Mac 10.6 LCD Font Smoothing Bug
For anyone out there using Snow Leopard (10.6) on their Mac with a 3rd party monitor (I use Samsung flat panels), you may notice your text seems harder to read. I personally realized that after a few long coding sessions in front of the Mac my eyes started completely bugging out after a few hours. Somehow the fonts never seemed to render right, but I thought I was imagining things. But no, it turns out I wasn’t: there’s a bug in the 10.6 LCD sub-pixel font smoothing setting when using your Mac with certain 3rd party monitors. In the “Appearance” setting, you’ll notice 10.6 has a simplified smoothing setting which simply offers to enable LCD font smoothing if its available. This is different from previous versions which allowed you to set this property manually, and it probably wouldn’t be a problem if it actually worked.
To manually enable it, just use this terminal command:
defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain AppleFontSmoothing -int 2
As you can see from the picture, this setting makes quite a difference. Well this change is literally a welcome relief for the old eyeballs.
Food allergies update
We got the results back from the blood test the allergist ordered for Arlo to get a better handle on exactly how allergic he is to certain things. Skin tests were indicating he had allergies to many nuts, soy, and milk. Well surprise, surprise. The blood tests ran indicated a class 2 reaction to some nuts (6 is max), but negative for soy and milk! It was definitely good news, but a bit disorienting; if we can take the blood test as authoritative, if it’s not a allergic response we’re dealing with here, what’s happening to Arlo with these foods?
We’re still maintaining Arlo’s diet as something isn’t quite agreeing with him with these foods, but it definitely takes some of the stress of knowing that should any accidental milk or soy sneak in there, we don’t have to worry about a anaphylactic response and a trip to the ER. Probably the silver lining to all of this is that the whole family is eating much healthier now as we’ve virtually eliminated all processed foods as well as eating out and Zoe is making most things from scratch now (soup bases, breads, crackers, etc.) and it’s definitely made a noticeable difference in our general health. Thanks Zoe!