Daily Tech News 12 November 2023

• The Tuxedo Pulse 14 is a Ryzen 7840HS laptop with a 2880x1800 OLED display. (Tuxedo Computers)
  
  It has 32GB of RAM - soldered, but at least there's a good amount, room for two M.2 2280 SSDs, four USB ports, HDMI, and two mini-DisplayPort, uh, ports. It comes installed with Linux by default but you can choose Windows instead, or install it yourelf.
  
  There are 29 keyboard layouts to choose from, including the option of a fully custom layout where you edit the design template and upload it when placing your order. That's about $85 extra but that doesn't seem unreasonable.
  
  So, can you get the Four Essential Keys?
  
  Lol. No.
  
  
  
• The Fedora Slimbook 14 is a Core i7 12700H laptop with a 2880x1800 OLED display - these displays are showing up everywhere, which is great because they are terrific displays - Thunderbolt and USB-C ports, two regular USB ports, HDMI, a full-size SD card reader, a headphone jack, and a separate power socket. (Slimbook)
  
  It supports up to 64GB of DDR4 RAM in two SODIMM slots, and a single M.2 SSD.
  
  There are 14 keyboard layouts available with further options for other layouts, though they don't detail exactly how that works.
  
  So, can you get the Four Essential Keys?
  
  Lol. No.
  
  But.
  
  The Fedora Slimbook 16 weighs just 1.5kg - barely more than my existing 14" laptop, has Nvidia 3050 Ti graphics, and a three-column numeric keypad with a single-height enter key.
  
  Which means, if they support custom keyboard printing, that you can turn it into a 15-key macro pad with any layout you can dream of. (Actually 18 as there are three half-height keys above the main keypad.) Four essential keys and another fourteen.

• AMD could be looking to Samsung's 3nm process for some of the chips coming next year. (WCCFTech)
  
  This would make sense, from a perspective of not putting all your eggs in one basket hanging directly over a hungry snake, and also from a perspective of not buying all your eggs from one egg shop.
  
  Samsung's 3nm process isn't quite as good as TSMC's, but that's like saying a Ferrari isn't quite as good as a Lamborghini, when the third option is an Edsel.
  
  
  
• Monaspace is a monospace programming font superfamily from GitHub. (GitHub)
  
  Good monospaced fonts used to be scarce; in the last couple of years there's been a flood of them. This particular font provides five styles, seven weights, twenty-six widths, and twelve degrees of slant
  
  This has a couple of interesting features, including ten sets of ligatures - where adjacent characters are combined into a more complicated glyph - and what they are calling "texture healing". If you have the letters imi in that sequence, in a normal monospaced font that looks ugly because the i characters are wide and the m character is squished. Texture healing keeps everything in the monospaced grid, but lets the m fill the entire width of its cell while each i is moved to to give the m more room.
  
  If your application properly supports TrueType/OpenType fonts, it doesn't need to know anything about this; it uses a trick built into TrueType that us normally used to support variants of Arabic characters - in Arabic, letters can look different depending on where they are located in a word.
  
  You can play with it on the GitHub page and it certainly seems to work.
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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