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Filed under: Fun, Internet, Photo, Utilities, Windows, Macintosh, Linux

Wally is a kick-ass, connected wallpaper changer for Windows, Mac, and Linux


There are plenty of wallpaper-changing applications out there, and plenty of them can tap into photo sharing sites like Flickr and Photobucket for access to a plethora of images. Still, not many of them are quite as well-connected as Wally.

Even fewer are cross-platform. Wally, though, is happy to share its background-rotating skills with Windows, Mac, and Linux users alike. It's built using Nokia's Qt4 framework and supports an insane number of image sources: local and remote folders (via FTP), and popular photo sites like Flickr, Yahoo!, Panoramio, Pikeo, Ipernity, Photobucket, Buzznet, Picasa, Smugmug, and Bing. You can use any combination of sources you choose by adding and removing them on the settings screen.

Customization options are plentiful, from specifying the delay between image changes to tweaking the size of your local image history store. Images from the 'net are pulled in based on the search terms you specify - and yes, you can shut off Bing's adult filter if you want to.

Wally is free and open source, and pre-compiled downloads are available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. The project is also mirrorerd over at Sourceforge.

Filed under: Internet, Windows, Microsoft, Social Software, Windows x64

Live Messenger turns 10, MS uses extras download to pimp IE8 and Bing

Live Messenger has now been around for ten years and is being used by more than 330 million people worldwide. Well done, Live Messenger team!

To celebrate, Microsoft has put together a free download containing emoticons, winks, backgrounds, and other Messenger extras. To see whether or not this was postable, I downloaded both Live Messenger and the pack and installed them.

When you click the download button for the "FREE Gift Pack," you'll not only get the extras, you'll also get a pop-up advertisement pushing IE8. When you start installing the pack, you'll get another poke in the ribs asking you to download the new browser.

And you'll also be prompted to change your homepage to MSN and your default search provider to Bing. Unlike the recent IE8 installer change, this time the options are checked by default. Maybe you really can't teach an old dog new tricks.

On top of all this, there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of content in the pack. So what's the real goal here? To say "thank you" to 10 years of use and 330 million users, or to capitalize on the opportunity to wrangle some more browser and search share?

Filed under: OS Updates, Photo, Windows, Microsoft

WinVistaClub releases OneWorld theme for Windows 7


Looking for an attractive new theme for your Windows 7 install?

Apart from the official Microsoft options available on the Personalization page, WinVistaClub and IntoWindows have put together the OneWorld theme.

OneWorld features five wallpaper images (compiled from other sources) and makes use of Windows 7's desktop background slideshow feature. It's designed to present an ever-expanding view of our place in the universe, from a cityscape, to a view of Earth from space, to the more abstract finale. The theme also tweaks the Welcome Center and Explorer's task pane.

Installing the themepack does require that you replace two dll files in your System32 folder. If you're not comfortable doing that, you can still install the wallpapers by extracting them from the themepack with a program like 7zip.

Note for 64-bit users: the patched dlls provided in the zip archive are from a 32-bit install, and likely won't work on Windows 7 x64.

Filed under: Design

Desktop background that don't suck

WallpaperOkay, I admit it: I'm a design snob. Sure, I'm no world-class designer myself, you don't have to be a chef to tell when something tastes nasty, you don't need to be a design whiz to know that most of the desktop backgrounds at almost every big free-wallpapers site out there suck. Don't lose hope just yet, though: Design blog Joey Interactive has a great round-up of web sites that have a slightly higher ratio of don't-suck to suck in the wallpaper department. Especially unique is the high proportion of wallpapers for higher resolutions and widescreen and multi-monitor setups. My desktop background has been plain black for longer than I'd like to admit, and it didn't take me more than five minutes to find a handful of backgrounds I wouldn't be ashamed to use.

Featured Time Waster

The World's Hardest Game 2.0 - Time Waster

So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do. Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game. The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...

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