Kylir's Website

A couple weeks ago, Mindy was telling me how her body was acting all weird and that she thought she might be pregnant. I told her that if she was pregnant, I’d buy her lunch – you know, give her an incentive to be pregnant or something. Plus we go on too many dinner dates and not enough lunch dates. We bought a pregnancy test and this is what I found in the bathroom the next morning:

That’s right – I’m gonna be a dad, again! Yeah! I am very excited. I think the timing is perfect and everything else seems to be in order for a new member to be added to our family. I also think this is a great time to renew my determination to be the best father and husband that I can be. I know that the little tyke that’s coming will be brought into a family that will love and take care of him/her. It’s going to be great!

Now, if we could just do something about the pesky nine month ordeal that is ahead of us…

I’ve been messing around with some Firefox Stylish user styles for a while now and today I finally got them all onto userstyles.org. Check them out here:

http://userstyles.org/users/52050

My newest board game addiction is Puerto Rico, a great strategic game that is similar to Settlers of Catan. Puerto Rico hits a great balance of deep strategy, good interaction, and interesting gameplay. There’s nothing about it that seems out-of-place or awkward. The only thing it lacks is the inability to play with only two players. After searching around on the Internet, I found an official two player variant and then an adaption of that variant that addresses some of its shortcomings. Mindy and I played it last night and we think it is perfect. I created a Word document with the rule adaptions for two players. Enjoy!

I’m a huge fan of AutoHotKey. AutoHotKey has the power to make your keyboard do amazing things. I use it on a daily basis to open programs and folders, manage windows, and edit text amongst many, many other things. I use it so extensively that I find it frustrating to use a computer without it. AutoHotKey has the power to transform you into a computer ninja. I highly recommend its use.

Recently I released a part of my AutoHotKey script to the Internets and called it Kommand. Kommand remaps your keyboard and enables VIM-like key bindings that are useful for scooting around a document and making changes. I’ve found it very useful for coding. The nice thing is that since it is an AutoHotKey script, it is application independent and works wherever text input is needed. In addition to text editing, Kommand provides many keyboard shortcuts that help in window management. You can close, restore, maximize, minimize, and move windows around the screen really easily and quickly.

Kommand is very early software and I am only putting it out there to see if anyone is interested. More information about it can be found in the AutoHotKey forums here:

http://www.autohotkey.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=281279

Kommand can be downloaded from the following link. The source AutoHotKey script is included along with a few files and executables that are useful for integrating it with Windows. If you use it, please let me know what you think!

http://www.kylirhorton.com/kommand.zip

Vista got a lot of things right. It also got a few things wrong. The naggy UAC “are you sure you want to do this” prompts is one example. Another annoyance is the sudden dialog that interrupts what you’re doing to tell you that less than 25% of your RAM is free. This warning would probably be warranted and helpful on systems with a small amount of RAM, but on mine 25% free memory is hardly anything to worry about – it means I have at least 1 GB of memory left.

Fortunately, like most things, there’s a fix.

1. Open the registry editor. (Click the Windows orb, type “regedit”, and hit enter.)
2. Browse to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\WDI\DiagnosticModules\.
3. Export the following folders. This is your backup in case something goes wrong.
   {5EE64AFB-398D-4edb-AF71-3B830219ABF7}
   {45DE1EA9-10BC-4f96-9B21-4B6B83DBF476}
   {C0F51D84-11B9-4e74-B083-99F11BA2DB0A}
4. Take ownership of the each folder mentioned in step 3. (You can take ownership by right clicking the folder and then hitting permissions. Click the advanced button and change owner to your user. Click OK and then give full control to your user group. Hit OK again.)
5. Delete the folders from step 3.
6. Reboot and enjoy.

Update: After doing the above steps, you should know that once memory runs out, it is out. You will have no warning. Once your memory gets maxed out, programs will behave very erratic and suddenly crash without warning. I’ve decided that this side effect can be just as annoying as the popups. If you consistently push your machine’s memory to its limits, you should think twice about disabling the low memory messages. Having said that, I still prefer using my machine without Vista’s nagginess.