TangleBones

Fonts in Windows XP: Help?

Like many unfor­tu­nate people, I spent years of my life using Win­dows PCs. Finally freed of the burden of con­stantly updat­ing, fixing, scan­ning and re-​installing them, I’ve given up on keep­ing track of how to do any­thing more than the bare min­i­mum with Win­dows. And now that’s come back to bite me in the ass.

I have to use Win­dows at work - as do most people with office jobs. My work com­puter was recently upgraded with a pretty nice Sam­sung LCD mon­i­tor, and I switched from stan­dard font smooth­ing to ClearType. That made all of the text so spindly and spi­dery that I could barely read it, so I turned off font smooth­ing entirely, and it was fine. Not good look­ing, but fine.

Today I made the mis­take of load­ing up my blog in Google Chrome on my work com­puter to show a co-​worker a trick I knew, and I was hor­ri­fied by the way the fonts looked. I usu­ally only deal with my blog from my Macs, so I wasn’t pre­pared for the horror:

Ghastly, no? I switched to IE and Fire­fox and dis­cov­ered the same thing. Hor­ri­fy­ing. I then tried Safari for Win­dows which uses its own font draw­ing software: 

Well, that’s cer­tainly better. Or at least what I’m used to and what I meant for the site to look like when I last worked on it. I tried Microsofts ClearType tuner, both online and as a Con­trol Panel tool, and while I could darken things up to a point where they weren’t hor­ri­ble, I couldn’t make them look much better, and noth­ing I did seemed to have any effect in any of the web browsers.

So my ques­tion is, how do I get Chrome or Fire­fox to look more like that? And since I’m pre­sum­ing that the fonts are this ugly for most people, should I be switch­ing to sIFR or somemthing? Because that’s just heinous.

December 16th, 2008 · Category: Technology, Web Sites · Tags: apple, browsers, cleartype, fonts, safari, windows · 5 Comments »

That’s Confusing

So if you have 5 min­utes and 13 sec­onds to spare, check this out:

Now, Amanda Palmer of the Dres­den Dolls is cer­tainly not everyone’s cup of tea, so bar­ring her gen­eral style, what reason do you think her record com­pany had for want­ing to reject this video? The same-​sex love fest? The crazed look­ing diners? The strange timbre of her voice? The fact that it’s hard to tell what Leeds United has to do with the rest of the song?

Nope: they think her stom­ach looks fat.

Amanda tells the story her­self over at her blog, but the end result is that her fans put up a web­site telling Road­run­ner Records where to stick it: In the ReBel­lyon. 

For the record: I’ve thought Amanda Palmer was hot since I first saw the video for Coin-​Operated Boy. Belly schmelly: that’s one crazy/passionate/rocking babe.

December 12th, 2008 · Category: Music · Tags: amanda palmer, belly, body image, leeds united, who killed amanda palmer · 2 Comments »

Oh the Spoiled, Spoiled Boy

Jared has been extra cute lately (making puns about his drum­stick at Thanks­giv­ing dinner was price­less), and has been doing his best to put up with things not being reg­u­lar. He had a sleep­over at Shelley’s last night and had to endure not having the right juice, wear­ing Shelley’s paja­mas (he sup­ports planned par­ent­hood now, I guess) because daddy forgot to pack any (the upside is that when he out­grows his, I have her birth­day presents all lined up) and being forced to sub­sist almost exclu­sively on turkey and bacon. Well, that last one didn’t really bother him.

But now that black Friday is here, I’m look­ing around for Christ­mas presents. I’ve got Sierra’s gifts pretty well sorted out, and the two of them will be get­ting one big group present, but I need to find some­thing nice just for Jared. 

But what to get him? The boy doesn’t really like toys: he plays with them for the 5 min­utes it takes to figure out what they do, then tosses them under his bed or the couch for­ever. He has every DVD and VHS cas­sette imag­in­able cour­tesy of 6 years of allowance-​spending and some recent EBay shop­ping for “the old shows” by Shel­ley. He has every soft­ware pack­age for his com­puter I can think to get him since he only really likes edu­ca­tional puzzle games. I think he has every kid’s video game he’s ever shown the slight­est inter­est in for every major plat­form avail­able, plus the goofy kids-​only ones like V-Flash. So what’s left? In what area have I failed to spoil him?

(Before anyone makes any silly sug­ges­tions, books and clothes are not Christ­mas presents for a kid, they’re sta­ples. It would be like you or I find­ing a glass of water and some Dori­tos under the tree.)

I keep think­ing of get­ting him one of those kid-​oriented dig­i­tal cam­eras, but they all require their own buggy soft­ware. If he had the atten­tion span for video edit­ing, I’d get him a Flip camera like the one Shel­ley got me for my birth­day. There are things he’d prob­a­bly enjoy like a scooter or a tram­po­line, but with what looks to be the cold­est winter in his life­time coming up, they wouldn’t be much use. What have I for­got­ten about? 

And what am I going to get him for his birth­day 3 weeks later?

November 28th, 2008 · Category: Family · Tags: gifts, jared, presents, xmas · 9 Comments »