Nice Parking Job
Over the weekend, while I was out running an errand with Arlo, we both witnessed an impressive feat of driving, performed by a rather elderly woman who perhaps should have turned in her car keys a few years ago.
Having trouble negotiating a turn off the main boulevard onto a side street, she got stuck after making her turning radius too wide. After attempting to straighten out and back up, she must have gotten flustered due to the fact that someone was waiting behind her.
Well, either she mistook the gas for the brake or she experienced the worst case of road rage I’ve ever seen, because, next thing I knew, I heard the squealing of tires and turned around just in time to see her backing up, full throttle, and drive her car up onto the hood and over the roof of the car behind her.
Madness: windows shattering, engine whining as she was still stomping the accelerator flat out, wheels spinning crazily in the air, and occupants of the car underneath throwing themselves out of harms way. Luckily no one was seriously injured.
It was very impressive and a bit freaky. I mean, that’s kind of the last thing you expect the car in front of you to do. Arlo was sure surprised.
It was fairly reminiscent of this gem of a video:
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.