Quite glad I couldn't make it to London this weekend

A couple of weeks ago, L had some virus which gave her a very sore throat and various other things. We were both pleased I didn't get it.

This afternoon, though, my throat starts going 'ow'. It's now going 'OW OW OW'.

So, yes, while I was sad not to be able to be in London, I was probably rather infectious and you really don't want this...

To see what I've been seeing, squeeze your monitor until the pixels are about half the width…

Running Linux Mint (based on Ubuntu, based on Debian GNU/Linux) means this system doesn't come with Arial 'built-in'. Hooray. Except that for a while, some web pages in Opera in particular have displayed oddly here: some of the sans-serif fonts have been very thin and narrow.

I did wonder if this was the result of having Helvetica Narrow somewhere on my system and, yes, it looks like that's what happened. Although it wasn't in the directories mentioned in /etc/fonts/font.conf as the places to look – the three main ones are /usr/share/fonts, /usr/local/share/fonts and ~/.fonts – it looks like having run FontMatrix at one point in the past created ~/.Fontmatrix which had links to Helvetica Narrow amongst some others.

Deleting that directory, running sudo fc-cache -f -v, restarting Opera and all's well. I don't know what was getting its fonts from there, but at some point I will see what the CSS for the affected sites was asking for. It probably wasn't Helvetica Narrow…

Mirrored from my website's blog, The deranged mad of a brain man.