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

The iPhone is now available at 16GB and iPod Touch at 32GB, both of them selling at $499. Too bad, it is just the capacity that have been doubled, but no new features has been added to the iPhone. No 3G, no whatever.. the same old thing as before. The new pricing structure would be as follow:

iPhone
8GB - $399
16GB - $499

iPod Touch
8GB - $299
16GB - $399
32GB - $499

It is good to make late purchase on gadgets sometimes. They are always better as time goes, and the price will be lower. For just an additional $100, you can have double the capacity. Read the full press release on Apple Press Info.

Beware if you are searching for domain names availability on Network Solutions. Every searched domain names will be registered automatically under the name of Network Solutions for 5 days, making the domain unavailable to register under any other registrars in this period, but Network Solutions itself. They name this as customer protection measure.

This might be a good way to reserve the domain name you wanted to register if you currently have not enough money or under similar cases. But you will end up paying the higher price of what Network Solutions charge, which is $34.99 instead of the usual less than $10. Not to mention that if your searched domain is a good one with high potential of reselling at a much higher price, it might be hijacked.

There are users that have complain this to ICANN, and this is what they have responded:

I contacted ICANN and they said that although they believe it to be an unethical business practice they said that it is legal for Network Solutions to hijack domain names and hold them for ransom when searched off of their site. ICANN stated that there is nothing they can do to stop the practice.
—Stratagenix of DomainState.com

Not sure whether Network Solutions is doing this for their customer’s good or for their own good. If they are doing this just merely to increase their sales and to grab great domain names, then they are very wrong. If it is for the customers, then I would suggest them to have an option before searching the domain, whether to reserve it or not.

WordPress 2.3.3 has been released today to fix a flaw in the xmlrpc.php

WordPress 2.3.3 is an urgent security release. A flaw was found in our XML-RPC implementation such that a specially crafted request would allow any valid user to edit posts of any other user on that blog.

There are also a few other minor bug fixes in this version, but if you wouldn’t mind them and just want the security fix, then download just the xmlrpc.php (just 60KB) and replace it with your existing copy.

It seems that Google is trying something new again. Instead of black URL like what I have set in my AdSense account, the URL appeared underlined and is using the title color instead of what I have specified.

Screenshot:

Anyone see similar phenomenon?