Make Vista's Fonts Sing
July 19, 2007

Some of you might remember Chris Pirillo from his days back on ZDTV. Scratch that. Some of you might remember ZDTV. It was a cable TV network dedicated to computing that actually didn't suck. ZDTV begat TechTV which kind of sucked, but it had its own host of good television shows. Among them was Call for Help, originally hosted by Leo Laporte who gave way to one Chris Pirillo, owner of Locker Gnome - a technology oriented website which I used to frequent in my youth.

Sadly, TechTV did not last long before it was consumed by G4 in order to create "a network for gamers by gamers". By gamers, they mean twenty-something-males with a permanent hard-on and a penchant for beer. I believe that they are down to but one gaming related show, and even that's questionable.

You are all wondering, I'm sure, what brings me to mention this relic of a computing era gone by. Well, I was searching the great intarwebs awhile back for ways to tweak Vista's font rendering engine for a more attractive look. I was having absolutely no luck. That is, until I happened upon Chris Pirillo's page on fixing Vista's fonts. He provides a simple registry fix that remaps the most common fonts to the far superior new Segoe UI font that our benefactors have so graciously provided us.

You may be asking yourself, "does it work?". The answer is most certainly yes. The difference is utterly palpable and makes everything (especially the web) look infinitely better. You may also ask, "is this dangerous?". Well, anything involving the registry is dangerous. I can say that the keys modified appear innocuous and that I have tried this on two machines without error.

You may also notice (if you are astute) that the link you see is to my own local mirror. I've began hosting my own Windows Addons collection again. I like having all of my needs in one place, and that page is there to satisfy me. You may even find some of the FireFox extensions listed there to be... well, awesome. Enjoy!

New Dining Table!
April 27, 2007

So, Emily and I bought a new table two weekends ago for $150 - we were pretty impressed. The one we had been using was on loan from my parents, and really didn't fit the space. The space was tiny, miniscule almost microscopic - but the table was pretty big. So, when we got our tax rebate this year we decided that we'd buy a nice table to enjoy our meals at. The result? A nice table that totally matched our tastes and didn't require monkey-like acrobatics to move in and out of. We totally lucked out that Shop-Ko was having a sale when were looking - everything else was in the $300 range.

A List Apart's Designer Survey
April 24, 2007

So, A List Apart is hosting a survey for web developers. I've always been interested in this sort of thing, so all you designers out there ought to go take this survey! Click the image to the right to get there.

Yes Draz, you should take it too.

New Ruby Site!
September 12, 2006

There's a new Ruby-Lang site, and it looks oh so delicious! The old one was terrible looking and a pain to show people who you were introducing the language in. The new design makes me want to find more converts! I really love the little Ruby code breakout towards the top. Very nice.

Something a bit Simpler
September 04, 2006

I redesigned again. I chose to go with something a bit more stark and simple this time around, since I haven't tried that in awhile. I always used to love the minimalist themes from all the UI sites, so I'm going to try this for a bit. I'm still not quite sure how to work the sidebar back in, so that will have to come later. I'm thinking about perhaps having it run through at the bottom, but I'm not certain.