Attaboy Media

Apple changed the font smoothing preferences in Snow Leopard and removed the proper control for external monitors — their automatic setting doesn’t work properly. Text looked absolutely terrible on my Samsung LCD monitor after installing OS X 10.6 until I entered this into the Terminal:

defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain AppleFontSmoothing -int 2

(You might also prefer -int 1 for less smoothing or -int 3 for more smoothing.)

I can’t imagine why non-Canadians think all of our police wear funny hats and bright red tunics.

This is the sort of thing we strive for at Dabble DB a lot of the time — for the user, Things Should Just Work.

Christopher Grabowski’s photos of dying and dead coastal communities in British Columbia, from Geist magazine

Why are bikes in Portland so expensive?

Mark Hume calls it “one of the biggest salmon disasters in recent history”. Sad.

On being John Hughes’s penpal.

With Google Reader synching and Send to Instapaper goodness.

Uh oh… somebody slap me — I kinda like this.

“In the moments before a crash or near crash, drivers typically spent nearly five seconds looking at their devices — enough time at typical highway speeds to cover more than the length of a football field.”

It also turns out that not looking where you’re going for extended periods while driving 100 km/h correlates strongly with not having an effing clue.

As usual, Canadian journalists conflate a rising Canadian dollar with a falling American dollar. The loonie is worth more compared to the American dollar, it’s true, but compared to the pound sterling and the euro, the loonie is standing still. Compare the four currencies over the past three months.

VIA Rail is Canada’s crown embarrassment. I’m not normally in favour of privatization, but it’s hard to imagine a private company doing any worse. They let their locomotive engineers work for two and a half years without a contract, and — surprise! — they finally they got fed up and went on strike today. Just when the rest of the world is turning to rail travel, VIA makes sure that people will find out how great Porter Airlines is. How will they ever win anyone back? “The union is settling in for the possibility of a long strike, Mr. Shewchuk said.”

Given my recent experiences on VIA Rail (consistent 2-hour delays), I heartily applaud this move. I can’t help but point out, however that when they say, the upgrades “will shave roughly 30 minutes off the travel time along the 539-kilometre rail line that links Toronto and Montreal,” that means schedules will go back to what they were five years ago — four-hour express service instead of four-and-a-half hours.

Every bit helps, but isn’t it a sad comment that all $300 million buys you is service like we used to have?