People used to argue about the pronunciation of the word ‘Linux’. Here is it – the correct one, from the creator himself.

Steve Ballmer is all along this crazy since Windows 1.0’s day, or even earlier. Don’t you just love this guy ?

Do you know what’s the ‘Placebar’ ? Many people don’t know what is it although they may be using it day-in and day-out. The Windows Placebar is this:

Yup, Placebar is that long and narrow bars on the left-side of most file open/save dialog with a few shortcuts to the common folders like ‘Desktop’, ‘My Documents’, ‘My Computer’, etc.

The question here is, do you find it useful ? For me, besides the ‘My Documents’, I can say I have never open/save my files to the Desktop, My Computer, etc. So wouldn’t you want to change it ?

It’s a mystery why Microsoft have never provided a tools to change the Placebar. Luckily, there are some tools online that can help you to just that – one of it being Melloware Placebar Editor.

The program is pretty straight forward. For each of the 5 Placebar shortcuts presented, just tick the ’Custom’ tick-box and browse for your desired folder. In my settings, I change 4 of them to the folders I use often.

Click Save to save the changes, and click the Test button to see how it would look like. In my case, this is what it looks like after the changes, Neato!

You may have noticed that there’s a ‘Office’ tab in the Placebar Editor. Yes, Microsoft Office actually uses another set of Placebar (the reason for this, again, is beyond me). You can add 5 more shortcuts beside the standard ones, as shown below.

I’ve just added 3 shortcuts to the folder I usually use (2 for my recent projects, and 1 for my office general documents). Now my Office File dialog looks like this (notice the changes to the Placebar on the left):

Here’s another tips for you: you can actually change the Microsoft Office’s Placebar manually without this Placebar Editor. From the Microsoft Office file dialog, browse to the folder that you wish to add to the Placebar, then right-click on the Placebar. A menu item called ‘Add xxxxxx’ will be shown, where ‘xxxxxx’ is the name of the current folder you just browsed to (check below). Just click on that menu item to add it to the Placebar, easy!

Ever wanted to change your photos/gravatar into that touchy Obama-style? Now are you can do it easily at http://obamiconme.pastemagazine.com/. Just upload your image, change the 4 color settings (blue,red,yellow,white), put in a text and go! It is even fun to look at the gallery!

 

Here is the image I created for my avatar. If you don’t like the little frame with the obamicon.me text, just remove it or crop the image with your own picture editor.

What took them so long to finally come out with this light ? Yes! A light that gradually brighten up and play soothing natural sound, as you slowly wakes up to it, is finally here!

According to Philips' homepage, this is how it works.

The Wake-up Light start producing light from half an hour before your set wake-up time. The light gradually brightens, like the sun rising. During those thirty minutes, the light falls on your eyes, and positively affects the production of energy hormones. This means that at the set alarm time your sleep and energy hormones are better balanced, and you feel more energetic when you wake up.

The key features are:

'Key features include 3 natural sounds, FM radio, and adjustable light intensity.'

On the health benefits,

'The Wake-up Light was designed to counteract insufficient light exposure when waking up and the negative consequences that may have on our well-being.'

'Additionally, studies by M.J. Norden and D.H. Avery from the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Studies, University of Washington School of Medicine, Seattle, USA, found that dawn simulation helped reduce the time for getting out of bed, from 24.5 minutes to 9.6 minutes. It also helped reduce the time required to become reasonably alert from 49.2 minutes to 21.0 minutes.'

 

I wonder whether it's available locally at my place, let's go check it out!

 

Stop being woken up. Start waking up. Yeah!

I’m still waiting for this cool desktop toy called Bumptop to come out. It’s been more than a year since it was announced in 2007. This cool and funny demo here will give you an idea of what it is capable of. I hope it’ll be out before Microsoft Surface or the rumored Apple iSurface renders it irrelevant.

This is a Microsoft book. Seriously!

http://www.amazon.com/Writing-Secure-Second-Michael-Howard/dp/0735617228/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1231658510&sr=8-1

 

I don’t usually have time to beautify my desktop. I seldom even change my Windows desktop wallpaper. But for those of you who like to be pampered with a different wallpaper every once in a while, there are plenty of tools out there to do just that. In this post, I would like to recommend the free Desktoptopia. What’s special about Desktoptopia is that, it actually gives you designer-quality wallpapers , instead of those mediocre ones by average-Joes. I have tried a couple of times, and have yet been disappointed by the wallpaper it provides.

When you start the program, a little   icon appears in the system tray. Click on it to get to the settings screen. You will want to set it to ‘Start at Login’ so that you don’t need worry about starting it up manually. Next you can choose the interval at which the wallpaper is renewed. Normally we set it to auto change every 1 day. You can even set to auto change up to every 1 second! But that’s just a bit crazy. This thing even support multiple monitors if you have one (I’m jealous!) via the ‘Multiple Monitors’ selection.

You can further customize the type of wallpapers you like to receive in the Feeds tab. Unselect the categories you don’t prefer here.

When done, click ‘Save’ and let the wonder begins.

At anytime if you don’t like the wallpaper, you can just right-click on the systray-icon and choose ‘Next Background’. Another nice wallpaper will come grace your desktop in no time!

As a bonus tips, Desktoptopia stores all its downloaded wallpaper in the %USERPROFILE%\Local Settings\Application Data\Desktoptopia\Desktoptopia\cache folder (for e.g. ‘C:\Documents and Settings\administrator\Local Settings\Application Data\Desktoptopia\Desktoptopia\cache’). This means that you can browse to this folder to reuse the previously downloaded Desktoptopia wallpapers even when you’re offline.

Below are a samplings of wallpaper Desktoptopia provides.

 

If the wallpapers provided does not suit your taste, or if you prefer to manually dig for wallpapers, some of the popular sites are Wincustomize, DeviantArt, Shifted Reality, and Wallpaper Stock.

Do you always visit a particular website, and keep it permanently sticked to your browser tab; which you then keep on hitting the Refresh button every few minutes to see what’s the latest update ? This can be especially true for those of you may still using one of those static stock price page to keep track of your investment. Or if you trades foreign currency, and is lucky enough to have invested in that super-inflated currency, hence constantly checking the latest rate like this:

Enter ‘The Refresh Thing’. This website will help you to automatically refresh a particular webpage, based on a desired interval.

Using it is very straight forward. Just enter the URL of your webpage, and specify the interval (in seconds) to have the webpage auto-refreshed, then click the Go! button to let it fly! In the screenshot below, I’m refreshing my Facebook homepage every 3 minutes (180 seconds).

Note that auto-refreshing Facebook and Twitter homepage this way may not be the best idea to keep yourself updated on Facebook. You may opt to use tools like Digsby to stay on top of Facebook updates.

 

If you still remember the good-old modem dial-up sound, you’re gonna love this. Check out http://www.sonnyradio.com/dialupkid.htm.

For my 9-5 work, I usually need to open up a dozen of programs/windows, and my Windows taskbar quickly become crowded and un-useable. To save the precious screen space in the taskbar, i opt to hide away the system tray clock and the Start Button altogether. That gives me an extra 2 inches in the Taskbar, making it that much better, I am a freak!

 

To hide away the Windows XP Start Button, I use Start Killer.  Once installed, right-click on the Systray icon (or press CTRL+ALT+SHIFT+F12) to bring up the settings dialog. Make sure that the ‘Load on system startup’ is checked so that the Start Button will be hidden always.

After the Start Button is hidden, you can still bring it up by pressing the Win key, or Ctrl-Esc key as per normal.

 

Instead of hiding it altogether, you may opt to make it shorter by taking away or changing the ‘Start’ caption. You can choose to change it, for e.g. to ‘Go’. There are many utilities online for you to do that, but those quick solutions are not too elegant, because they only change the caption but doesn’t shorten the length of the Start Button. To really change the caption and shorten the button, you will need to do some registry hacking. Feeling adventurous ? Head over here, or this video tutorial. Thinking of changing the Windows logo in the Start Button as well ? Head over here for another video tutorial.