zerosleeps

The current state of the default Ubuntu server shell:

Welcome to Ubuntu 22.04.2 LTS (GNU/Linux 5.15.0-69-generic x86_64)

 * Documentation:  https://help.ubuntu.com
 * Management:     https://landscape.canonical.com
 * Support:        https://ubuntu.com/advantage

  System information as of Sun Apr  9 07:03:41 UTC 2023

  System load:  0.0                Processes:             129
  Usage of /:   69.4% of 24.05GB   Users logged in:       0
  Memory usage: 44%                IPv4 address for eth0: [redacted]
  Swap usage:   81%                IPv4 address for eth0: [redacted]

  Get cloud support with Ubuntu Advantage Cloud Guest:
    http://www.ubuntu.com/business/services/cloud

 * Introducing Expanded Security Maintenance for Applications.
   Receive updates to over 25,000 software packages with your
   Ubuntu Pro subscription. Free for personal use.

     https://ubuntu.com/pro

Expanded Security Maintenance for Applications is not enabled.

0 updates can be applied immediately.

Enable ESM Apps to receive additional future security updates.
See https://ubuntu.com/esm or run: sudo pro status


You have no mail.
Last login: Sun Apr  9 01:00:19 2023 from [redacted]
[redacted]@[redacted]:~# 

That’s about 11 lines of advertisement, which is exactly 50% of the non-blank lines. Gross. Canonical’s gotta make their money somehow and I certainly don’t give them any, but this is the last server I have that’s running Ubuntu and I plan on moving it to Debian when version 12 is released.

Something about this post from Linode makes me nervous. Linode as a brand/company feels, to me, as if it exists to serve the little guy: indie developers and fast modern companies.

Akamai does not feel like that to me. It’s a big company, which is only interested in working with other big companies.

I switched a bunch of self-hosted services - which are almost exclusively used by me here in Melbourne - from DigitalOcean to Linode in June 2020 simply because Linode had servers in Sydney. The closest I could get with DigitalOcean was Singapore, and the difference was noticeable. But DigitalOcean now has servers in Sydney as well, and still has that indie feel that I like.

I’ll give Akamai a chance and see what happens though.

Someone else expressing something I feel much more eloquently than I would ever be able to:

I tried using AI. It scared me.

As threatened, I slapped down 45 Australian Rupees and purchased a “Worry-Free” licence for Sancoale Slab (normal regular variant) from Fontspring.

Isn’t it beautiful? 😍

So now that version… 5…? of zerosleeps.com has been up-and-running for a while I’ve started thinking about changes and improvements, and one of the things near the top of that list is the typeface. Right now, all text is as per a default Bulma setup: sans-serif and web-safe. It’s all very comfortable but boring.

I’ve always enjoyed the font used on Bundler’s website which is apparently called “Sancoale Slab Norm Regular”. Shoving that search term into DuckDuckGo results in page after page of results for sites with names like “onlinewebfontsonline.xyz”. I wanna know who created this font and buy it from them, dammit.

Some more searching indicates that the Sancoale family of fonts was created by a company called Insigne and sure enough, in amongst the list of hundreds of things created by this company is Sancoale Slab. The product page has a lot of text (not rendered in the font I want to buy) and a few images showing samples, but no indication on how I can give these people my money.

Oh no! Wait! Right at the bottom of the product page there’s a sentence which reads “80% off for a limited time!” but it doesn’t look like a link… no! Wait again! It is a link! And it goes to a site called “myfonts.com” 🙄

Well I guess this is the “official” way of buying this font, and myfonts.com does list prices so I’m getting somewhere. “From” $45.66 (presumably USD). Let’s click on “Buying Choices”. I won’t be using this for desktop publishing or in a mobile app, so I guess I want the “Webfonts” option… wait “10,000 pageviews per month”? “Licence: Annual”.

A bit more digging indicates that I won’t be able to host the font myself - I’ll have to use a “webfont kit”, and “every time the webpage using the webfont kit is loaded … the counting system counts a single pageview for each webfont within the webfont kit”.

Sod that.

One of the other sites that keeps coming up in search results is Fontspring and apparently I can give them $32 (USD?) for a “Worry-Free” licence:

All of Fontspring licenses are perpetual, which means you pay once and use it forever. Fontspring does not require you to install any cumbersome pageview tracking scripts. We trust you.

That sounds way better. But doesn’t the publisher (“foundry”) of the font set the terms? I dunno how this stuff works.

I hate wanting to give someone my money, and not being given an easy way of doing that.