Posted on Friday, January 2, 2009
On a lot of windows systems, fonts can look very pixelated and display fonts poorly. I have had experiences as mentioned above, on my old XP laptop. All fonts looked the same and were very pixelated; even on websites. That is when I discovered ClearType.
What is ClearType?
ClearType is a type of technology developed by Microsoft that improves the display of text on LCD screens that can be found on a variety of devices. Examples of such devices are laptops, pocket PCs and flat panel monitors.
Though you may not know it ClearType comes built into Windows XP and Windows Vista operating systems. ClearType is automaticly turned on in the windows Vista operating system.
How Do I use it?
As mentioned above ClearType is already turned on in Windows Vista. To turn it on in xp you need to:
- Right click on the desktop and select ‘Properties’
- Select the ‘Appearance’ tab and press the ‘Effects…’ button
- Check the box for ‘Use the following method to smooth edges of screen fonts’, then select ‘ClearType’ in the dropdown list
- Close the Effects dialog by clicking ‘OK’ and click ‘Apply’ to complete the process
Tuning ClearType
You may want to tweak your ClearType settings. To do this Microsoft have provided a web Tuner (requires windows Internet Explorer) that allows you to change your settings from there website. Microsoft also provides ‘Power Toy‘;a piece of software that allows you to to tweak your settings. For more information on ClearType visit the ClearType website.
posted in Technology, The Web, Software |
Posted on Thursday, September 25, 2008
DBS is the first program I have written in visual C#. Its purpose is a simple one; to change the background of the desktop after a set amount of time. Yes, I know there are other applications out there that do exactly the same job but there are a number of reasons that I created my own:
- Because I wanted to learn visual C#
- Because most of the applications have features in them that either wanted or needed
- Because this way I know what crap is running in the background when I’m working
It has been tested on both Windows XP and Vista. Tested with .PNG, .JPG , .GIF, and .BMP.
Requires the latest version of the .NET framework.
If you discover any bugs. Please contact me
How It’s Used
It’s easy to use. Just follow these steps:
- Get your images and through them into a folder stored somewhere on your hard drive
- Click the browse button and select the folder
- Let the application do the rest
An extra feature I added is the ability to change the time (in minuets) between wallpaper changes.
DBS setup
posted in Technology, Software, My Projects, Software |
Posted on Wednesday, June 18, 2008
So, yesterday was firefox 3 launch day; I was pretty exited to see how much faster the browser was than the memory leaking firefox 2. I was pleasantly surprised by it; pages like the comics page on penny-arcade no longer take 15 seconds to load the comic. The comics now load instantaneously. That’s the good thing.
The thing I hate about firefox 3 is the (in my opinion) inappropriately named named ‘Awesome bar’. The problem I have with it is that every time I start to enter a URL it brings up a list of URLs that have been found in the history or your favourites and have been matched with the text that was entered into the address bar. I just don’t like it. I much prefer the firefox 2 address bar. The fact that the ‘Awesome bar’ exist isn’t my problem; my problem is that there isn’t any way of making it act like it does in firefox 2. Sure, you can turn it off but that’s just as unhelpful as having turned on.
I can see that people are either going to love it. Or hate it. I personally hate it.
What do you think?
Update: I Have found a way to stop the bookmarks from appearing in the address bar drop down.
- Use this guide to find the you firefox profile
- Now find the userChrome.css file. It should be in the file called chrome. If isn’t in there then just rename the userChrome-example file to ‘userChrome’.
- Now add the following code to the userChrome.css file.
richlistitem[type=”bookmark”]
{
display: none !important;
}
- Restart Firefox
For more information visit this site
posted in Technology, Software |
Posted on Wednesday, April 23, 2008
To-Do-To-Text 1.5 Alpha is almost ready to be released. It will contain new features mainly the option to add an event to a task so that the user is reminded before the task is due.
It will be thoroughly tested and and the documentation will be updated.
After this release I really can’t see the application being expanded again because I don’t want it to change it’s goal. It’s been a good experiment and a very enjoyable one. I have learnt lots of new things in the way of programming in vb.net.
posted in Technology, Software, My Projects, Software |
