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Lifehacker
Last week we asked you where you found wallpaper to customise multiple monitor setups, you responded and we rounded up your favourite sites to help share the high resolution goodness! Read on for the dirt.
The holiday season is in full swing and our Lifehacker Desktop Show and Tell Flickr Pool is overflowing with smart and fun desktop configurations bursting at the seams with holiday spirit. Let's take a look.
Where are thou perfectly enormous desktop wallpapers? Our inbox is frequently stuffed with demands for beautiful high-res multi-monitor wallpaper, but the multi-monitor segment of users seems largely ignored. Where can we send our readers? We've covered sites over the years that offer beautiful high resolution wallpaper. When confronted with spiffing up a spread of 3000+ pixels however, there seems to be very little love to go around. Where do you find your multi-monitor wallpaper? No matter how well known or obscure your sources, we want to hear how you put a sparkle on your enormous bank of screen space!
Feeling the urge for a new wallpaper image? The Web Designer Depot site rounds up 40 wallpapers loaded with colour for your perusal and downloading. Nice selection here of super-colorful items.
Dear Lifehacker,
I always thought it was ridiculous and dangerous that Windows puts wallpapers mixed in with essential system files in the Windows folder. Is there a way or program to point the Display Properties -> Desktop tab to another folder? It would be nice if it then allowed me to organise it with sub-folders.
Sincerely,
Organised Papers
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!
Windows only: Wallpaper Shifter is a lightweight wallpaper randomiser. The installation is 8.11MB which by portable-application standards isn't super light, but the system resources consumed by Walllpaper Shifter are extremely lightweight.
Wallpaper Shifter is a little program that starts when you login to Windows and picks a random wallpaper from your list. Depending on the wallpaper width and height, it can automagically scale it for you to fit your desktop without deforming it's proportions. It does not remain running in the background so no system resources are used.
If you need a more complex wallpaper changer that will stay active during your Window session, check out John's Background Switcher. Wallpaper Shifter is freeware, Windows only.
Posted by Angus Kidman at 1:00 PM on November 6, 2008
I went to a charity concert by Bananarama (yes, the 80s girl group who sang 'Venus' and 'Love In The First Degree') the other night, and found myself unexpectedly positioned right in front of the stage. Even more unexpectedly, the usual security goons who try and block people taking pictures were nowhere in evidence, leaving me cursing that I'd left my EOS at home and only had the basic camera in my BlackBerry to fall back on. I took 150-odd photographs, but unsurprisingly given stage lighting and the camera's limitations, not many of them turned out too well.
Windows only: Free application ToneThis makes it simple to create MP3 ringtones, wallpaper, and videos for your mobile phone. Apart from its simple MP3 ringtone creator, ToneThis sports a lot of great features—like simple tools for sending media to supported phones in a few clicks. Unfortunately those features don't always work perfectly—as CNET can attest to—but as a simple ringtone and wallpaper creator, it does the job admirably. If you decide to give it a try, be sure to read the installer carefully—this thing tries its best to install all kinds of toolbars and other crap that you probably don't want. ToneThis is a free download, Windows only.
Windows only: Free, open-source application WebWallpaper loads images from any URL or desktop location and swaps out your desktop background on a schedule. Originally designed for use with webcams, the application works with any image URL you point it to. WebWallpaper comes with a few webcam URLs baked in with beautiful streaming images, so it's easy to get up and running with live-updating backgrounds. If you know of a high-resolution webcam in your area that streams to a static URL, this app is potentially very cool—your desktop becomes a window looking outside, updating your wallpaper with the current conditions automatically. If WebWallpaper isn't quite what you're looking for, check out previously mentioned John's Background Switcher—which integrates with popular photo webapps like Flickr, Picasa, and even Facebook—or the recently released Wallpapers from MSN.
