Hack

I decided I needed a clock in my living room, and remembered I had this Matrix Orbital VFD2041 vacuum fluorescent display in my junk box, so I whipped up a few lines of C code to make it show the current time. The VFD connects to my home theater PC via its RS-232 interface and a USB RS-232 dongle.

Here's the source:

• vfdclock.tar.gz

I decided to try using GNOME Terminal with ugly fonts — that is, bitmap fonts which are not anti-aliased. The goal of this experiment was to improve terminal performance when scrolling large amounts of information in a big window. At the end of the day, the performance was not improved in my case. (I have my monitor rotated 90° for a portrait display, and I think my use of rotation may be a bottleneck for my graphics throughput.) However, I decided to keep the ugly fonts anyway, since it seems to allow me to use smaller fonts without sacrificing legibility.

The presence of multiple "clipboard" selection buffers in the X Window System has long been a source of irritation with me, and I frequently end up pasting the wrong thing. A few years ago, I hacked the xterm terminal emulator program to always copy into both buffers, and this solved the problem for me. However, I've been playing around with GNOME Terminal lately, so I recently patched its source code to do something similar.