do you ever change the "preferences" of any of your programs

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and why?

― Tracer Hand (tracerhand), Friday, 4 April 2003 13:23 (twenty-one years ago) link

To make them look pretty.

― Nordicskillz (Nordicskillz), Friday, 4 April 2003 13:25 (twenty-one years ago) link

Or so no-one else can fuck with em.

― Nordicskillz (Nordicskillz), Friday, 4 April 2003 13:25 (twenty-one years ago) link

Do you ever change the preferences of your mobile phone? While on tour, we all set ours to French, just for kicks. But then someone always ends up setting theirs to Turkish and you can't get it back...

― kate, Friday, 4 April 2003 13:26 (twenty-one years ago) link

i only change them if i use the program

― ron (ron), Friday, 4 April 2003 13:31 (twenty-one years ago) link

I like changing the voice on my Macintosh so it sounds like a camp robot.

― Jerry the Nipper (Jerrynipper), Friday, 4 April 2003 13:34 (twenty-one years ago) link

My friend's little sister was studying for her finals in French & Spanish and changed her mobile settings to Spanish to help her revise. ha ha. I think this was a joke as surely education standards haven't slipped that far.

― Emma, Friday, 4 April 2003 13:34 (twenty-one years ago) link

Maybe she just wanted to ace the txt portion of the test - "ntn6, cno"

I changed the preferences of the lovely Emma B's computer to "French" one day for kicks, she rolled her eyes and was like "I need to work, please" so I changed it back. But now Cmd-C doesn't "copy" anymore it creates an accent cedilla! "Thanks, genius."

― Tracer Hand (tracerhand), Friday, 4 April 2003 13:42 (twenty-one years ago) link

Sorry, I should have said "Emmanuelle" - I know how you get.

― Tracer Hand (tracerhand), Friday, 4 April 2003 13:43 (twenty-one years ago) link

(who me?)

― Emma, Friday, 4 April 2003 13:48 (twenty-one years ago) link

You've made your plans for eradicating all other Emmas well-known here, don't come the innocent with me!

― Tracer Hand (tracerhand), Friday, 4 April 2003 13:55 (twenty-one years ago) link

ha. All men in the world ever seem to have either a girlfriend or a sister called Emma. If I were going to eradicate them all I would never have time for ILE. I would need a weapon of (Em)mas destruction.

oh dear clearly time to go home.

― Emma, Friday, 4 April 2003 13:57 (twenty-one years ago) link

Can mobiles do em-dashes?

—ma

Clearly I've just arrived at work!

― Tracer Hand (tracerhand), Friday, 4 April 2003 14:02 (twenty-one years ago) link

Preferences that affect just the looks of the program: never. After a point, who the hell cares? I am amazed anyone still bothers w/ desktop themes and the like.

Preferences that affect the functionality of the program: all the time. You can often make things much easier on yourself by going through the preferences dialogues and checking/unchecking a few boxes.

― fletrejet, Friday, 4 April 2003 14:04 (twenty-one years ago) link

Er, I mean, not that I change my desktop appearance and so forth all that often, but obviously I care: I'm staring at it for hours a day, so naturally I'm going to tweak it until it pleases the eye rather than offends it. And then I'm going to leave it be until I need more eye candy.

Anyway, tweaking the preference is usually the first thing I do with a program; it can sometimes be a good way to learn about the features a program has.

― Chris P (Chris P), Friday, 4 April 2003 14:10 (twenty-one years ago) link

I play with my office assistant.
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Cue funnies.

― Nordicskillz (Nordicskillz), Friday, 4 April 2003 14:12 (twenty-one years ago) link

I would change my preferences more but bad IT dept resets them every time I log off.

― N. (nickdastoor), Friday, 4 April 2003 14:15 (twenty-one years ago) link

you gots to put the smack down on these programs. they want to be all anonymously sending yr info around on the net and stuff

― ron (ron), Friday, 4 April 2003 14:21 (twenty-one years ago) link

Re tweaking appearance: I wrote a script to randomly change my background image every hour during the daytime. It gives it a bit of variety.

― caitlin (caitlin), Friday, 4 April 2003 14:28 (twenty-one years ago) link

Is it hard to explain? THat sounds fun.

― Sarah McLUsky (coco), Friday, 4 April 2003 14:29 (twenty-one years ago) link

A script? I do that changing background thing on my Mac at home sometimes. You just check a box.

― N. (nickdastoor), Friday, 4 April 2003 14:30 (twenty-one years ago) link

95% of the time I have a program filling the screen and therefore hardly ever see my wallpaper. Right now mine is a manowar album cover I put on as a joke about 4 months ago. Other than that, you can change the colours of your windows (yawn), and your sounds (ugh - the less sounds the better).

― fletrejet, Friday, 4 April 2003 14:33 (twenty-one years ago) link

Right now my desktop pic is a photo of bf and I holding hands in DC. AWWWW...

― Sarah McLUsky (coco), Friday, 4 April 2003 14:36 (twenty-one years ago) link

I am forever fiddling with the preferences of programmes, particularly Microsoft Word in the vain hopw of getting them to work the way I want to rather than the way they want me to.

N. System Preferences -> Desktop -> Change picture every ....

You've got to select a folder of pictures though. I have it set to my iphoto folder.

― Ed (dali), Friday, 4 April 2003 14:42 (twenty-one years ago) link

Ed, I know. I was just doing my 'mac pride' thing.

― N. (nickdastoor), Friday, 4 April 2003 14:48 (twenty-one years ago) link

Sorry, I rearranged your words and punctuation in my head.

― Ed (dali), Friday, 4 April 2003 15:14 (twenty-one years ago) link

I'm struck down with malaise it must be making me delerious. Bring me more Laudenum.

― Ed (dali), Friday, 4 April 2003 15:15 (twenty-one years ago) link

So Ed what do you DO with Word, share your geeky details! I mean let me know if it's too personal! I know that I ALWAYS turn grammar and spell-checking OFF because I make my own rules, rite??

― Tracer Hand (tracerhand), Friday, 4 April 2003 15:24 (twenty-one years ago) link

ha, I program for a living => I can barely resist changing all of the settings on everything. In fact I think I do this less than almost any of my colleagues, but undoubtedly more than most non-programmers.

― Martin Skidmore (Martin Skidmore), Friday, 4 April 2003 17:18 (twenty-one years ago) link

Does anyone here compulsively fiddle with their monitor settings when they sit down at a new monitor, just to make sure it stretches ALL THE WAY to the edge?

― Tracer Hand (tracerhand), Friday, 4 April 2003 17:29 (twenty-one years ago) link

absolutely.

― Spencer Chow (spencermfi), Friday, 4 April 2003 17:33 (twenty-one years ago) link

also, do you ever change the "preferences" of any of your programs

my Powerpoint is now bi-curious.

― Spencer Chow (spencermfi), Friday, 4 April 2003 17:34 (twenty-one years ago) link

I set up default fonts & stylesheets in word for various types of documents. Leave in spelling and grammer tho. I used to incessantly tweak but now I don't do nearly nothing except change the background occasionally coz my life's just easier that way.

I probably tweak so little that I actually cause myself some extra work.

― Sterling Clover (s_clover), Friday, 4 April 2003 19:04 (twenty-one years ago) link

Ha ha Spencer I don't, it's not something that even occurs to me normally, and then some graphic designer will come over and goggle, impressed at my "restraint".

― Tracer Hand (tracerhand), Friday, 4 April 2003 19:25 (twenty-one years ago) link

I also change everyone's refresh rate. I cure headaches!

― Spencer Chow (spencermfi), Friday, 4 April 2003 19:29 (twenty-one years ago) link

Tracer, yes I do it compulsively.

― Mr. Diamond (diamond), Friday, 4 April 2003 19:42 (twenty-one years ago) link

i always turn off that damn beeping noise on instant messenger.

― Maria (Maria), Friday, 4 April 2003 20:44 (twenty-one years ago) link

Like Martin, I'm a programmer/sysadmin type so I'm changing the settings of everything.

― Chris Barrus (Chris Barrus), Friday, 4 April 2003 20:55 (twenty-one years ago) link

I'm an ultra-minimalist about desktop environments (I only made the switch from 80x24 ASCII terminal to a windowed environment about two years ago on my home system) so I'm frequently experimenting with my setup. For a while I was trying to replace everything I could with postscript hackery - I managed to replace a bunch of xloads (networked server load displays) with postscript - but now I'm working on replacing all desktop widgets (docks, status displays, controls, etc) with hardware. Basicly, something like a 1960s front panel, but for GUI control, rather than CPU. So far I've just been doing status lights, but that's going well.

― Dave Fischer, Friday, 4 April 2003 21:53 (twenty-one years ago) link

I changed my preferences on my phone and switched it to "do not take calls from telemarketers or parents" by unplugging it and buying a cellphone only four people know about.

Programs, though. I turn the sounds off of everything. Word is set up to default to 11-point Bookman Old Style. Grammar check is off because it's useless. Auto-correct is off because it causes more problems than it solves (some editors want an em dash, some want a double hyphen, I do it manually as requested). I run the spell-check occasionally on long things, and usually have to add a few dozen words to the dictionary as a result.

― Tep (ktepi), Friday, 4 April 2003 21:56 (twenty-one years ago) link

On internet explorer I have all my text purple and all the buttons orange. It looks pretty.

― A Nairn (moretap), Friday, 4 April 2003 22:43 (twenty-one years ago) link

I take hold of my preferences and aggressively assert my demands as a power user!

Okay not really, but I tweak things now and then, sure. Also at work I've started recording macros for Word and Excel. My biggest one so far is for these pieces of ad copy that have to have all of the special characters -- accents, m- and n-dashes, italics, boldface -- replaced with text coding: I recorded a macro that supposedly does or at least marks off most of this, except you still have to proof through and double-check it so I'm not sure how much I'm helping myself.

― nabisco (nabisco), Friday, 4 April 2003 22:58 (twenty-one years ago) link

I am still working on a macro that will reply appropriately to all incoming email.

― nabisco (nabisco), Friday, 4 April 2003 22:59 (twenty-one years ago) link

(I think in order to do that I would need a fertile woman, 22 years, a lot of money, and the assistance of the U.S. education system.)

― nabisco (nabisco), Friday, 4 April 2003 23:00 (twenty-one years ago) link

I'll bet you could do it in 10 if you limit the macro's other functions (does it REALLY need math?)

― Tep (ktepi), Friday, 4 April 2003 23:06 (twenty-one years ago) link

I almost never change anything in the prefs unless is actively annoying me or impeding me. Wallpaper means shag all as I'm usually alttabbing between 3 full screen windows and sounds are just a big pain anyway. Word gets spelling and grammar autocorrect and highlighting wacked, Visual Studio get its highlighting tweaked and that's it.

― RickyT (RickyT), Friday, 4 April 2003 23:14 (twenty-one years ago) link

i change things. i put all the programs i use on a daily basis into the top level start menu (why is explorer, for instance, in a third level menu?) and i just hate the way that word defaults to capitalising the first letters of sentences (bad when writing documentation containing code)

oh and i must have 'set ts=4' and 'set sw=4' in my .vimrc 8)

andy

― koogs (koogs), Sunday, 6 April 2003 09:13 (twenty-one years ago) link

Oh yeah simple macros on BASH to do ls to "ls -F" etc. I'm a power-programmer and thus somehow NOT a power user. For example I do all my java and XML coding in wordpad, occasionally checking the XML with IE.

― Sterling Clover (s_clover), Sunday, 6 April 2003 21:12 (twenty-one years ago) link

we're getting XP soon (and flat screens! yay!) and so the first thing I'm going to do is change the look to K-klassic.

― MarkH (MarkH), Monday, 7 April 2003 07:40 (twenty-one years ago) link

I have really cool fonts on my window title bars.

― RJG (RJG), Monday, 7 April 2003 09:08 (twenty-one years ago) link

What's happened to the ability to change the Mac OS X Menu fonts. It appears to have disappeared. I just had the urge to change to Helvetica Neue

― Ed (dali), Monday, 7 April 2003 09:23 (twenty-one years ago) link

nine months pass...

i can't believe i didn't change my safari font to times new roman 12 a lot earlier.

― cozen (Cozen), Wednesday, 21 January 2004 22:28 (twenty years ago) link

If I had Safari set to Times New Roman 12, I couldn't even read anything onscreen!

― Sean (Sean), Wednesday, 21 January 2004 22:35 (twenty years ago) link

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