User Blogs

I had bent my right front stock steel wheel on my 1993 Impreza, so I decided to get some new wheels. Buying one wheel is kind of silly when they are (or should be) cheap, and fourteen inch wheels suck anyway so I was planning to get some 15" steel wheels from a Forester. These look kind of like alloys, and they're bigger than the stock wheel so you can run a lower sidewall. So I call up my local Subaru recycler, Subaru & Suzuki Auto Recycling (they do Kia too) and asked them what it could cost to get four Forester steel wheels.

As you may or may not know, I live on Cobb Mountain in Lake County, California. This is a really beautiful piece of country, and many parts of it enjoy microclimates - almost nanoclimates, really - that really mitigate the impact of weather. Unfortunately, my particular portion of the hill isn't in one of these areas and we get the worst of all worlds; hot in the summer, where people just around the corner from us are ten degrees warmer, and cold in the winter, although that's an affliction shared by pretty much the whole hill. Clear Lake is at about 1000 feet, and we're at about 2700 with only one significant mountain range between us and the coast (since we're on top of the second one.)

sIFR is a tool that replaces text elements in a webpage with some styled flash text. While there are some failings in the tool (currently version 2.0.2, with version 3 now in alpha testing) it is in general the only highly-supported way to use nonstandard fonts in webpages.

I have taken the time and effort to finally make sIFR work on this site; I tried it out a long time ago but ended up being confused. Actually, I'm still confused; when you replace elements, sometimes elements you have no interest in seem to be replaced, even though the generated source (not the original page source, but what's actually rendered) doesn't show any way that the styles should match those elements. I was forced to use more restrictive CSS in the sIFR style sheet than I liked, but it's working out okay so far.

Stu Nicholls is my hero today; he created a simple, working CSS fluid drop shadow. I literally tried six other drop shadows before I found his, which worked without additional freaking out in my drupal theme.

I was reading through a story on Slashdot that made reference to an old system.ini entry for Windows 9x that tells Windows to do its level best not to use the paging file, AKA swap space. This has no relevance to Windows NT; however, there are some similar registry settings that do work in NT.

One reference I located doing subsequent searches is Martin Krohn's Windows XP Tweaking Guide. This has numerous handy tweaks; I will boil the ones I intend to actually use down here, as this (or a subsequent blog post) will be a kind of worksheet explaining what I did and what did and didn't work.