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The Improved User Interface crate has had its 0.3.0 release, adding new input fields (Checkbox and Combobox), new layout options (LayoutGrid), as well as finally working 100% on Windows, and with many bug fixes. This comes with the 0.1.3 release of the underlying ui-sys crate to support these features. It’s been a big undertaking to get to this point, and I’m excited to grow from here, now that libui itself is moving forward again as well.

I just finished moving my EtherPad Lite instance and my Gogs Git VCS instance to subdomains, rather than subdirectories. This involved two sources of pain: a lot of waiting for the DNS to propagate. First I had to wait to get my new NS settings set, then to actually update the domain names allowing the git.leotindall.com and pad.leotindall.com domains to point to this server. a lot of config file updating in multiple places.

We, each and every one of us, need to make the decision to move to free, open source, and decentralized online services. It will be painful. It will be difficult. It may mean giving up some comforts, like sending money instantly to friends without fees. It is also the only way to prevent some seriously bad things from happening. Inciting Events In recent weeks, two major things happened: Facebook’s business model - gathering as much information about you as possible, then selling it - was used in a totally predictable way that, nonetheless, nobody seemed prepared for.

I recently got a U2F Zero, a tiny (about 2 inches long) and cheap (about 8 dollars) device implementing the FIDO Universal Second Factor protocol. It’s open source, too, which is awesome. I primarily use Firefox. Unfortunately, Firefox doesn’t support U2F out of the box; you have to enable security.webauth.u2f in about:config. Once enabled, I tried to register it with GitHub. Unfortunately, it kept on failing, despite the little green light on the U2F Zero going blue.

One of the hardest parts about building beautiful Linux systems is fonts. Fonts on Linux are generally handled with fontconfig. Unfortunately, fontconfig has no real GUI editors or usable interactive configuration tools, so users are expected to manually edit XML configuration files. As with most Unix styling topics, Eevee has a great piece on fontconfig’s complexities. She digs into how to disable and re-configure fonts, how to set fallbacks, and how to verify that the correct resolution order is set.