step 2″ format for these types of functions. It appears that I’m being presented two choices here: the first, to begin following only those contacts who are already on Gowalla; the second, to send invite emails to all checked names in the list.

Instead, both buttons do exactly the same thing. So when I clicked the button at the top, an email was sent to every person on that list. There was no pop-up window telling me, “You are about to send an email to 947 people. Continue?”

Fortunately I hadn’t used my full name on my profile; the email people received came from no-reply@gowalla.com or something similar; and I deleted my profile as soon as I realized what had happened. So hopefully I wasn’t as incriminated as I may have otherwise been. I know I roll my eyes whenever a friend has fallen for an obvious trap like that. And I like to think I’m pretty good at spotting these tricks. But this layout is outright deceptive.

Now however details are starting to emerge. OMG! Ubuntu! describes how to get a bootleg copy of it. And at UDS back in May, Bruno Maag gave a session entitled “Making Beautiful Fonts” in which he elaborated on the creation of the new font. There is now video of that session, as well as the slides, which were sadly not included in the frame.

My first impression is that it feels a bit too stiff, rigid, and tech-y. Of course there’s no way to tell until you use it on your desktop. Reassuring, however, that they’re giving it proper italics.