Picnik, one of my favourite online photo editor, locked its premium features to only premium members on 23rd October last year. What is left for non-paying users are a handy of basic tools, which is much less fun than what premium users are enjoying.

However, Picnik had announced on Wednesday that the previously paid premium features is now free. Free users will now have access to premium tools and features, which is made available by being ad-supported. If you are a paid users, Picnik will remain ads-free and you will have a couple more of features. It looks like this:

It’s a real good news for a loyal free user of Picnik. But I just found that the workable space is somewhat too small with the banner at the bottom. Anyway, I would rather sacrifice those space with a lot more cool premium tools.

Especially on smaller screens, the advertisements on Windows Live Messenger really takes up quite a lot of space. It is also annoying for popping up when the cursor is accidentally moved to the ads.

A-Patch is one of the best thing to remove advertisements on Windows Live Messenger, as it can be also used to customize the messenger to the fullest. Removing e-mail button, remove nudge delay, disable nudge shake, removing buttons, logos—you name it, they probably have it.

You can view all the features included here.

To start using A-Patch, download it according to your Windows Live Messenger version (which  can be checked via Help > About Messenger). Run the software and you can begin customizing your Windows Live Messenger according to your liking.

To remove the advertisements on the messenger, just simply select "Remove Advertisement" which can be found under "Contact List" (page 5). This is how it looks like when you are done.

Without advertisements:

It is against the terms of use to patch your messenger, so do it at your own risk. Also, make sure your messenger is not on when doing the patch, or it would not proceed.

YouTube went up to #2, while Google dropped from #3 to #4.

It is quite shocking to have a video sharing website rank higher than two giant search engines. Anyway, Alexa tends to be always inaccurate for their ranking system, and people don’t really care much about it anymore.

Alexa Top 100 Sites

It’s officially announced on Tuesday. The 1GB iPod shuffle had went down from $79 to $49, while 2GB iPod shuffle was being introduced, which is priced at $69.

That had made iPod shuffle the most affordable (and wearable) music player by far. However, like the iPhone, the 2GB iPod shuffle is nothing different from the 1GB, just double the memory.

The 1GB is now readily stock available in Apple Store, while the 2GB will only be available later this month.

MSN Messenger/Windows Live Messenger has a quite annoying feature to me, which is having a popup of Windows Live Today/MSN Today every single time you sign into your account. That might be useful to some, but in my case, I am not using Hotmail, thus making the pop-up not useful at all.

To disable Windows Live Today, simply follow the instructions below:

1. Click on Tools, select Options
2. Click on the General tab
3. Uncheck the Show Windows Live Today after I sign in to Messenger box

Voila, the next time you sign into your Windows Live Messenger, the popup will not appear anymore and all you see is just your contact list.

There are times when I am having a project and it requires me to look for resources from the internet. Most of the time, I will look up on Wikipedia, and it troubles me so much when I copy and paste an article that is full of links to Microsoft Word.

Instead of removing those links one by one, you can try this method, which only consist of two steps, but will remove all links in one go.

1. Press Ctrl+A, which will highlight the entire text
2. Press Ctrl+Shift+F9 (OR Ctrl+6), and you will see all links disappearing within seconds

This method is working on my Microsoft Word 2003, but I have not tested it on other versions.

Most of my wallpapers are found on the internet. Whenever I encountered a decent wallpaper that looks appealing to me, I would right click on it and set it as desktop background—to see if it looks good on my desktop.

Unfortunately, there are times where I was not satisfied with the wallpaper, and want the older wallpaper again, that I did not download earlier, but just set it as desktop background using the right click menu. Therefore, it is only possible for me to obtain the wallpaper again if only I could remember where I encountered it in the past.

One of the easiest way to solve the problem is to simply download the wallpaper to just any location on your local disk. But instead, I prefer to add all my favorite wallpapers to the local wallpaper directory on my Windows XP.

Once they are moved into the directory, the wallpapers will appear as one of the default wallpapers on the Display Properties (Right click on Desktop > Properties). To do so, just simply move your selected wallpapers to the wallpaper folder.

Windows XP - C:\WINDOWS\Web\Wallpaper\
Windows Vista - C:\Users\*User Name*\Appdata\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows Photo Gallery\

The next time you want to revert your wallpaper, you can just simply select it from the Display Properties window.

For the pass month (or since late December 2007 if I’m not wrong), one of the most popular Firefox extension for AdSense publishers, the AdSense Notifier, had stopped reporting earnings correctly—but just zeros for all values. That was due to the updates Google made, which had changed the reports page to AJAX and added extra HTTP calls to retrieve the reports.

The author of AdSense Notifier had recently updated the extension on the 6th of February, and reports are showing correctly now. Feel free to update your AdSense Notifier for it to work properly again.

Update to AdSense Notifier 0.9.6

[Windows XP / Server 2003] Want to customize your desktop but not sure where to start? There are several ways of doing it, but in this guide, you will learn how to customize your desktop with visual style, which is free, without all the advertisements popping every time you boot your computer.

Patch uxtheme.dll

Before you could use visual style on your Windows XP, you will have to replace a file in C:\Windows\System32 called uxtheme.dll. You can either do it manually, or download the patcher, which will do the job for you automatically.

After downloading, run the program to start patching. All file protection dialogs should be canceled, and after everything are done, restart your computer. You can always un-patch by running the program again, so no worries.

Download & Install Visual Style

You can already start customizing your desktop using visual style after restarting. Download any visual style that you like, and place the file or folder to C:\WINDOWS\Resources\Themes. These few websites have good collections of visual style:

• deviantART
• Customize.org

Next, right click on your desktop and select “Properties”. Select the “Appearance” tab and choose the visual style you have just installed from the drop down menu. Click OK and wait. You will then see your old boring Windows theme changing to a nice theme of your choice.

via MakeUseOf.com