Qt4 (KDE) applications like Chromium and VirtualBox have had ugly non-antialiased fonts, whereas Gtk2 (Gnome) applications look fine. I’ve found the fix – basically create a ~/.fonts.conf file with the following content, which turns on subpixel smoothing (installing freetype-freeworld did naff all):

<?xml version="1.0"?>

<fontconfig>
  <match target="font">
    <edit name="autohint" mode="assign">
      <bool>true</bool>
    </edit>
  </match>
</fontconfig>

I also changed the monospaced font in Chromium from 13pt Courier-New to 12pt Monospace, which interestingly enough made the fonts a bit bigger, and seems identical to my Firefox setup.

I’ve also upgraded the blog to WordPress 3.0.1 which went very smoothly – plugins/themes worked without even having to edit the CSS files. Doesn’t look like much as far as new features go for a major version release, I guess it got to 2.9.2 and they kinda had to move to 3.0 next!

I received the replacement fan for my graphics card today – the heatsink is so much bigger than the crappy one from Inno3D, and the fan is maybe 60mm not the 40mm crud from Inno3D. Temps have dropped 10c idle and 20c loaded (about 43/54c now). Looks like the same “TopCooler” model I have on my 8600GT. Not bad for six quid.

I’m now waiting for a replacement windscreen arm for my GPS, the sucker bit is broken off, so the ebay China guy is sending me a new one. Gotta give it to them, they know customer service over there. Not like an online store in the UK I ordered something from – I emailed them today asking where it was, only to be told they never sent it out as they’ve stopped selling them. Nice of them to bother telling me!

Update: I have changed the CSS for the blog to reduce the main text size from 16px (1em) to 14px, as it looks a bit huge in Chrome/IE8. It now looks fine in Opera and Firefox too.