Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with quartz

Looking for reputable watch companies!

PetiePal — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 09:45:30 -0800

Looking to buy a new watch, something nice for daily wear but that won't break the bank. Suggest some great watch-makers. Looking for reputable and quality watch company suggestions. Criteria and background expanded on in full q! I used to have a really nice Fossil watch my brother gave me for my Confirmation gift years ago. It was a leather band, off-white pearlish face and the crystal was raised to a diamond point on top. It had Roman Numerals and a big sun/moon dial that rotated through the day. Sadly it was stolen years ago.

Since then my brother gave me an ESQ Swiss watch for my college graduation in '04, quartz timed which I love and wear only for really nice occasions as it's a much fancier watch than for every day. I may be getting an automatic I've had my eye on for Christmas from the 'rents but I'm looking for another every day watch.

Here are some criteria:

-Can be quartz or automatic movement
-Preferable steel or titanium metal bands as leather tends to rot away too quickly
-I am however open to some cool leather "cuff" watches if they are inexpensive as I might buy one of those and another nicer watch
-I'm not very fond of Chronographs, they feel too "busy" to me so no Tag Heurs lol.
-I'd LOVE if it had sun/moon dials. I miss that from my older watch
-Looking to spend no more than 1200 at the very very most. More likely I'd love to stay under 1k.

Can Mefites out there suggest some great watch companies I could look into? I've checked out Hamilton, Fossil, Invicta, ESQ Swiss. Feel free to suggest more than one watch, I'm looking for classic variety here.

Thanks :)

Is this gold?

Brodiggitty — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 12:30:48 -0800

Is that gold I'm seeing in this hunk of quartz? My girlfriend found the rock in Dawson City, Yukon while walking on the tailings of an old gold mine. I realize it's nowhere near pure, but amongst the grime and silvery metal, there is something metallic and gold coloured.

I know that veins of gold are found in quartz, and I'm fairly sure this is a hunk of quartz. The next picture in the album is the reverse side of the rock.

If it's not gold, what mineral/metal is it?

Quartz Composer Alternative?

yet.another.boston.question — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 17:13:36 -0800

Are there any [cool and easy to use] Windows alternatives to Apple's "Quartz Composer?" I want to set up some electronic signage at the school I work at, and Quartz would really do the trick. But before I buy a couple of Macs I wanted to know if I had any other options.

Thanks!

Please help me GLOBALLY DISABLE font smoothing (anti-aliasing) in Tiger

allterrainbrain — Wed, 04 Oct 2006 14:13:48 -0800

Please help me GLOBALLY DISABLE font smoothing (anti-aliasing) in Tiger. I did it almost-completely in Panther, but the Panther solution needs another step in Tiger. Yes, I'm positive I don't want font smoothing. :)

So here are the two commands I found to use in Panther. Both need to be done as root.
defaults write -g AppleAntiAliasingThreshold 128
defaults write CoreGraphics CGFontDisableAntialiasing YES

(I assume 128 could be any number and it's just "something bigger than the biggest font size you expect to ever use.")

In Tiger (on Intel), using these doesn't work to disable anti-aliasing in the menu text across the top of the screen.

My Panther machine (which I still have, if you want me to report anything about it) is definitely using non-anti-aliased Lucida Grande on all the top menus -- whether in Finder or in any app. HOWEVER, I never got the other kinds of system text (dialog boxes, Preference panels, etc.) to stop using anti-aliasing. So the font rendering in the menus is somehow different from the rendering in other kinds of "system" text.

Unfortunately I didn't keep a record of everything I did in Panther, and it's been a few years now -- I only remember it as a long, roundabout process of googling & trying different solutions. So it's likely that something else I did in addition to these two commands made the top menus stop using anti-aliasing. So what could that extra something have been??

(TinkerTool and its siblings aren't the answer, since their option for disabling font smoothing seems to be just a graphical frontend for the AppleAntialiasingThreshold command above. But of course I'd hugely appreciate any tip about a tweaking app I missed that goes further -- that got rid of anti-aliasing in your top menus, not just inside your apps, in Tiger.)