It’s been a funny weekend. I woke up Saturday to find that my server had been terminated, and after some support tickets with my web host (sent to my backup email address!) it seems they had a “problem” and had accidentally deleted everyone’s virtual servers! So they issues me with two new empty servers, which I then had to restore from backups, thankfully I rsync’ed the previous evening. They’d also allocated new IP addresses so I had to update some zone files and get reverse-DNS sorted, luckily I had set my DNS TTL to 15sec, so they instantly propagated.

Amazon now have their own Android Appstore to compete with Google’s Android Market. They give away a free (normally paid-for) app every day. I missed SwiftKey the other day, now its just fecking Angry Birds or some crap. For some reason its amazon.com (USA) only, but it seems to work via email/wifi for amazon.co.uk (UK) accounts, just not via SMS/3g I guess. A lot of the free content seems to be duplicates of what’s already on Android Market though.

I quite like the Kobo application on Android, so was disappointed to see that there isn’t a Linux client. Until I found there soon will be! You can download the pre-release Ubuntu binary from here. I’ve got it working on Fedora14 by roughly using these instructions. Essentially you extract the .deb file into /opt/kobodesktop and create a shell script to set the environment variables to point to the statically-linked Qt/OpenSSL libs, and a desktop launcher file to run that from your Applications->Office menu.

Fedora 13/14 only have Firefox 3.6 in their repositories, so I decided to install the “Spot” repo and try out the new Firefox 4.0: su - cd /etc/yum.repos.d/ wget http://repos.fedorapeople.org/repos/spot/firefox4/fedora-firefox4.repo yum install firefox4 You can also get it from the Remi repo. It seems to have copied a lot of the GUI changes from Google Chrome – you now have the “Firefox Button” which replaces the menubar for all preferences etc; just like Chrome’s spanner icon, tabs have been moved to the top of the window, and the statusbar is gone.

Further to my earlier post here on this same matter, I’ve found an even better way of fixing KDE (Qt) fonts thanks to this openSUSE guide. Just run “kcmshell4 fonts” and turn on antialiasing and full hinting and sub-pixel rendering. Hey presto, nice looking fonts in Calibre, VirtualBox, Chrome etc. Essentially it creates ~/.fonts.conf with the following content: <?xml version='1.0'?> <fontconfig> <match target="font"> <edit mode="assign" name="rgba"> <const>rgb</const> </edit> </match> <match target="font"> <edit mode="assign" name="hinting"> <bool>true</bool> </edit> </match> <match target="font"> <edit mode="assign" name="hintstyle"> <const>hintslight</const> </edit> </match> <match target="font"> <edit mode="assign" name="antialias"> <bool>true</bool> </edit> </match> </fontconfig>