Entries tagged “howto”

Monday, September 14, 2009

Disabling the alarm on APC UPSes

UPS Alarm
From the wonderful Fly, You Fools! webcomic by Saad Akhtar. Read the full strip.

You know what I mean. What were they thinking? Here’s a helpful explanation by an APC employee:

I understand your concern with not wanting to be woken up at 2am to be alerted that power has gone out in your residence. I use the software at home to disable the audible tone as well, however, I think taking a look at it from a different approach may be ideal. Is the UPS your source of power for your alarm clock in the morning? What would occur if you were to have to wake up at a specific time during the week, and your alarm clock, which is not powered by your UPS, powers off due to a blackout, even if it is momentary? I think it would be ideal in this scenario that the UPS wakes you to notify you of a power failure. That would allow you to possibly find an alternate source of power for the alarm clock, or, if power is to be restored within a reasonable period of time, to reset your clock so that you wake up on time.

Right. That’s why. That horrible shriek is meant to wake you up. If, like all real people, you have an alarm clock that runs on batteries and prefer a full night’s sleep, it turns out that you can disable it. This works on most common APC UPS models with the USB cable. Windows users should install APC’s PowerChute software. It apparently has an option somewhere to turn it off. On Linux, the apcupsd package will do it for you (make sure to plugin the USB cable first):

Read on...

  1. 5:37 PM
  2. 4 comments
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Thursday, October 23, 2008

Improving font rendering under Ubuntu

Ubuntu ships FreeType with the bytecode interpreter enabled. This works very well for common typefaces such as Vera, DejaVu, Verdana and Georgia at small sizes but somehow doesn’t for other typefaces and sizes.

After some tinkering, I came up with a configuration that works for me:

  1. Open the Terminal and type sudo dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig-config
  2. Choose Autohinter, Automatic for subpixel rendering, and No for bitmapped fonts.
  3. Under System ? Preferences ? Appearance ? Fonts ? Details, choose Subpixel and Slight.
  4. Restart OpenOffice (including the Quickstarter) and Firefox. These two don’t reflect changes automatically.

We’re making two choices here:

  1. Native bytecode interpreter vs the autohinter. I’m not completely sold on one over the other.
  2. Full vs slight subpixel rendering. Full looks fantastic at small sizes (8-9pt) but terrible when large. Slight is less well defined at small sizes, but acceptably well shaped for larger sizes.

Further reading: Comprehensive Ubuntu Font Configuration Guide (written for Gutsy but also applicable to Intrepid).

Update: Disregard the above. The blurriness at small size gets unbearable after a while. Go back to native interpreter, full subpixel hinting, and setup custom workarounds in your ~/.fonts.conf file. Here’s mine:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<fontconfig>
    <match target="font">
        <test qual="any" name="family" compare="eq">
            <!-- Twitter uses Lucida Grande. The site looks terrible without
                 hintslight enabled. -->
            <string>Lucida Grande</string>
        </test>
        <edit name="autohint" mode="assign">
            <bool>true</bool>
        </edit>
        <edit name="hintstyle" mode="assign">
            <const>hintslight</const>
        </edit>
    </match>
</fontconfig>
  1. 11:53 AM
  2. 3 comments
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