Reader нawk’s OS X desktop is an impressive gray-scale overhaul of the entire system—with system stats, customised dock and even modified folder icons blended together nicely.
Craft weblog The Long Thread walks through how to make your own attractive, customisable DIY notebooks from used cereal boxes.
If you’ve used Windows for any amount of time, you’ve already had to deal with the dreaded (Not Responding) frozen application—so instead of using Task Manager, why not create a shortcut to auto-kill them?
Windows only: Paragon Partition Manager is a feature-rich application for partitioning your hard drive, optimising your disks, creating simple partition backups, and more. It’s normally $US40, but today you can snag it for free.
Productivity doesn’t occur in a bubble. No matter how meticulous you might be with the flow of your organisational system, if nobody plays along it wreaks havoc on your output. Train people to play along!
Save snapshots of frequently-updated files over time with programmer-strength version control—but without the learning curve. Free software Flashbake captures working files and adds details like the weather and your Twitter status to each version automatically.
Firefox with Greasemonkey: Gmail Compactor replaces Gmail’s standard top-left links—Compose, Inbox, Sent Mail, etc.—with clear icons, while also moving the search box to the left-hand side, saving left-hand space for links, labels, and other widgets.
A Microsoft director has pinned down the details for the “XP Mode” to be included with higher-level Windows 7 editions. Those running Windows 7 Professional, Enterprise, or Ultimate, with at least 2GB of RAM and an Intel or AMD processor that supports hardware-level virtualisation (often labelled as AMD-V, or VT on Intel chips), and already owning a licensed copy of Windows XP Service Pack 3 will have access to the “XP Mode” download for free. And while the virtual XP machine will run seamlessly and in the background, it will require its own antivirus and protection software. [CNET via Gizmodo]
