X11 Fonts in Recent Ubuntu Releases

Opening X11 windows such as emacs from remote machines fail to display fonts in recent versions of Ubuntu. This may be fixed by installing the x11 font packages:

xfonts-100dpi xfonts-75dpi

Unfortunately currently apt doesn't update the font path, so you need to do so manually:

xset +fp /usr/share/fonts/X11/75dpi:unscaled
xset +fp /usr/share/fonts/X11/100dpi:unscaled
xset fp+ /usr/share/fonts/X11/75dpi
xset fp+ /usr/share/fonts/X11/100dpi
xset fp rehash

Taken from the ubuntu forums here.

Hat Futures

A recent TED talk discussed how the economy is transitioning with technology taking over many traditional jobs.  As far as I understand he points out that creativity will become much more important in the future. Here is the talk:

Now listen to Gabe Newells reflections on valve's recent success in the hat busniess.

It seems to me that valve has a great answer to how people will keep themselves busy and entertained in the future, at least for those who enjoy creating and participating in games. It makes me optimistic about the future :)

How to shrink a PDF

Ghostscript has a handy way to downsizing pdf's if you don't need images and so on at full resolution:

gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dPDFSETTINGS=/screen -dNOPAUSE -dQUIET -dBATCH -sOutputFile=output.pdf input.pdf

As seen at ubuntugeek.