I commission custom art for the IT Mastery books, but do the text layout myself. Most often, I use the Minion Pro for the body font and Myriad Pro for the display font. They’re staid, reliable, and unremarkable. On rare occasion, the topic demands a particular font. That’s straightforward; I must distort the design until the font fits.
When a book requires a specific kind of font, but not a single font, things get hard.
The cover for OpenZFS Mastery is an old Mediterraniean vase. It needs a font that looks like it’s from the Roman Empire or ancient Greece. There’s lots of fonts for that, no?
Yes. Hundreds of fonts.
Each promising candidate needs a test cover. Here’s some of what I’ve run through trying to find one that works.
Baselius font
This is a nifty font. I like the central line. The title doesn’t really stand out, though. Next candidate.
Elektra font
The title stands out better, but looks kind of… janky?
Maybe a different approach.
Romanicum font
That flows too well. It looks modern, not like it was carved into unbaked clay. Try again.
The font is named “Greco-Roman Lubed Wrestling.” Seriously.
I like the look of this font, but the title doesn’t stand out well enough.
Adonias font
Okay, this is pretty good. The title stands out nicely and is legible at a distance. The U is kind of odd, making the author names look like JLIDE and LLKAS.
After spending a couple hours searching through fonts, I have exhausted my visual analysis energy. Adonias it is, for now. I’ll see if I can find better some other day.
When you wonder why cover designers charge so much? This is why.
This post went to Patronizers in July and to the public in August. Not a Patronizer? You could be!
It’s 98F outside and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Settling into the new apartment continues. My master plan for a smaller desk I can wheel onto the balcony is almost complete, but it’s 98F outside. I did go to the dojo yesterday despite the heat, but I think going tonight would be pushing my limits. Fortunately, my physical labor of getting our home ready to sale is done and I don’t have to go out in it. Other people are working on the house, preparing it for sale, and I don’t have to go back until next week. The divorce is in the court’s hands and everyone’s waiting.
Which means I have a week to catch up, starting with getting the monthly See the Sausage Being Made article back on the schedule I prefer. It feels like putting out to sea in a raft designed by observing nature rather than a knowledge of physics.
I’ve been reading the OpenZFS Mastery manuscript, tweaking tidbits here and there in the beginning. I hope to build up momentum so that when I reach the point where I stopped writing, I just keep going. This technique has worked well for me in the past and I’m hopeful it will again. Besides, I have nothing to do but hide indoors and write, because 98F.
No bright idea survives contact with reality, so I’m still rearranging the apartment. I had set up my test server under my desk, as one does, and configured a wireless bridge to give it Ethernet. It worked fine. I want to kill the power to the office when I’m not working, however. I call the test server as such because it hosts the VMs I use for testing, and it has eight hard drive bays for ZFS testing. I have a couple projects that I want to write about next that would benefit from having a production server running 24/7. I’ve relocated the test host to the living room and plugged it directly into the demarc switch. In my copious free time I’ll be configuring a DNS server and a netflow collector on it. That’ll let me play with things like DNS-based ad blocking and IPv6 analysis, two topics that will play against each other. The software license on my streaming media TV permits it to use my bandwidth during off hours to pillage web sites to feed AI scumbags? First, how dare. Second, turn off the TV at the power strip when not in use. But log its DNS queries so you can send those queries to oblivion, and analyze the traffic so you can feed it garbage? That’s the goal. Plus, you know, solving actual sysadmin problems. But mostly grinding my personal axes, the source of my best books.1
Earlier today, I got a message on the Run Your Own Mail Server Kickstarter. It ended in 2024, but a backer had missed both the original download link and the second download link I posted for folks who missed the first one. Two years. I don’t mind resending a download link, but when does Kickstarter fulfillment stop? I hired a naturally organized and disciplined person to shepherd physical fulfillment, so I’m confident that future books will have less drama. If someone fills out a backer survey two years after the campaign ends, should I interrupt everything to ship them the book? Set aside a day a month to check for stragglers on every campaign I’ve ever run? I’m pondering saying something in the Kickstarter like “Fulfillment stops three months after the first shipment leaves my house.” If someone contacts me I can choose to be accommodating, but it also leaves me an exit if necessary. I generally want to be accommodating. I also need room to say “come on, it’s been four years and the thing you backed for no longer exists. I sent you four requests for your shipping address before giving up. We are done here.” I’d leave ebook download links up for a year, because that’s the easy way to be accommodating.
Speaking of fulfillment: all of the N4SA2e Defenestrated Edition copies are on their way. I appreciate everyone’s patience. If I had known or believed Liz and I were going to divorce I would not have run the Kickstarter. Oops, I need to update the SNMP MIB and the web site for it! Tomorrow, I guess. Maybe I’ll do the MIB tonight, that’s nice easy Perl and doesn’t involve any icky images. Book covers are overrated anyway.
If there’s interest, I’m also thinking of an all-Patronizer video hangout this month. It’s been a while since I’ve done one, but life is no longer overwhelming me. Any interest?
Oh! I have managed some original writing from scratch since moving out. The FreeBSD Journal Letters column on improving software quality came out well enough. The Journal has a new editor and is making some changes, which gives me new opportunities to be cranky. I had some fun with it. I also did an interview for the Escape From 2026 Bundle, where I talked singularities and orcdom. Writing that interview was the first time I’ve felt the words come alive in over a year. Oh crap–I owe Digital Reader backers a copy of Tiny Time Wars! And I must update the web site for it!
These fiction bundles where I say my book goes out of print when the bundle ends? They’re collections. I gathered a few of my alternate history and time travel tales into a file, put a cover on it, and boom–an exclusive! The stories are all available elsewhere, but this particular collection won’t ever be in stores. If I need a collection of time travel stories in stores, I’ll write another time travel story and make a different book.
Publishing is an absolute scam. I have no idea why you support me. But I sincerely appreciate it.
My main standing desk is 60″ by 30″. It’s built on wheeled wire shelves. I tried using a small standing desk from Amazon, but it lacked the structural integrity to hold the monitors still while I typed.
What I wound up with is another set of wheeled wire shelves, 36″ by 18″. The top is a 2’x3′ sheet of laminated MDF supported by half-inch plywood. I used a hole saw to notch post settings in the bottom of the plywood. The Mac is mounted beneath the shelf, along with a power squid. My landscape-mode monitors are on the other desk. Each desk is independently powered, but they can be connected with one USB, one audio, and two DisplayPort cables.
Without a better workshop, this design is as sturdy as I can get. The monitors still wobbled. Adding the ten-disk tower PC to the bottom shelf as ballast sufficiently steadied it.
I can now roll out onto the balcony, with monitors optimized for making words. Detroit hit 100F yesterday and 97F today, but I’m hoping for good outdoor writing weather by November or so. January at the latest.
My sincere gratitude to the folks who saw my Amazon wishlist and sent me the parts. Yes, the wishlist is empty–because people keep buying whatever I put on it! Your generosity has made rebuilding a life much more comfortable. Thank you.
This post went to Patronizers in June and to the public in July. Not a Patronizer? You could be!
I am now settled in a safe and clean apartment. After ten days of work, everything is unpacked and in a place. I’m not happy with all the places, but those can be adjusted and if things have a place the apartment can be kept tidy. My office is functional, including printers and wireless. I’m actually fairly content with how it came out.
I loathe carpeting, but that’s what I could get.
Going from a sprawling house to an apartment is weird. The network demarc is close enough to my office that, instead of trying a dozen different makeshift ways to get Ethernet to my test gear, I might be able to do everything over wireless? The power strips all show these bizarre “grounded” lights, which I have never seen before but am reliably informed do not represent a failure mode.
My first priority is catching up on stuff that’s behind. I had planned to ship Patronizer copies of the Defenestrated N4SA2e, but a problem with my Patronizer system has made me delay a day. I suspect that none of the paused print-level Patronizers chose to pause, but I must verify before turning them on. I’d be inclined to just ship them all books, but someone might have gotten disgusted with me and wish to never hear my name again and I don’t want the postal inspectors to charge me with mail-order stalking.
My second priority is getting back to making words. I’m financially okay for a few months, but people support me when they see progress and there has been no real progress for a few months. I can’t just leap into writing eight hours a day, however. Writing is a muscle that must be warmed up or you crash and burn out. I’m starting by blogging more often. Some of that content will make it into Sausage posts as relevant, but most of it will be randomness to get the writing brain rolling. The impulse to write is once again present, but I know my brain. Brains are the worst. The worst. I can’t afford a self-imposed crash.
Plus: I might be living separately, but the divorce still must work its way through. An estate sale agent is disposing of the material trappings of our old life and then the house will go on the market. This is all intensely emotional, and I just have to roll with it.
I’m making the best of the split, though. My new apartment is less than two miles from my dojo, so I’ve been practicing more. The rats came with me, and they’re settled in okay. Everything is in open storage, which helps me remember what I own. Money is tight so I am living on a cash only basis until I achieve stability.
In other good news/bad news, a couple of publications that I had sold stories to folded. Again. Once again, as previously documented, I have been seen fleeing a burning publisher. The bad news is, the publisher sat on them for two years and I won’t get paid for them. In indifferent news, I am giving up on selling short pieces to publishers. It’s not worth my time. In good news, I can publish these stories myself and score an easy dopamine hit. The pile includes Montague Portal and Rats’ Man’s Lackey, so that’ll make some of you happy. Plus a ghost story, a magic Regency, and a sci-fi Regency. Because I could, because they amused me, and because nobody stopped me.
No, I didn’t warn anyone. They might have stopped me.
That’s kind of the key right now. Not warning people? No–well, okay, yes, also that. But amusing myself. The path to being okay lies through amusement. Besides, if the labor of writing doesn’t amuse me, the result will read like any other tech book. Tedious. Flat. I’m connecting with people and attempting to refill my well of amusement. I’ll be doing a writer’s event in Seattle at the beginning of August, and have tentatively scheduled a public meetup at Sirena Gelato in Kirkland on the evening of July 30th. No, I haven’t scheduled with the gelato shop. That would count as a warning.
Anyway, if you’re around Seattle on 30 July, there’s your chance to meet me.
And now, the Tilted Windmill Press store wants me to update to WordPress version 7.0, complete with generative AI features. Do not try me this month, you abhorrent monster. Do not.
In an effort to make the word machine in my skull fire up, I’m trying to blog more. Some of those blog posts will be short and/or daft. Besides, why give my silly thoughts to the big companies and not put them here?
Last night, ZZ Claybourne and I got Chinese and finished watching Alienoid. (Alienoid is a Korean two-part sci-fi kung fu what-the-heck film, reminiscent on Buckaroo Banzai on acid. Both parts are out, so I can recommend it.) Anyway, Chinese food.
We all know fortune cookies. Just like most of our Chinese food, they were invented in the US and play to Western ideas of China.
ZZ and I both picked a cookie from the bag. His was, as is traditional, trite and inoffensive. Mine?
This is my new favorite fortune. The world needs more fortunes like this.
Also, M is my lucky lottery number? I do believe I’ve been told that if I want to win the lottery, I must resort to methods other than the traditional “buy a ticket and hope.” Fair enough.
One Montague Portal, one Rats’ Man’s Lackey. Both exclusive to my store until I have enough of each to do a collection.
Yes, the cover art is correct. For Reasons. Having this story be exclusive to my store lets me do silly things like this.
Both Montague Portal and Rats’ Man’s Lackey were meant to be single stories, but the Muse got involved and she’s an absolute jerk. (Don’t go clicking around that site, Oglaf is decided NOT safe for work. Or children. The artist has never declared safety to be a design goal, so I can’t complain.) Anyway, these first person tales limit my ability to give an outsider’s impression of the hero.3 Luggage is viciously competent and quite dangerous, but he’s so matter-of-fact about it that the reader doesn’t see that. With The 1846 I got to show that. I also got to show what would make Luggage immediately say “I’m not doing this” and nope out at full speed, so that was fun.
Anyway. New Montague Portal, new Rats’ Man’s Lackey. Enjoy.
Just because things connect doesn’t mean they work.
The small standing desk supports the two monitors and the CPU. Unplug four cables, and I can move it anywhere in the apartment.
But if I actually start writing on the attached keyboard, the whole thing shakes horribly. The little standing desk isn’t robust enough to support all that equipment.
Folks have asked how they can help me, and I always say “buy my books.” Given my situation, I’ve (ugh) reactivated my Amazon wishlist. There’s not a huge amount on it, but if you feel like giving me a hand I sure won’t say no.
If you need some fun reading, I have a book in the Escape From 2026 bundle. Fourteen ebooks, DRM-free, all about time travel, alternate worlds, and generally mucking with history. My book, Tiny Time Wars? It’s exclusive to this bundle. As in, when this bundle goes away, so does this book. It will never be reissued.
Plus, part of the proceeds go to supporting World Central Kitchen. We shouldn’t need to live in a world where folks go hungry. The UN knows how to end hunger. Nobody will pay for it. WCK helps deal with the problem until someone with money develops a conscience. (Because seriously? If I was a trillionaire and the UN told me they could fix hunger for six billion dollars, I’d give them twelve and tell them to write me a nice thank-you note. I’d be the most popular person on Earth.)
WordPress paused several Patronizer accounts in April. People haven’t been billed, or notified of their benefits. I don’t know why. I only realized when I went to ship Patronizer copies of the Defenestrated Networking for System Administrators.
The annoying thing is, I can’t just reactivate all these backers. People can pause their own memberships. I’ve mailed everyone with a paused membership who patronizes me via TWP, asking them to let me know if they didn’t pause their membership. A few have already responded, confirming that it’s a WordPress strangeness. Strangely, a couple of folks who subscribe on Patreon also had their memberships paused around the same time. Why? No clue.
If you Patronize me, either in my store or on Patreon, please check that your membership is still active.
I’m adding “check and verify paused memberships” to my monthly checklist. And talk about bad timing!
If you chose to pause your sponsorship, that’s completely fine. I appreciate your past support and hope that me being more productive in the future will lure you back.
