For those of you joining us in progress we’ve started something new here called the How-To Geek Bounty Program, where we sponsor software projects based on ideas suggested by the readers.
The second bounty so far was sponsored by Scott, who was looking for a replacement for the Active Desktop feature that is missing from Vista.
Once again, Andreas Verhoeven was up to the task, and created Ave’s DesktopSites, which will let you put images of websites on your desktop, configurable to where you want them, and they will update on a schedule.
You could use this for displaying headlines on your desktop:
Or you could use it the way Scott does, which is to display dynamically updating weather maps as his desktop wallpaper. Now that’s some heavy duty usage there!
If you have any issues with this application, you can leave a post on the forum. There is also a known issue with dual monitors.
If you’ve got an idea for a new application or to fix something annoying in Windows Vista, you should put a thread on the bounty program forum… we’ll be picking the next project to sponsor soon.
Download AveDesktopSites [mirror] from Ave’s Vista Stuff [source]
The market seems to be full of OS X Expose clones, but this is the first one that I’ve found that not only works really well, but has a ton of customization options. It’s called Switcher, and you might already be familiar since it’s been out for a while.
Outlook 2007 and earlier versions display the Outlook Today page when you first start up, but for most people it’s a fairly useless page since you just want to get to your email anyway.
From the unsure why you’d want to do this department comes this tip on how to completely disable tabbed browsing in Firefox. I’ve gotten quite a number of requests for this over the last few months, so I’m finally breaking down and writing an article about it.
Let’s say you have a directory with hundreds of files with the wrong file names, and you’d like to replace every filename containing test with prod. (this is a contrived example). We can easily do this with the “for” command in bash, combined with a little bit of bash goodness. Today we’ll learn how
If you’ve looked in Task Manager and wondered what on earth the jusched.exe process is and if you can turn it off, then you are in luck. This process is the Java Update scheduler, which is a process that wastes memory all the time just to check once a month whether there are new updates to Java.
Why does every single application insist on installing a completely useless icon into the system tray? It would be one thing if it performed some function, but it doesn’t do anything that you can’t do from your control panel. The least they could have done is have a dialog during the setup process
Quite a few people have written in asking me if it’s possible to turn off Aero when on battery power to save a few precious minutes of battery life. While I dispute the claim that Aero drains the battery life, there is now a utility that will automatically turn off Aero when in battery mode so you
The new Parental Controls in Windows Vista will allow you to filter the content your children can view on the web. You could, for instance, block your kids from using MySpace or other similar sites. Before you set this up, you should make sure your child has a non-administrator account so they can’t
Windows is always trying to save you from yourself and with Windows Home Server it is no exception. Anytime you log on as the administrator, you receive an annoying caution message, but we can disable this annoying message from coming up every time you log on to your server.
It only took two days for somebody to come through on my offer of a bounty. Reader Shawn wrote in with a link to Vista Thumbnail Sizer, a utility written by Andreas Verhoeven, that performs exactly the features I was looking for.
