Misc

If you’ve used terminals since the early 90’s then you might be pretty used to an old style DOS like font like me. After running windows for so long one of the hardest things about switching to OSX was finding a good font that looks something like what I was used to. This was a must have condition for making the switch two years ago.

There’s just something about the new fonts that just doesn’t work for me after spending hundreds of thousands of hours either in a text editor or at the command prompt. Of course the actual Terminal Font on windows isn’t a TTF so that’s a dead end.

What I eventually found was a True Type Font called Video Terminal Screen. This is what it looks like in iTerm on Leopard at 16pt. Text and code look great with it, well to me.

I’m happy to be heading to Portland to speak at OSCON in two weeks where I’ll be presenting my performance caching talk for the last time. If you haven’t had a chance to see it yet I hope I’ll see you there. Hrm, now i’ll need to think of something new to talk about…

I’m digging deep in the archives for this one, inspired by a coworker’s own note about crosswords. His recent publication in the New York Times brought back the painfull memory of my own rejection. In light of this I have unearthed my own failed submission to the Times for your consumption.

If I recall, I had rated this at about a Wendnesday’s difficulty but I’m not entirely positive. If you take the time to do this then I apologize in advance for the two page pdf format. This is the only format I currently have available.

Also, it’s not too late to see Will Shortz speak at UC Berkely this may. Tickets are still available here.

With the recent release of Konami’s Arcade Stlye Controller for Guitar Freaks I decided I had to order one so I could play one of my favorite games again. Not having even a playstation makes this an expensive game to import. Between the cost of the game, controller, console and mods we’re looking at over $500. Of course I could have gone with an alternate game like Guitar Hero, but Konami is the originator of the rythm game genre and GF reflects this in being much more playable than Guitar Hero.

So with the gear in hand I plugged everything in, ready to tear the game up. I started playing some of the songs I knew in Masterpiece Silver and was failing almost everything. For songs I know I could score an S on in the arcade I was getting a D or an E now! I set to searching online for the issue and found out that because my tv is an LCD based HDTV the upcoversion this can lag the display enough to make a rhythm game like this unplayable. For most games this means you’ve got to shell out about $500 for a specialized upconverter but luckily the newer Guitar Freaks games come with a timing delay setting. With my tv a setting of -4 saved the day!