I'm lazy. After Yet Another Gentoo Installation, where I found my fonts were messed up (I'm picky too), and found myself thinking, "Now, what package was that font I liked in?" I decided to indulge my laziness and install *all* the fonts with stable packages in gentoo (or, at least, all the ones that would install.) Here's the command:
for font in `emerge --search font | egrep '^\*' | grep -v Masked | cut -d ' ' -f 3`; do emerge $font; done
If you're curious what'd be installed, just replace 'emerge' with 'echo', or just run 'emerge --search font' by itself.
Note that some of the fonts don't install easily (they require manual downloads of blah blah), but I figure I'm so lazy I'll just skip all those. Besides, if they don't install trivially, then there's probably something wrong with them anyway.
Finally, on the topic of fonts, let me take this opportunity to plug rejon's Open Font Library, a new project to do for fonts what our Open Clip Art Library has done for clipart. Imagine a HUGE, central repository of fonts of all sorts, under clear Public Domain terms, packaged in a way that allows you to select subsets of fonts based on your own filters. For example, select the highest scored font for each font face, plus all fantasy fonts. Or, select all fonts with fancy drop caps. Or, select all fonts that most closely (and legally) approximate the most common commercial fonts.
Granny Linux
Wow, I've gotten a lot more feedback on Granny Linux than I expected (all positive, too). I wish I actually had any spare time, because I think it'd be an extremely cool project and a great way to make life better for a LOT of people. Instead, I'll keep pitching out random ideas here, and hopefully maybe inspire someone with more time than I. :-)
From the feedback I've gotten, it sounds like the exciting part is not so much the stripped down interface but rather the administrative backend, and the notion that Granny Linux totally abandons the Windows-oriented idea of a single-user computer (thus forcing everything to be dumbed down to the lowest common denominator) and instead embraces the reality that for a basic end user, there are going to be people in several roles related to that machine. Each role can be specialized to certain desires and talents, and the system designer needs to design for each of these roles, and strive to make life easy for each. I.e., the user wants a consistent, reliable, simple interface; the first level admin wants simplicity of troubleshooting and configuring a single machine; the high level admin wants lots of options for customizing, testing, verifying, etc. across many machines.
Also, this whole concept is quite conducive to the idea of self-supported open source developers. The idea being that just as a person would hire a local professional to take care of their taxes, plumbing, or window cleaning, they'd similarly hire out their computer care to a professional computer engineer. I think there is already a fairly vibrant local tech support "industry" but much of that work involves relatively low-skill labor of scraping viruses off computers, reinstalling Windows, etc. With Granny Linux, the support load is divided into an even less technical level, and a much more technical level. The higher level is perhaps more in line with how your typical open source developer would like to spend their time anyway.
MythTV Club
Last night we had our second MythTV club meeting. We doubled our attendance from the first meeting too! :-)
Kees downloaded and installed the MythTV front end on his laptop, and dmandell, shiruken and I checked it out. Very purty. Kees (who has been a devoted Tivo afficianado) remarked, "Forget Tivo!" He was quite impressed. We went through the configuration settings; there's a lot of features you can turn on, and a lot of ways to customize them if you're unhappy with the defaults. Also plenty of ways to plug in your own scripts and tools.
One of the things Kees loves is that he was able to pull up and view his huge collection of music videos. He collects those off TV as a hobby, and this was the major motivation for him to write GOPChop. There were a few minor format issues for some of the videos, but he had ideas of ironing those out.
So, the question of whether to go forward with MythTV was unquestionably solved, and I'll be putting in the hardware order today. :-)
Habitat for Humanity
Brian, Kees, and I have decided to go volunteer for H4H here in Oregon one day next week. OSDL has a policy where if you spend one day vacation doing volunteer work, they match that with another day off to do the same. I think it'll be a cool way to put some energy into service and improve my carpentry skills in the process.