Dammit Jim!

I just found out about ClearType fonts thanks to Download Squad. I’m still debating whether I like them or not. They took me a few hours to get used to. Every time I looked away from my computer, I would come back and feel like my eyes were unfocused. But that blurry effect seems to have gone away and the fonts do look pretty and somehow thicker so I’m thinking I’ll stay with them. I guess they’re not all that hidden but funny how you can go years on a operating system and not know something so basic. Anyway, if you want to try on your computer go to the Display Control Panel. Click on the Appearance tab and click the Effects… button. Then select ClearType from the drop down under “Use the following method to smooth edges of screen fonts:”. You can also find out more about it and see examples at Microsoft’s ClearType Tuner.

This is pretty basic knowledge but I’ve helped a few people out recently that had been using Unix/Linux for a while and didn’t know and it sure helped me out when I figured it out. If you had asked me how many quotation marks were on a keyboard before I started doing Bash stuff I would have said two. But I, and it seems most non-programmers, often forget the little ` on the same key as the tilde ~ (to the left of the numbers on standard keyboards). So there are actually three types of quotation marks and each one means something different to Unix:

I’ve been running into math and programming related comics for a while now and always wondered where they were coming from. Today I finally ran across the source. From the topics, it appears the guy is some sort of computer networking mathy type. Some of them are beyond me and I’ve actually learned a bit by googling the ones I didn’t understand like the Alice and Bob one. Anyway, here’s a few samples:

As a biologist, I’ve often thought “I could really use an instrument that did X”. Logging temperatures, locations, depth, light levels and other variables, controlling devices like cameras or servos, and communicating with a computer seem like a task for microcontrollers. So it’s been in my head for a while to try and learn a bit about them.