Little MSN Messenger Tip

For those using MSN Messenger, you may have the experience of using a certain picture as your MSN Messenger display picture, only to find it resized to an ugly proportion.

Here is a tip to make your display pic appear as it is. No cropping or resizing occurs.

Make your Display Pictures 96 pixels X 96 pixels!

You see, that's the default size of the display pic, and if you crop or resize your pics in a graphic editing application such as the free GIMP, your pictures will be resized using sampling methods such as bicubic or billinear sampling methods that make your pictures look better when compared to the crude "forced resize" method that MSN Messenger employs.

Well, that may be a rather long and in-depth sentence for such a simple message, but every little bit of knowledge helps!

*Of course, this does not apply to MSN Plus users that can put display pictures of any dimensions and clog down the already choking MSN servers. ;)

Objectdock: Windows Equivalent of the Mac's OSX Dock

Let me bring your attention to your Window's taskbar. It is a simple horizontal bar with a Start menu, icons of your running applications in the background, and of course buttons for your current tasks.

What if you could turn it into a fully animated dock that magnifies icons upon your mouse hovering over it, just like the Dock in the OS X?

Now you can! Object Dock from Stardock is a freeware program that runs on Windows. It functions just like the Dock, and you can configure it to list shortcuts and running applications (just like your taskbar). The difference is the icons are all beatiful high-resolution 128 X 128 pngs!

There are many default hi-res icons that come with Object Dock. For example, there are icons for the Microsoft Office series, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Reader, Windows Media Player, and much more!

However, in the last post, I recommended Konfabulator and there is no 128 X 128 icon for Konfab! No worries, I made one, you can get it here:


Right-click and choose "Save Image As..." to download it.

Konfabulator 2.0 Launched

Konfabulator 2.0 has just been launched a few days ago.

For those new to the application, Konfabulator is an application functions like the Dashboard on the Apple Mac OSX. It enables you to put widgets on your desktop and these widgets have specific functions. For example, I now have a calendar widget, a weather reporting widget, a CPU meter and a RAM meter.

Konfabulator runs on Javascript, so it is cross-platform. What's more, the Widget Gallery makes thousands and thousands of widgets available for you to download and use immediately on your desktop.





For those on the Windows XP OS, this is a great way to be able to enjoy the Dashboard-like features on the Mac OSX. Currently, Konfabulator can run on both Windows and the Mac OS.

Konfabulator 2 is a free download, but a reminder window will appear a few days after you install it. You will be able to use it for free, but you can remove the reminder window simply by buying a license (registration key) for $19.95, which is well worth it's value.

Get Konfabulator 2.0 now!

By the way, to know how I transformed my Windows XP GUI to what I have in the screenshot, you can sign up for the newsletter of this blog. You will then receive an email notifying you whenever a new post is made on this blog. Just fill in the form in the sidebar.

The Stylish Computing Blog

The Stylish Computing blog aims to capture all the possible ways to use your computer in the most stylish way possible. From case modding to stylish computing gear to GUI skinning, this blog will bring the most complete and diverse resource of stylish computing to your screen.