We all like a little something on our desktop to brighten up the day. I came across this great post on lifehacker about some gaming desktop wallpaper.

Knowing Windows 7 has a great desktop wallpaper feature where you can have a stack of wallpaper and change them at will I set off downloading them to my machine.

Then right Click on your desktop and select Personalise.

Open the pictures folder and the Personalisation tab side by side

Now, right click any picture and select “Set as desktop background”.

A new “Unsaved theme” will appear.

Select the “Desktop background” option highlighted here in red.

Windows 7 at this point, having a complete degree from the University of Smartarse, will have the folder open where you originally selected the first image.

Select the pictures you want in the slideshow , choose Fill as the Picture position and pick a time you want the pictures to change. i have highlighted the sections below.

You can also drag other files from other folders in there as well, drag and drop applies.

Click “Save changes”.

A new theme will appear, right click on it and pick the option you want.

Save the theme for yourself, or make a theme out of pic’s of embarrassing nights out and send it to your friends.

Here is the theme I created.

Here is what my desktop looks like

high res version

I have seen the future of desktop applications. I am very excited. However I have to remind myself that , like the iPhone (which I don’t own) now all software in the same range is the same.

So you might have heard of twitter, its this crazy funky re-emergence of the SMS , but instead of sending incomprehensible short messages to friends and hot members of the opposite sex, we can do it online. To loads of people , and their dog, apparently.

So I always found twitter something of an annoyance to visit as a web-site, but as a desktop application , its neat enough , as long as people stop mining my tweets and friends so I will follow their rubbish…. anyway I digress, I will pass some more comments on this when the time is right.

I'm a fan of Windows Vista/7 so it was great to hear a podcast about a WPF application for twitter from Hanselminutes.So I grabbed it from here and installed on my machine, its got a great web installer, a feature of .NET , have not seen any application use this installer ever, its very very sweet.

It Just looks fantastic, lots of transparency , animations, sliding effects, fantastic layout.

It will also automatically shorten the URL you paste into a tweet in a slick animated fashion.

Problems are it is the one size at all times ! You cannot re-size the application. Buts its such a small problem , its just do cool, and memory eating , and flamboyant , you have to try it.

So really we are on your way with WPF, I wonder are we going to come from here to this …

Microsoft Labs seem to think so , this is a very good selling point for Microsoft's Software+Services approach. As long as we get WPF based interfaces, I'm tired of the same old app interfaces, this is why I actually loved the office 2007 interface. Its why I like the iPhone interface. And I am looking forward to multitouch in windows 7. Not so I can smudge every screen I own, but its more the idea that I will get a fantastic interface like the above in my lifetime.

Fantastic short film. 

Terrific, captures the feeling of Half Life 2 perfectly. 

Quote

YouTube - Mock The Week: Newsreel - Prince Philip
  

There are a lot of interesting posts about the upcoming Windows Live Updates. One of the most exciting ones is that SkyDrive storage is increasing to 25 Gigabytes.

5GB to 25Gb, a 500% increase! There are new features available on the SkyDrive as well.

• Download whole folders as a compressed Zip archive.
• Move and Copy Files between folders.
• Place your Favourite web links into your SkyDrive and Synch them with the Windows Live Toolbar

These are just a few of my favourite upgrades, and there is lots more. There are more details on the SkyDrive team's blog at http://skydriveteam.spaces.live.com/

This looks like an interesting talk for Students and Educators on Embedded development and Robotics.

"Are you a student or academic interested in learning how to build the embedded systems and robots of the future?
Then why not attend the Microsoft® Windows® Embedded European Tour which is now visiting university campuses across Europe. You'll hear from experts from Microsoft as well as local industry partners and gain an insight in to one of the fastest growing technology markets.
You’ll see the Microsoft Windows Embedded family of products at work in the real world and discover how they are being used to power systems in factories, cars, your personal navigation or music player device or even your set-top box at home.  You’ll get under the hood of the Microsoft® .NET Micro Framework and also discover just how easy it is to build robotics applications for a wide variety of hardware using Microsoft® Robotics Developer Studio, the Windows-based environment.  "

More on Martha's Blog here.

Martha Rotter's Blog : Embedded Development Tour Coming to Dublin

Register here for the event

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032394842&Culture=en-IE

This is very true. I am reading City of Dreaming Books at the moment, and the amount of zany stuff that has to be made up and explained is killing me.

Also it has illustrations, another imagination killer.

xkcd - A Webcomic - Fiction Rule of Thumb

I found this interesting blog from a site referred to as Digital Nomads. As a worker who finds myself on the go a lot these days with my new job I find the idea of using a coffee shop as an office amusing and odd, and also given the amount of confidential chatter, most dangerous. 

I shudder to think of what kind of job would have me walk into a coffee shop with a laptop and set up office for the day. Imagine my horror when I read the blog about arriving at 10 thirty and leaving at 6:00.

Generally I work in the office, I can meet clients in a coffee shop if i want to I suppose, but what does that make me as a trusted specialist ?

Anyone got any thoughts or ideas on this ?

Coffee Shop Office

There are lots of tools available for blogging , messaging, photo uploads etc. I am well impressed with the new suite of tools for windows live users. At http://get.live.com/ you can download the new betas of the Microsoft Live suite of desktop tools for XP and Vista. I find the blog tool very handy, by default it published to windows live spaces but can also be used to publish blogs to other providers.

The Photo tool is great as well, it also has a PhotoSynth feature that is pretty neat. It also uploads your photos to live spaces.

I also have installed the MSN messenger application onto my facebook page, this is pretty handy as I can now update my status by changing my status in messenger.

All this stuff is free, now all I need to get is a tool that remote controls my XBOX so I can schedule downloads and stuff.

I have been playing a lot of Viva Pinata:Trouble in Paradise lately on the XBOX. You can take pictures of your creatures and garden and upload them onto www.vivapinata.com, I have taken a bunch of them and uploaded them here.

http://y2kprawn.spaces.live.com/photos/cns!6BDC8C108B55437D!227/

Makes nice gentle desktop wallpaper.

On windows Live and FaceBook you can now add messenger to your FaceBook account. One of the cooler features of this is that you can update your "what are you doing now" from messenger. So when you change your messenger status , you also get the change reflected in facebook.

This is especially neat for me as I can use messenger on my XBOX, so when I am playing a game, the status update is sent to FaceBook as well. 

Windows Live Messenger Developer Blog : Messenger on Facebook V2

Windows Live Mesh is launched in Ireland. It is a service that aims to let you access your files and folders from wherever you are.

This to me is very enticing, I always wanted something like this. So far I have 2 PC's on it and its working well !

Check it out at http://www.mesh.com , play with it, its a kind of beta at the moment. But there awesome potential here.

Check out some nerdy talks on http://channel9.msdn.com/tags/LiveMesh/