Windows Blinds Skins

Chill! Hot under the collar? Here are 25 ways to stay cool

Boy, is it hot! And here comes August ...

It's tough, if you're trying to keep down the electric bill, to stay cool at home.

If your arguments for why you're camping out in Weis Market's meat freezer have failed, here are some ideas that might bring temporary relief from the heat.

Temper your house

1. Close any open windows in the morning to keep cooler air in and the renewed heat out. Keep blinds shut and curtains drawn.

2. Heat rises. If you have a livable basement, spend as much time as possible in the coolest room of the house. Position a fan in an upstairs window to draw out heat collected during the day.

3. Turn off lights you're not using; even lights create heat.

4. Open windows after the sun has set and use window fans to create a cross-breeze for cooler night air: Pull a breeze inside with a breeze coming in and face the fan outward at an opposite window to pull warm air out.

5. To stay cool in bed, fill a hot water bottle with ice water and place it under your ankles or the back of your knees.

6. Toss bed sheets into plastic bags and place in the freezer for an hour before bedtime.

7. Use cotton-filled pillows as opposed to down or latex foam.

Keep a cool head

1. Wear lightweight, light-colored, loose-fitting clothing. Cotton and linen keep you cooler than many synthetics.

2. Try storing lotions or cosmetic toners in the refrigerator to use on hot, tired feet. Products containing mint leave a cool feeling on your skin.

3. Take frequent baths or showers with cool or tepid (not cold) water. However, don't shower immediately after becoming overheated; the extreme temperature changes may make you ill.

4. Cool your pulse points -- wrists, back of neck, top of head -- with ice cubes wrapped in a terry cloth. Studies show this will reduce your core body temperature by as much as 3 degrees.

5. Soak a cotton shirt with water, wring it out, put it on and sit in an open-weave chair in front of a fan. Re-wet as it dries. Place a wet washcloth on front of the fan for a cool, misting effect.

6. Fill a glass it almost to the brim with ice cubes. Hold it up to your mouth and blow gently into the cup. The ice causes your breath to cool down as it rises up from the ice, into your face.

If you must get out

1. Exercise during cooler hours, staying out of the heat from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.

2. Decrease the amount of time you exercise and the level of exertion.

3.

Laguna Windowblinds scheme, problem with transparent text! » Forum ...

Sometimes when I use the Laguna skin,  text is transparent.

I can't figure out why, or how to change this.

A good example right now is iTunes, the information window.

You can reproduce through running Windowblinds, Laguna skin and itunes on Win7.

I love this skin, can I alter this setting somewhere? 

It has happened sometimes with Window text too.

Note text to to the left and right, in the itunes info window.

There are (at least through XP) certain font/text settings which can be defined in WB which apply globally to the GUI, even in apps not 'skinned' by way of exclusion, although I can't swear that is the case in Win7 (not there yet).  Unskinned apps still often pull some, but not necessarily all, font settings from the OS in many cases.  Apple's apps have usually used their own fonts, though, so I'm not certain in this case, but the fact that it is skin-specific suggests so.  Finding out is a time-consuming, change-one-font-at-a-time process until you find the one that it's using in that info window.  Changing it (in WB) will usually screw up  the appearance of the font somewhere else since the font settings are usually deliberately set for that 'somewhere else'.

My experience has been that there are inevitably unresolvable issues of this kind because of the way the OS hard-codes certain things (seemingly entirely arbitrarily) and variability in the way apps handle/use font settings.  One of the unfortunate aspects of the way MS does things, one that Stardock's developers cannot work around.  Similarly true with the Windows menu item highlight color affecting font rendering in skinned menus, forcing the skinner to compromise one or the other.

All of which may not solve your issue, or have anything to do with it.

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