Knat's News--Issue 4

Now hosted by
Crosswinds

Volume:00 Issue:003
Sept 15, 1999

" Stuff you knead to know"

Click on a Topic: Create a Font! - Free LD PC-to-Phone Calls - Crash Clinic

The Write Stuff:

     Fonts put personality on your pages. Wouldn't it be great if you could print pages that truly reflected your own personality instead of some professional font designer's? If you have the time and inclination, you can make your own TrueType fonts with some easily obtainable tools.
     First you'll need a font editing program. Font Creator Program 2.2 is an excellent piece of shareware (not disableware) from High-Logic and can be downloaded (1.1 megs) here. It costs $35 to register if you use it beyond the 30-day trial period. It allows you to edit an existing font or create a brand new one from scratch.
     A paint/photo editing program to fashion your glyhs is neccesary for any serious designing. Jasc Software's Paint Shop Pro 6.0 is good, but almost any image editor will do. Be sure to reduce your images to two-color black and white so you can paste them into Font Creator.
     If you have access to a scanner, draw your characters out on paper first. Let your creativity go wild.
     You can create a full set of 255 characters or limit yourself to the 96 or so possible keyboard characters. If you're not that ambitious, make a font consisting of the alphabet, numerals and a few punctuation marks. That requires designing about 70 characters. Or how about a single character font the just prints out your signature?
     In case you're not familiar with the extended set of non-keyboard characters, they can be accessed using a character mapping program or by using various Alt+number combinations such as Alt+0169 to produce the Š symbol.
     The second line in this article's heading is a 202-character font created by Knat named "Rat Scratch". Join Knat's Rats by
downloading RatScratch.zip(35k) here. Subscriber's to Knat's Knews may use Rat Scratch free of charge.

Subscribe to Knat's Knews here.

As of this issue, we are going to try to make the newsletters a little shorter and hopefully that will help with getting them out a little more frequently. If you've got any ideas for articles, questions or comments please please use the feedback page. Thanks!

Who Needs A Long Distance Carrier?
     Not you if you've got a computer with an internet connection, a full-duplex sound card, a microphone, and some earphones. And you're willing to put up with a few inconveniences.
     The quality of VOIP or "voice over the internet" has gotten so good it often approaches that of regular phone calls--even over a 28.8 modem. Occasionally there are echoes and other difficulties, but most of the time however, it's possible to get a pretty good connection to any telephone in the U.S.
     A full-duplex sound card is neccesary for simultaneous two way conversations. With a half-duplex card or a full-duplex card with half-duplex drivers, you'll only have walkie-talkie style communications, so you may need to surf onto your soundcard manufacturer's website to get full-duplex drivers. If you're not sure about setting up your card, the help pages at DialPad are usefull.

Pick an internet "phone company".
Our favorite here at Knat's Knews is DialPad.com for several reasons:

Reliable

Easy logon

No software to install because the dialer is a Java applet

     Of course there are other choices. PhoneFree, which can be downloaded at PhoneFree.com runs on your computer and works well most of the time.
     Another possiblity is iConnectHere.com. They offer faxing and fee-based international calling and their PC-to-phone is a 125K browser plug-in. It loads quickly after the initial installation and works quite well. With iConnectHere, you can also place free phone calls to Canada and if you use your credit card you can call gloabally.
     You may decide to keep your long distance carrier for the convenience factor, but you can definitely cut your phone bill by using the internet for your calls. You may also find yourself doing some long distance business you might otherwise have passed on, like those non-toll-free tech support numbers that keep you on hold forever.

CRASH CLINIC

Dedicated to the smooth and efficient operation of your
Win9x system because there's nothing so irritating as a
computer CRASH! #@*%!~`#/$>o!! :( :( :(

Stabilize your computer by adjusting hidden cache settings
     Your computer may have 128 megs of RAM installed and still give low memory warnings and crash because Win9x allows memory to get locked up and become unavailabe to your applications. In this installment of Crash Clinic we'll take a look at five settings hidden in the system.ini file that can increase available system resources and give you a more stable system.

     These settings control something called the "vcache." You can adjust them yourself by using Notepad or another text editor to open c:\windows\system.ini. WARNING! Before editing your system.ini file, make a backup copy so you can easily restore your system settings if necessary.
     From the Start Button chooose "Run" and type
"NOTEPAD \WINDOWS\system.ini" and hit [Enter]. Now scroll down until you find a section labeled "[vcache]." Most likely it will be empty if your vcache settings have never been changed.
     Here is a copy of Knat's [vcache] section:
[vcache]

MaxFileCache=8192

MinFileCache=8192

ChunkSize=512

NameCache=2048

DirectoryCache=48
     Add these same lines to your system.ini's vcache section, but first read the following explanation so you can choose values appropriate for your computer.

MinFileCache & MaxFileCache set the minimum/maximum RAM cache size used. The higher you set it, the more RAM allocated specifically to Windows and the less that will be available to your own software. By default, Windows sets no maximum, which can result in very little being left over to run your programs. Maxfilecache should be no more than 25% of your system's total RAM. If you have 64 or more megabytes of RAM, 16384 (16 X 1024) is sufficient for the maximum. Minfilecache should be no less than 10% of your RAM. Do NOT set it to 0. Too low a value may cause blue screen errors at start up. It is a good idea to set both at the same (higher) value so that Windows won't waste resources readjusting the cache size. Use integer multiples of 1024 for these two settings.

Chunksize directly affects performance. The disk cache is a single block of memory which is divided into chunks. If the chunks are too small then there are too many to manage efficiently. If they're too large then small amounts of data will waste cache space. The optimum value for most systems is probably 512 (kilobytes). In any case, the absolute minimum the value should be is 256. Any change should be a doubled multiple of that (512, 1024, 2048, 4096, etc.) You can experiment with this setting for best performance on your system.

NameCache limits the amount of files Windows can track. 2048 is ample.

DirectoryCache limits the directories Windows can track. 48 is sufficient here. The advantage of fixing the values for files and directories is that Windows does not have to reallocate memory to increase or decrease the cache.

     Once you've decided what values you're going to use for these five settings, edit system.ini accordingly and save. Your new settings will take effect the next time you restart Windows.

     If you're nervous about editing system.ini by yourself, you can download Thomas Reimann 's Cacheman, a small freeware program available at Outer Technologies. Cacheman's graphical interface let's you set values for maximum and minimum vcache size as well as chunk size. It has a beginner mode that automatically optimizes the settings based on your system's RAM. It allows changes to be easily undone and is very safe.
     SwapMon from Pinoyware.com is another program that can adjust your vcache size. It also monitors your swap file and can recommend an optimum size for that as well.

     Happy crash free computing,
                                                                 --

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