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!