The Right Stuff

I am constantly in search for good background images. To me, a good background image has a nice motif (that is, looks good), is colorful in an undistracting way and has large uniform areas to place icons and other stuff. High resolution and great quality is also important since my desktop is 1600 by 1200 pixels.

I've collected a pretty large amount of images over the years, but the choice of the right image is always a rather longish process that isn't repeated too often. Once an image has been chosen, I'll stick to it for weeks or even months. The last one pleased my eyes since last August.

The other day I found a new resource for inspiring desktops: Mando Gomez' mandolux. This guy is specialized in high-quality photographs and illustrations that are even available for multi monitor configurations. The site even offers a RSS feed, the images are also available on flickr. So this is my new desktop, delighting me for next couple of months:

Other desktop image galleries can be found here:

• Art. Lebedev Studio (the guys with the Optimus keyboard)
• Pixel Girl Presents
• Sensitive Light
• InterfaceLIFT
  
• deviantART (you'll have to search a little)

I'm always looking for funny user images to place on my logon screen. Of course, normal users have been assigned their own image, but what to do with the Administrator and the Guest account? Whenever I see some ugly funny pictures of people I'll save it for later consideration to assign them to the Administrator or Guest user. Till today, Guest has always been a woman (as I like having women as my guests :-)), whereas the Administrator has been assigned a picture of a male.

Yesterday evening I was browsing through my referrals and found that someone came here from my ICQ profile. There was an ad banner on top of the profile page that had a picture in it. This nice girl immediately convinced me to be the new Guest.

Here she is, ready to brighten up your Welcome Screen in two exciting variations:

In case you wonder how the old Guest picture and my Administrator look like:

 *

* It's actually a soothing feeling to know that nobody else than Peter Norton has full control over my machine.

Now playing: Tosca - J.A.C. - Superrob

XP in Windows XP stands for experience. Microsoft added a whole bunch of new user experience features to their now almost 5 years old client OS, for example Fast User Switching. They also incorporated a new icon design. I like the appearance very much, apart from the fact that there are resources and dialogs that date back to Windows 3.11. The font installation dialog is a good example. I hope such dialogs are revamped before Windows Vista ships this year.

For now there's actually a solution to replace old-style icons as presented in the internet options dialog without having to install a theme.

 is replaced by 

XPize patches system files containing such ancient icon resources and replaces them with "XP-ish" counterparts. Windows loads these new resources without even noticing that they have changed. This works absolutely transparent and the UI features will look more consistent afterwards.