A mixed bag

I ordered a BlacX SATA/IDE/USB docking station today. Should have bought one back when I first discovered them. Would have made all the farting around with Corey a lot less painful.

In other news, I discovered that getting xterm to use TrueType fonts is as simple as -fa NAME-PT. As in:

xterm -r -fa Consolas-17

Consolas, if you didn't know, is a nice little monospaced font that MS commissioned, tuned to LCD screens. The previous link downloads a bloody useless setup.exe. So I downloaded the .ttf from elsewhere.

Also, you might be interested in this review of programming fonts from 2007. Though he seems to think that 11pt is legible.

Finally, a snippet to get the current X resolution. I needed this to adjust the font size based on resolution. My users want the terminal to fill the screen.

read prop Xsize Ysize < <(xprop -notype -root 32cc ' $0 $1\n' _NET_DESKTOP_GEOMETRY)

echo "${DISPLAY:-Display} is ($Xsize,$Ysize)"

If you didn't know about Process Substitution you do now.