nuxx.net blog

After work today I swung by REI and picked up an Ultimate Support bike stand; the Sport-Mechanic model. (Here is a mirror of their catalog PDF, as the site is changing.) I really like this company’s stands, and as mentioned before, I have one of their display / floor stands for holding my bike upright when parking it.

This stand is quite useful, as I’m able to hold my bike off the ground and actually adjust things while pedaling, which is a nice change of pace. It was a hassle before holding the back end off the ground with one hand, pedaling with the other, and trying to see what wasn’t right. That said, I’m not sure if it’s really worth its cost.

The stand was $159 (plus 6% sales tax), and while I’ve found that online I could have acquired it for $20 less, including free shipping, at least this way I had the option of returning it if I didn’t like it. I also ended up getting two Park Tool items, the FR-5 Cassette Lockring Tool and SR-1 Sprocket Remover / Chain Whip, which are needed for taking apart my rear wheel.

I’m almost tempted to return the stand, partially because I can get it for so much cheaper online, and partially because I’m not sure if I really need it. I shouldn’t be buying expensive things that I don’t need and/or won’t use enough to make them worth the money spent. I’ll decide this tomorrow or over the weekend.

I also spent a bunch of time tonight washing my bike, cleaning up the drive train, and lubricating and/or adjusting the parts that needed it. The chain was cleaned in a solvent bath then checked for wear, which showed that it’s stretched 1/32″ over 11 links. Being half worn out it looks like I’ll end up replacing the chain sometime this year if I keep riding as frequently as I have been.

Back in January I mentioned that I have switched to Consolas as my preferred monospaced font for on-screen work. As part of this I switched cmd.exe to using it as well, but doing so was not a trivial matter. If you wish to do so, here’s how in a couple of nice, easy steps:

1) Get a copy of Consolas. You can either get it here direct from Microsoft, or I also have a copy of just the .ttf files here.
2) Add the fonts to the machine by dragging and dropping them into %WINDIR%\Fonts (eg: c:\windows\fonts) or add them using the Fonts applet in Control Panel.
3) Add a string value called 00 with a value of Consolas to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Console\TrueTypeFont. Importing this .reg file will do this for you.
4) Start up cmd.exe and you’ll now be able to change the font to Consolas. I suggest saving the changed properties for future use.
5) Note that despite changing the selected font at this time, it does not actually change in the window. You must now reboot the computer (not just log out, but actually reboot) and then log back in.
6) Fire up cmd.exe and you’ll see that the font being used is now Consolas, as shown above.

Note that the window shown above has the font size set to 14 point. For what it’s worth, I run the console on my laptop (with a 1400×1050 display) at 14 point, with a window width of 150 characters and height of 70 characters, as can be seen here.

I also use Consolas in PuTTY running at 11 point, 80 columns and 50 rows and in Notepad++, also at 11 point.

One last thing to remember is that this font was designed to be used with ClearType, Microsoft’s implementation of subpixel rendering. Without this it’ll look like poop.