Sometimes I make games. Sometimes I make websites. This is my blog.
I just learned about the custom theme feature in Gmail. For a long time I’ve wanted to use my own background in Gmail and now I finally can.
If you’re a fan of Minecraft and you’re looking for a good background to use in Gmail, I put one together. Feel free to click the image below and use it. I recommend the Dark theme option when using this image, but the choice is yours. Enjoy!
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| From Game Blaster 64 |
My laptop is an Averatec 3260. 512MB of RAM, 80GB hard disk, and 1.6GHz processor. It’s had the front panel LCD and battery replaced, by me. It’s still missing the front bezel (I thought it looked cooler with it off.) Up until yesterday, the performance of the machine was just above what I’d consider to be “survivable” regardless of OS.
Then, everything changed.
While I was working with Cory Fowler at Red Brick Cafe and then later at my apartment, I was updating my copy of Mandriva Linux from 2009.1 to 2010.0. During installation something must have gone wrong because KDE4 no longer started properly. It kept bringing me back to the login screen. So, instead of using KDE4 I used IceWM.
I haven’t gone back to KDE4 since yesterday. And I’m the hugest KDE4 fan there is.
If you’ve got an old laptop or an old desktop that’s struggling under the weight of Windows XP or KDE4, grab a copy of Mandriva Linux for free and install the IceWM packages. Give it a go. I’m sure you’ll be impressed with the performance of your machine. I know I was! I remember running IceWM a few times when I first started using Linux quite a number of years ago but it has really come a long way since then.
IceWM runs all of the KDE4 programs I care about and even the Gnome programs, too. Watching a video on YouTube is made much easier with the lighter-weight desktop, as is just general browsing.
IceWM offers a lot of customization but some of it is complicated to configure. The easiest thing to do is to replace the God-awful default theme with something way cooler and easier on the eyes. The theme I’m using now is psicopoire.
The Box-Look.org website includes hundreds of awesome themes you can try out. And installing them is actually pretty simple. To install a new theme in IceWM, try this:
Does anyone else know any other neat, lightweight software to replace large-scale, heavy applications? I’d love to give them a try.
One of the best parts of Google Chrome is the theme. It’s simple and attractive. Now you can have that same theme (minus the top-window tab placement) in Firefox 3, thanks to a developer named “falconer”.
Download Chromifox, the Google Chrome theme for Firefox 3.
Update as of 2018-02-13: Extensions such as these are no longer supported by Firefox as it has moved to the new WebExtensions system. If you’re looking for alternatives to your favourite Firefox extensions take a look at this handy article from Digital.com.
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