Charles Engelke's Blog

I’ve become pretty conservative about changing the software I use.
It’s usually just not worth the effort. The software I use is
generally good enough now, and most updates add little or nothing
I want. And the updates may be unstable or worse than the original
(as with Acrobat Reader 6.0, which seems to take forever to start
up, but which doesn’t do a single thing I care about better than
Acrobat Reader 5, or 2, 3, or 4, for that matter).

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… be sure to turn on ClearType. It makes a big difference
to legibility of text on LCDs (flat panels and laptop screens). And
it’s not turned on by default.

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When I last rebuilt my hard drive, about a month ago, I installed
OpenOffice instead of Microsoft Office. I wanted to see how
practical it would be to use it instead. Turns out, it’s pretty
practical. I’ve created files that I’ve sent to Microsoft users
without a hitch, and opened files they sent me. I even collaborated
on an RFI document with Microsoft Office users.

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Robocopy is a Microsoft tool that I only recently discovered.
It’s a bit like rsync, but very Windows-specific. Really,
robocopy is a smarter xcopy. You use it mostly like xcopy,
but it recognizes when the source file is the same as the target
file, and skips copying it.

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