This year organizers of the Glastonbury festival will hand out 3000 wireless headphones to the revelers, in order to keep the noise down in the night, as required by the council.

Here’s a great business idea - instead of one single jukebox in a pub, playing the local bully’s favs, why not give people headsets with a mike, so they can talk more or less freely, and then charge for (different) music on every headset? The profits will soar, I tell you.

Ah, and don’t forget my royalties, if you happen to setup this kind of jukebox at your local watering hole :-)

Oh well, I guess the idea of pub-goers wearing headphones is stupid altogether…

Hmmm… seems that since I mentioned 0nlin3 p0k3r and t3×4s h0ld3m, I get more comment spam every day than I was getting in weeks. To check whether my sp4ming fri3ndz actually search for the afforementioned strings, I will 3l33t-ify the names in the post.

Bitstream Vera Sans Mono is quite a pleasant mono-spaced font that I set in all editors. Yesterday I suddenly felt an urge to have the same clear font for dos prompt.

Dos-prompt -> Properties. OK, why are Lucida Console and raster fonts the only choices?

How to change it? I’ll go brute with that. Choose raster fonts, regedit, export all to before.reg. Choose “Lucida Console”, regedit, export all to after.reg.

Let’s compare in a professional manner. First choice, cleardiffmrg.exe within ClearCase - seems that a diff on 54Mb files is too much for the poor thing. Windiff instantly tells the files are different, since the dates is different. What a smart piece of software! That’s all for the differences from windiff. Simple fc /N /U. Wow! It found it!

***** before.reg
430356: [HKEY_USERS\S-1-5-21-1715567821-2049760794-725345543-1004\
\Console\%SystemRoot%_System32_cmd.exe]
430357: "FontSize"=dword:000c0000
430358: "FontFamily"=dword:00000036
430359: "FontWeight"=dword:00000190
430360: "FaceName"="Lucida Console"
430361:
***** AFTER.REG
430356: [HKEY_USERS\S-1-5-21-1715567821-2049760794-725345543-1004\Console\%SystemRoot%_System32_cmd.exe]
430357: "FontSize"=dword:000c0010
430358: "FontFamily"=dword:00000030
430359: "FontWeight"=dword:00000190
430360: "FaceName"="Terminal"
430361:
*****

Hmmm… somehow it’s not very useful. Changing the key doesn’t make any visible difference. Brute force is just that - brute and mindless. So regedit -> Search for “Lucida Console”. And here’s something:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsNT\
\CurrentVersion\Console\TrueTypeFont\0

Changing the value from “Lucida Console” to “Bitstream Vera Sans Mono”, changed the Menu, I could see it in preview, but the font didn’t change. WTF? A little googling and here is the solution:

I just needed to restart Windows! How lame of me! When it was done everything worked correctly…

So, my faithul readers (0nlin3 p0k3r and t3×4s h0ld3m ;-)), here’s the recipe:

Set HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsNT\
\CurrentVersion\Console\TrueTypeFont\0 to your fav mono font, restart and that’s it.

Safety Disclaimer: What you see here is an account of my pointless errands in the winxp registry, It is not a procedure for you to follow. Playing around with Windows Registry is risky, so don’t try it.

Update:
I changed the sp4mm3r names to 3l33t (see next post) Let’s see what happens.

Made this pic on a walk with my daughter.

I must have spent my life under a rock, but what does it mean?

“does not concern those it doesn’t concern”, “were it not to concern you, you would have known”, “does not concern our secret brotherhood”?

It would be nice to know the spirit of this sign. It’s a public road after all…