As I Xi It

I think its been about 4 – 6 weeks since I got my netbook and in that time I’ve barely used my desktop or laptop. In fact, I think this might be the first time in over a month that I’ve booted up my laptop. At the moment I’m typing this entry on the laptop and its rather bizzare. It just feels significantly larger than my netbook, it doesn’t feel like a 14.1″ but more of a 17″, if I was using an actual 17″ then I suspect it’d feel like a portable cinema. Strange thing though – I don’t seem to notice the size difference so much when I’m using the desktop which has a 22.1″ screen.

Over the past few weeks I’ve grown accustomed to the little keyboard on my netbook and I can touch type with ease. Now I find myself having to readjust to the laptop and desktop keys which are both the same size.

Since this laptop is more or less devoid of “fun things”, I figured that it should help me focus on writing my book chapter. Progress has been somewhat sluggish at best. I know what I need to write, it’s just a matter of doing it. For some bizzare reason, I seem to be at my most hardworking at around 2 – 3 am onwards. Afternoons – early evenings are no good, they just make me drowsy. First thing in the morning is alright though.

I’ve just realised that I haven’t got a blog category devoted to work.

Since I’m in a desktop customising kind of mood, I tweaked my desktop’s desktop too. This is the Microsoft Zune theme with a wallpaper I made myself using my own pics and the wood background from here.

I was getting bored of the stock visual styles that came with Windows XP on my netbook so I had a Google for some other ones and came across Royale Noir which was suppose to be for Windows XP Media Edition, it looked quite good so I thought I’d give it a whirl. The wallpaper (Spectrum of the Sky) complements the colour scheme quite nicely and its all pretty easy on the eyes. The Rocketdock skin at the bottom I dug up from here.

The whole desktop seems to match the blueness of my Aspire One. A happy coincidence really, all I wanted was something different from the run-of-the-mill XP desktop.

These are some great mouse icons! Click me!

Still on the trail of a pretty desktop, I installed Yahoo! Widgets. It’s a widget engine where you can download add-on applications to do all sorts of useful stuff like tell you the weather, latest news headlines and other such exciting things. It’s not bad, but everytime I download a new widget, Firefox crashes a few minutes afterwards which can be quite annoying if you’re installing lots of widgets.

Here’s an updated screenshot of my desktop. I’ve got Gorgy Clock, Info 101 and Yahoo! Weather up. I always like to know the weather forecast. There’s a Tube status widget too, but its kinda ugly looking. Note that I’ve managed to find how to hide all my icons (right-click somewhere on the desktop > Arrange Icons By > Hide Desktop Icons).

I’ve been looking through Lifehacker and came across their Windows Desktop Show and Tell article showing some pretty cool looking desktops. They all looked so minimalistic, cool and kinda Mac like. I thought to myself, “I want that” so off I went in search of some icon docking application things.

I tested out two – ObjectDock and RocketDock.

ObjectDock has more bells and whistles than RocketDock. It also needs a minimum of 256MB of RAM to run and 20MB hard drive space whilst RocketDock only needs 10MB and the installation file is 6.20MB. Both of them are visually aesthetic but I opted for RocketDock in the end since it was the lighter weight application.

If you thought a skinned Windows toolbar was cool, this is even cooler!! I’ve shifted my XP toolbar to the top with autohide on. The icon dock sits on the bottom and I’ve autohid that too for more screen real estate. It just pops up when required. Most of the icons on my desktop are gone, all that’s left is My Documents, My Computer, Recycle Bin, My Bluetooth Places and an application I’ve just downloaded. I’m just wondering how to hide them.