Brown Thoughts

Those of you who can’t wait to try out Windows 7 Beta 1 that’s set to make an appearance at January’s CES are in luck. It seems that leaked copies of Windows 7 Beta 1 build 6.1.7000.0.081212-1400 have found their way to popular torrent sites.

Various reports have confirmed that Windows 7 will not be a total overhaul of Vista, but more of refining the OS, taking out the fat, and fixing the bugs (hopefully). Installation appears to be faster than previous versions of Windows, and there are less applications that come with the installation process.

Now on to the screenshots:

[High Five to Adrian Kingsley-Hughes]

Technorati Tags: Tech News, Windows 7 Beta 1

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Those of us who’ve been using Win XP for a while now have changed desktop wallpapers a couple of thousand times just to put something fresh on our desktop. Here’s another way to customize your desktop for free.

XPScene lets you use any video as a desktop background similar to Dreamscene found in Vista Ultimate. The program will generate an html file with embedded Windows Media Player video control.

To display your video, just go to Display Properties and select the html file like you would when you choose your normal wallpaper. You can start and stop the video, and change the volume.

XpScene requires Microsoft .NET 2.0 Framework and can take up a chunk of your computer’s resources so make sure your rig can handle the load before running the app.

Technorati Tags: Free Software, XPScene

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We all know what enhances movies and tv shows. It’s the background music. That’s why most people carry an mp3 player wherever they go - to have their own background music. That’s fine but if you really want the “movie” experience, everyone should hear the same background music.

The solution? The Personal Soundtrack Shirt. This shirt has a speaker embedded at the front and comes with a remote for easy selection of music. Aside from the included sounds, you can change the default sounds or plug in your audio player for a bigger selection of music. You can also just pop in your SD card if you don’t feel like carrying your mp3 player.

(1 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

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Computer pranks are always fun. They help break the monotony of the daily grind and promotes goodwill between co-workers. Well, maybe not goodwill, but it’s definitely a lot of fun. If you’re looking for another way to beat office boredom, this is for you.

Message Box Toy is a free Windows app that lets you create fake Windows messages and have them appear on your victim’s co-worker’s computer.

You can customize the message, the buttons, and the icons. The only drawback, is that it doesn’t come with a scheduler that lets you choose when you want it to appear.

Still, this little application is a nice addition to your arsenal of computer pranks.

Technorati Tags: Computer Pranks, Free Software

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Frequent visitors to Wikipedia are familiar with articles or pages of articles suddenly disappearing. These articles and pages are usually deleted by the editors for not being relevant enough. If you’re looking for an article that suddenly disappeared, you’ll find it at Deletionpedia.

Deletionpedia is basically a site that features articles that have been deleted from Wikipedia. The site currently has an archive of 63,532 pages that have been removed from the English Wikipedia. Unlike normal wikis, users can’t edit the pages on Deletionpedia as its merely an archive. Pages are automatically uploaded by a bot as they get deleted from Wikipedia.

Pages provide information such as when the article or page was deleted, the Wikipedia user that deleted the article, and the reason for deletion.

The page I was looking at was entitled, “List of movies with particularly long titles”. The first title on that list was, “Night of the Day of the Dawn of the Son of the Bride of the Return of the Revenge of the Terror of the Attack of the Evil, Mutant, Alien, Flesh Eating, Hellbound, Zombified Living Dead Part 2: In Shocking 2-D (1991)”. Gee, it’s a sequel.

Here’s the link to that page.

Technorati Tags: Deletionpedia, Tech News

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Email is probably the most common form of communication these days. That being said, people try to include their relevant information in the footer or signatures of their emails. Different webmail providers offer various options for adding email signatures leaving users wishing there was a simpler way of creating customized signatures for all their email accounts.

WiseStamp is a Firefox extension that will let users add customized signatures to their email accounts in Yahoo, Gmail, AOL, and Hotmail. Users get to add links to other sites, choose the font and color, add an image, and add links to their different social network profiles. Users also have the ability to add their personal signature to Google Docs, etc.

Here’s a list of features:

• Personally designed signatures
• Easy setup and configuration interface
• Use multiple email signatures (Business and Personal)
• Signature Rich Text editor (WYSIWYG Editor-choose color and font)
• Add your logo or image to your signature
• Automatically insert your signature to your webmail services
• Supports to all webmail functions- Compose Mail, Reply, and Forward
• Easily Include all your IM (Instant messaging) ID’s + icons
• Easily link to all of your social services-links & Profiles + icons
• Manually add your signature at mouse cursor location
• preview while editing Signature
• Simple control- switch signature on/off
• Support for special characters

The WiseStamp site offers an installation guide, tutorials, and a help section for users.

WiseStamp supports Firefox 2 and 3.

Technorati Tags: Custom Email Signatures, WiseStamp, Firefox Extensions

(5 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

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All of us have ideas of how to make the world a better place. Mine would be to outlaw productivity.

If you think you have a great idea that can change the world, you could be one of the lucky people picked by Google as part of the Project 10^100. Google will pick the top 100 from all submissions, and its users will narrow the list down to 20 by voting. A panel of judges will then select 5 submissions that will be funded.

Some of the categories are community, education, health, and environment. For the full list, head over to the site. The deadline for submissions is on October 20, 2008.

Technorati Tags: Tech News, Project 10^100

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Avid fans of dungeon crawling games have fantasized about going on similar hack and slash adventures since they started playing.

Gamers who play dungeon crawlers on their computers or those who play pen and paper D&D, will undoubtedly jump at the chance to explore real dungeons without fear of being eaten by its inhabitants.

If you’ve got dragon slayer blood flowing through your veins, head over to Gen Con Indy and join other adventurers in exploring Jeff Martin’s life-sized dungeon aptly named, True Dungeon.

Players waiting for their turn at the dungeon start at the True Tavern, the starting area for True Dungeon where players can relax before and after their adventure. The tavern includes a back alley with a blacksmith and magic shop where players can purchase equipment for their characters.

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