All posts by Kris

About Kris

Hardware hacker, technology integrator, and maker. He enjoys staring blankly at code and voiding the warranty.

webtypography

status

Font smoothing exampleStep one. Turn font smoothing on. No, not you Mac kids… :) In Windows, go to display properties, appearance, and click on the “Effects…” button. Check the box that says “Use the following method to smooth edges of screen fonts:” Select “ClearType” from the drop-down menu. Hit apply.

There, that’s better. I don’t want to hear any complaints like “now my fonts are blurry!” They’re not blurry, they’re smooth. Plus the’re kerned almost right. Meaning “It lo ok s be t t er th an thi s.”

I’ve spent about 4 hours working on the WordPress templates. They use standard tags, but it still took me a while to get planetkris.com sorted. They apply font sizes and types all over the place. Sometimes using “font : Century Gothic” and sometimes “font face : normal 12px Century Gothic.” Sometimes they define the typeface in #content as well as in #body. So even when you change one, you may need to go back and find the other.

Side note: I removed the rallynotes entries and catagory. I added the popcoaster catagory and entries.

popcoaster; Was a stand-alone coaster site of mine that I created in the hopes of selling some of my artwork. Specifically in the form of T-Shirts. Four months of a CafePress paid site, and I got nothing… So the coaster reviews and pictures will be incorporated back into planetkris.com .

blog puke…

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I’ve learned a lot in the last 4 days. I’ve learned that the term “propigate” is bullshit and register.com knows it. I’ve learned that trying to set your nameserver remotely through 2 SSH sessions is futile.

WordPress rocks… so far.

The MT importer worked better then I thought – and I really don’t care about permalinks.
You’ll notice rallynotes.com content here. It’ll be cleaned up soon. Explanation: MT hack back in the day.

Changes locked out – we ditch Six Apart.

status

lockout.gifI’m moving to my new hosting (BlueHost) in March. Well, I’m there now – but it will take that long to transfer the DNS :rolleyes: Linux hosting, lots of bandwidth for rally videos. More uptime then a cable modem in Portland, ME. :)

In the process of changing hosting I will dump Movable Type / Six Apart. It’s been real, it’s been fun, but it hasn’t been “real fun.” I’m looking strongly into b2evolution. It’s php based, but we’ve come a long way from the original “post nuke”, and I don’t need a content management system. I need a blog.

What’s this mean to you? You may not be able to post comment spam. ;) You won’t be able to search or see the picture gallery. The site should be “static” but up.

Thank you for your attention. We know you have many choices of websites to fly with, and we thank you for flying with planetkris.com. So, sit back, relax, and enjoy the crash…

– Kris

Google Maps!

rave

google_maps.jpgA precursory glance has revealed that it’s probably the greatest map search ever. I love the google simplicity and the sims’like graphics and shading. I have loaded a 2048 X 768 map of Irvine. I did a plot from my old apartment to Las Vegas and it came up pretty quick.

I have enough faith in Google to make this my defacto map search standard – sight unseen. I don’t see me being disappointed. The only thing that could make me giggle with delight is a “tulip based” turn by turn generator. Yahoo maps had something almost like this at one time and then dropped it. Silly Yahoo…

Electronic self preservation.

rant

This morning, BLAMPH I was woken up by the BLAMPH sound of a smoke detector. BLAMPH We have three of these BLAMPH things upstairs alone and I BLAMPH wasn’t sure which one BLAMPH was causing it.

I open the door to the bedroom and listen for the next BLAMPH. This is a beeping chirp-honk that’s being made by a device that’s dying. It certainly want’s to die. As visions of me knocking it directly off the ceiling flash in my sleepy head.

This is apparently a typical smoke detector system. The detectors all get power (120v) as they are wired into the apartment. They have little 9v batteries shoved in them (in case the AC power goes out) and they watch the voltage of that battery to see if it’s dead. If you know anything about electricity, you know that you can’t obtain the voltage of a battery without draining a tiny little bit of it’s remaining charge. This should take years but it’s already happened to 2 of the detectors in our apartment. You know, the apartment we’ve only been at for 5 months. I force it off the ceiling, disconnecting it from house power. IT’S STILL BLAMPH’ing. It does this 3 more times until it dies completely in this wierd 2001 Hal style; BLAM-pee-achh-ooop.

So my question is this? Why can’t we program in self preservation? It defies logic to have my cell phone beep and buzz AND flash, telling me it’s running low on charge. When THAT ITSELF is using up battery power! I think I could get at least 3 more minutes of talk time if it didn’t go BEE-doo “Battery Low!” If the phone or the smoke detector KNEW that I was going to rip out it’s only remaining power source and fling it across the room – it would die a lot quieter battery death.

Geeking it up with TiVo.

creativity

tivo.jpgBackground: I picked up a Series 2 80 hour from a friend shortly after they announced TiVoToGo at CES. I wanted a media PC with the ability to play MP3’s off my server in the living room. Pause and record shows, etc. Transfer shows to server and backup to DVD later. The hassle of setting up my own Linux PC with MPEG card was too much to worry about.

Problem: Initial setup without a phone line. No land line for me. No Vonage. Nothing. You need a phone line to make the initial setup call. I feel this is total bullshit and a lot of others agree. There are a few workarounds however – besides “Going over to a friends house with your [god-damn] TiVo.”

Geek Solution One: Apparently the older style Belkin USB Ethernet adapter works with a dialing prefix of ( ,#411 ). This is also TiVo software version dependant. I scoured a CompUSA, found one, hooked it up – and got nothing. I was going to need one of these anyway for connection to my LAN, but it didn’t help that I still couldn’t connect through the initial setup.

Geek Solution Two: Make or adapt the serial cable with a null modem cable to connect to a PPP server on your XP box. If I didn’t know how to solder, never ran my own BBS, or know how to network Windows, I would never have figured this out. So beware of these directions for making a PPP serial connection with your Tivo. My pitfalls were: 1. Null modem cable into adapter into TiVo serial cable. When Christine and I were trying to figure out the wiring we didn’t wire TX to RX and RX to TX. (This document helped) 2. No matter what connection speed I used, I never got the words “User Request” to show up in Hyperterminal. 3. Assign a range of IPs to the direct connection. This was the last thing preventing the machine from talking to the net. Read the directions several times… slowly.

So now I have my TiVo setup. :D I thought that Christine might not use it and she took off making wishlists and recordings. It’s downstairs on the network with the PS2. I have access to my pictures and mp3s over the LAN and can’t wait for the Tivo ToGo upgrade.

Top five reasons to get a TiVo:
1. Record shows.
2. Pause and skip commercials.
3. Watch shows on any PC in the house. Burn shows to DVD. (TiVoToGo)
4. Play MP3s in the living room.
5. Viewing guide – find and record searches.