October 11, 2010

Restoring the Default Fontset

As a web designer I find that every so often I end up looking at new fonts. Of course what inevitably ends up happening is that I’ll go through lists and lists of free (as in beer and freedom) fonts installing them all before testing them out. Of course, I rarely go back and uninstall the ones I don’t want. After all, you’ll never know when that font of people in random poses might come in handy.

But recently I hit on a weird issue. I installed about 100 fonts not really paying attention (it was late :( ) and I ended up overwriting something. No idea what, but it was important. Everything was messed up nad italicized and bolded in what had to be one of the most illegible fonts I have ever seen. I went through with word and photoshop looking at various fonts that I thought could have been over-written and no dice. I couldn’t figure it out. I even complained on twitter about it, but no luck.

In the end I ended up finding an application called FontFrenzy. What FontFrenzy really is, is a font management tool. It lets you install fonts, preview them and uninstall them. I guess that’s all a font manager really needs to do, I don’t know I’ve never used one. Why I DID end up installing Font Frenzy was because of a feature called Defrenzy. It uninstalls every single font except for the default font set included with your version of windows. It even creates a snapshot before it does, incase you want to revert.

I would post a screenshot or something, but it’s not necessary. There’s a button that says Defrenzy. And you just need to click it.

Voila, you have now restored the default font-set included with any version of windows from XP to 7.

http://sdsoftware.org/default.asp?id=5936

July 14, 2010

A quick fix

Fixing computer problems is no longer the quick task it used to be. Now, when you’re dealing with custom built pc’s averaging about 6 separate major parts, with each part comprised of its own little pieces, it starts to border impossible – or at least impossible in a timely manner. And that’s just hardware too. Counting all the possible software issues and incompatibilities, fixing a problem can border on days.

And days is simply too long. Often when a customer comes to me with computer problems it goes a little like this:

  1. Sit down and get the customer to explain what happened
  2. Keep pressing for more details. More often than not the customers description is very high level. “I clicked ok and it just showed up” isn’t very accurate. I need to know every detail leading up to the error. Most times that alone can identify a potential set of problems, or at least rule some things out.
  3. Research. Contrary to popular belief, IT professionals don’t know every problem that could occur. We know the common ones and we know ones that we’ve experienced before, and we know some of the stranger ones. 1 We need to look into other cases of your problem, we need to find patterns between occurrences and then apply them back to your case. We are not just Googling hoping to stumble across an answer. Although, we do use Google.
  4. Come up with a solution

Sadly, a lot of times the solution we come up with is simple: Reformat.

Yes I could spend 8 or 9 hours for the next 3 days removing all traces of the virus from your computer. Yes I could find the exact file that is corrupted on both your CD and your computer. Yes I could bake a pizza from scratch. But it’s not worth it. Not when there’s a solution that is fairly easy to follow and can get you back and computing faster than ever. Not to mention reformatting not only saves you time, it also saves you money, because I don’t charge you for solutions, I just charge for implementation.

That being said, every so often one of those really strange problems pop up and you can’t help but spend countless hours fixing it – but hey, we’re geeks.

Notes:

  1. I have been known to spend a lot of time on http://www.thedailywtf.com reading some of the stranger issues people have had ↩
November 20, 2009

Feature Friday – Google Wave Preview – Rarst.net

I’ve been really apprehensive about posting my own review of Google Wave simply because I don’t see how the general public will be affected by it yet. Long term, I’m hoping Google Wave will become the method of choice for collaboration, but short term, it’s still too early to tell. Some people are gushing over it, while others are a little wary. This post is a great introduction to wave and an easy way to see just what the hype is about. As always, I have reserved a couple invites to wave for FHB readers.

By now there is enough stuff on Wave posted to confuse anybody, so for for those who have access to preview version or not either – let’s carefully go over established facts and look at what is defined for sure.

wave

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