Fortysomething.ca have a slightly different than normal Windows XP theme – Royale Noir.

UPDATE: Please note that the freely available Zune theme is very similar (and feels a lot more finished than this theme.

It’s not perfect – some bits like the scrollbars are still standard blue Royale, but it makes a change for those becoming-dangerously-rare times when I’m in Windows (without hacking uxtheme.dll).

And the reason you don’t have to hack that file is because this is an official signed theme by Microsoft – albeit one they hadn’t finished and didn’t intend to publish.

Yes, I’m slow to this. I saw it on Digg about a week ago and I downloaded it, unrared it and put it on my shared partition, but didn’t get round to actually installing it in Windows until now. 7-Zip will unrar it for you, don’t get WinRAR, it’s arguably evil (I shouldn’t have to pay to decompress files, it’s just ridiculous).

Apple just upgraded the MacBook to Core 2 Duo. And I didn’t even realise the Core 2 did 64-bit either!

I want one.

But I also want Leopard, so I’ll see you in the spring, MacBook Core 2 Duo… with 64-bit Leopard and all my KDE apps running on top of OS X.

In completely unrelated news, I now officially consider myself a Linux geek as I successfully compiled my own kernel and got it to run on my spare machine under Ubuntu.

Beat that kernel name! Hosted on Zooomr

The fact that the code is exactly the same as the vanilla 2.6.18.2 release is completely irrelevant and coincidental! 😛

The tutorial I used to build the kernel is here.

I’m just having a play around with Flock, and doing a test blog post from within the browser.

Nice!

Blogged with Flock

This site – Don’t Click It, is very interesting.

Basically, you don’t have to (and aren’t supposed to) click the mouse button at all (apart from the initial ‘click here’ at the very start) to navigate it. I’ve had a play around and it’s actually really difficult to try and stop yourself clicking, especially when there are buttons that you expect to have to click.

It breaks all the rules of interface design that we’re used to, and it is an interesting exercise in seeing whether you can resist clicking.

Have a play around!

WordPress 2.0.5 is out, and it’s time to get upgrading!

Download the latest WordPress release from here.

Wow! Stonehenge is pretty cool, but a wonder of the world?? I’m not doubting it, but it’s seems a bit strange to me, considering if this went through I would live less than 20 miles away from a ‘wonder’. Wow, that would be pretty cool.

Read all about it on Yahoo Odd News.

Just had a very quick play with Firefox 2.0 RC2.

The new icon theme is nice and there are various enhancements to the feed functionality and UI and stuff.

But by far, the best thing about FF 2.0 I’ve seen so far is that it is fast

On an AMD Sempron 2600+ (this is not my main system, a P4 3.0 GHz) it goes from nought to loaded up and ready to go in 1.05 seconds. Compare that to 1.5.0.4 (yes, it’s old because it’s a SLED 10 system and I don’t have any updates on it) which hobbles along and gets there in 2.88 seconds.

I’m officially fired up about Firefox 2.0 now – the only bad thing will be waiting for extensions to get compatibility (though I might resort to tweaking the install.js files if necessary).

(Why am I so fired up about less than 3 seconds? Because it really does make a difference to have your app instantly respond to you.) I’ll have the same for Thunderbird, please (TB 1.5.0.7 is not very quick to start up either).

I like it!

Disclaimer: my timing is in no way scientific, I just used a stopwatch, so they’re probably really inaccurate. But you get the gist, it’s fast and if you still don’t believe me, download it and test it against the latest 1.5.0.x build.

It’s certainly going to come in useful (for me anyway).

Read my full post about it.

Well there’s a Gmail feature I didn’t notice until today.

My comment about BugMeNot:

Don’t forget Bugmenot, it’s a very good service for getting into sites that require registration.

Well, it got featured in Lifehacker’s latest Around the water cooler post. Cool!