LKL's Blog

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A new way to play around, literally, with social media: Empire Avenue

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I had to reinstall Windows a few days ago, and afterwards all of my fonts looked thin and pale, especially in FireFox. It took me a while to track down the solution, so I’m posting it here – both to help any of you in the same situation as well as to have a record of it for next time (knock on wood). The problem was that font smoothing wasn’t enabled – here’s how to fix it: Font Smoothing in Firefox

And here’s the site that led me to it: Do your fonts look faint and washed out?

Password protecting a file or folder on your website isn’t the easiest thing in the world, but this .htaccess password generator helps a lot. (Actually, the trouble I had – including temporarily password protecting my entire site and being asked for a password over and over – was due to my own feebleness. Theoretically, it really shouldn’t be hard at all.)

I’ve had a Hotmail email address forever, and for nostalgia if nothing else, I don’t want to get rid of it. However, I hate having to log into it to check for new mail – I’ve been wanting to be able to read my Hotmail in Gmail for years. And now I finally found a way to do it – here are detailed but simple instructions for enabling your Hotmail to be forwarded to another email account: Hack to Enable Hotmail POP3 and SMTP Support Many thanks to the person(s) who figured this out!

In the last couple of weeks, I’ve started receiving tons of Facebook friend requests from people I don’t know and with whom I have no friends in common. I can only guess that my profile is showing up somewhere on theirs because we have something (most likely French) in common. Since it doesn’t seem right to “friend” someone I don’t know, I created a couple of other pages:

Learn French at About fan site, for people who love my free French site.

Laura K. Lawless fan site, if you love me for more than just my French site.

I have several websites with dedicated email addresses, and the webmail solutions offerred by the different servers are uniformly lousy: they are slow and tedious. So I went in search of a solution – and found it. Mail2Web is a quick and convenient way to check any email account from any computer. You don’t have to register or create an account – just type your email address and the password that goes with it, and voilà ! (You also have a secure login option, if needed.) It’s the quickest and most convenient way I’ve found to check email while traveling.

Edited: After using the program below for a while, a friend recommended an even better program: Ultramon. It does all the same stuff as the other, plus you can choose different wallpaper and screensavers for each monitor, and the second monitor’s taskbar is a lot more attractive.

Original post from 12 April 2008: I’ve been using the extended desktop / dual monitors for a couple of years, and this set up is so essential to the way I work I simply can’t imagine how I ever got by without it. However, it’s not without its little annoyances, such as the fact that certain programs refuse to open in the monitor I want, so every time I launch the program, I have to resize it, move it to the other monitor, and maximize it again. The other day I decided enough was enough, and started Googling stuff like dual monitor program default to see if there was some way to tell programs which monitor they should open in. No luck there, but I found something even better – a program that adds a little button to each program that you just click and the program moves to the other monitor. Not only that, but you can also choose to install a taskbar on the other monitor, so that only the windows displayed on monitor 1 are in the taskbar on monitor 1, and only the windows displayed on monitor 2 are in the taskbar on monitor 2. It’s so cool, and it’s free. I don’t think it works for Macs, but if you’re using the extended desktop on a PC, definitely check it out: MultiMonitor TaskBar

If you like to make sure that you have the latest versions of software but find that it just takes too much time to get them all, you need to check out Secunia’s software inspector. You can run the scan online or download it to your computer, and it will tell you whether your operating system, browser(s), and pretty much every other kind of software is up to date. For programs that aren’t, Secunia provides links to get the latest versions. And it’s free!

Less what? Ink, paper, time, money? Yes! When I print from the internet, I normally copy everything into a program like Word so that I can manually remove all the ads, graphics, and whatever other garbage is making it take twice as long to print. But no more – I just discovered Green Print, which does it all for you. Very cool!