Windows only: If you’re a fan of the music service Pandora and sporting the Windows Vista Sidebar (or a ported Vista Sidebar on Windows XP) a Pandora sidebar gadget is now available to bring your stations to the desktop. When docked into the sidebar, it displays the current song and the thumbs up and down option. When undocked users see the entire Pandora interface and are able to edit stations. Pandora Sidebar Gadget is freeware, Windows only. Pandora Sidebar Gadget
Antique photographs have a certain warmth to them imparted by the development process that can’t be replicated by simply dumping the colour data from a photograph. At wiikiHow there is a tutorial on using GIMP, a free Photoshop alternative, to take the rich tones from an old photograph and apply them to a brand new photo. The process works with both black and white and sepia toned photographs, and can easily be adapted from the given steps to work with Photoshop too. The above image is a blend of the before and after sample photo from the tutorial. If you don’t have any antique photos handy, the tutorial covers where to find public domain images to lift tone samples from. How to Retone a Photograph with GIMP
It’s crazy to think that an operating system can fit every user’s needs out of the box, even if we are just talking about looks. Luckily, if you’re not keen on the cookie-cutter appearance of your OS, we’ve covered a handful of great tools for tweaking every last pixel of your desktop so it looks and acts just how you want. Keep reading for a closer look at the best of the best to transform your desktop in your image.
Windows only: If you like varied wallpaper but find yourself frittering away time digging through your archives picking new ones out, let Caledos Automatic Wallpaper Changer take care of the management side of things. You can add multiple folders, set the frequency of change anywhere from every minute to every month and anything in between. If you have multiple users on your workstation, their unique settings will be preserved by login. One particularly handy feature is the “What I saw” menu available by right clicking on the Caledos system tray icon. It displays the last 100 wallpapers as they were displayed on the monitor allowing you to quickly remove wallpapers that just weren’t up to snuff. Caledos is free(postcard)ware, Windows only. Thanks ndgreen! Caledos Automatic Wallpaper Changer
