For two weeks we've run a poll trying to get a feel for the community interest in a live Internet radio show centered around the WinCustomize community and the world of skinning.  The results were largely positive with two thirds of you saying you'd be interested in the podcast in one way or another, either as a listener or as a call-in.  And thankfully only a small handful of you regarded it as the worst idea ever conceived  Here's the visual break-down, as always... &n...

When I say "Desktop Gadget" I mean an actual gadget that sits on your physical desktop.  Engadget has word today that at long last, you can keep a cool, frosty beverage on-hand at your desk whenever you want with a very cool little gadget from a company called Brando.  The mini-fridge is powered entirely by a USB connection to your PC and can hold one 12oz can of your favorite beverage, so it's cold and ready to go when you most need it.  No more walking the 10' to the fridge in t...

A few weeks ago, I posted a story from Lifehacker about really cool monitor setups.  We've chatted here at length many times before on who has the sweetest setup, the desk with the best toys and tech, the most blinking lights etc.  Some of you have some great setups at home and at work, but while they may be stylish, are they well organized?  Personally, my desk both at home and at the office ends up being a mess of cables, keyboards, mice, speakers, CD cases and manuals.  Or...

Another week, another skin round-up by the ever-vigilant Island Dog.  The past week has been a pretty good one for submissions as we have everything ranging from a new, free Dream from Stardock Design, to a brand new WindowBlinds skin by BoXXi.  Also in the mix are some cursors, a few dock backgrounds and a very nice wallpaper pack.  Click the link below to see what you might have missed this week!

Last week, we talked a bit about the possibility of a live Internet radio show for the WinCustomize community, and the response was fairly positive with a few people being down-right excited about it.  well, internally we think it's a cool idea that could be a lot of fun to experiment with and are getting our ducks in a row so to speak to try and give the idea a shot.  However, before we do the real, full show, we need to do a dry-run, figure out the gotchas and iron out as many pr...

What do these items all have in common?  Images, News, Finance, Blogs, Books, Catalogs, Code, Phone Directories, Maps, Patents, Products, Academics, Video, Web. They're all specialized search engines provided by the undisputed king of search, Google.  For several years now, Google has been steadily adding new specialized searches to its list of products, increasing the amount of information the average user can quickly access from just one site.  However, unless you already kn...

Yesterday, the availability of TweakVista Beta was announced for Object Desktop subscribers, and we opened up the site and forums letting testers go nuts and see what all the application can do.  One of the cooler features (IMO) is the ability to look up information on processes and services running on your PC.  This morning I threw together a short walk-through of this insanely useful little feature so that more people can be aware of it and take advantage of it.  In short, ...

Say what you like about Windows Vista, how you'd never install it on your box, how it's too expensive, too bloated or too under-supported to succeed in the marketplace.  Rant and rave and wave your Linux flag, or Windows XP flag, or heck even your old BeOS flag if you've still got it.  Because, according to Bill Gates' speech at WinHEC yesterday, the naysayers don't appear to matter.  In the first 100 days of Windows Vista's general availability, Microsoft sold over 40 million li...

Yesterday, we announced the availability of TweakVista Beta to Object Desktop subscribers, and at long last people outside of Stardock are taking this fantastic application for a spin.  Personally, this is one of my favorite applications that we've developed in the past few years, it's just that well-done and so insanely useful I wonder how I've managed to run Vista as long as I have without it.  If you're a power user and try to get every bit of juice out of your system, this is ...

Today, a bit of news that keeps with the general theme of the site, customizing the Windows experience!  Here we customize everything from the UI skin to desktop icons and often complete shell replacements.  We animate our wallpapers, gadgetize or screens and trick out our media players.  In part we do it for the fun factor, and sometimes we even do it for usability and functionality.  One area of Windows though is often left completely untouched by the hand of customization...

Facebook, the preferred social networking site of college students, and Craigslist, the 900lbs gorilla in the world of online classifieds, appear ready to clash in an attempt to take (or keep) the title of most popular online classified site. Late last week, a new feature called the Marketplace, appeared on Facebook.com, a major social networking site recently recognized as the #1 Social Networking site by SEOMoz.org's 2007 Web 2.0 Awards.  Long a favorite of the college crowd for its si...

Google is well-known for it's habit of buying up smaller tech companies in an attempt to strengthen it's product list and engineering talent pool.  Recently though they've branched out into much larger mergers, such as the deal with web advertising giant, DoubleClick.  eWeek sat down with Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO, last week to talk about Google and it's rather expensive company-buying habit.  It turns out, that when you average it out, Google buys out about one company per week!...

11:59pm (Eastern) tonight, May 11th, is the deadline to get your entries in for WebGizmos' ObjectDock Contest.  So with just a few hours remaining, if you've got anything waiting in the wings, get cracking and submit it soon! Rules, requirements and examples of what others have entered so far can be found at the link below. Good luck!

Looking to see what's new and interesting in skinning this week?  Island Dog does the rounds and gathers up a handful of some of the more interesting uploads from the previous seven days.  This week's list includes a: BootSkin DX Theme Dream Animated Wallpaper Icon Pack WindowBlinds Skin Click the link below to see what you might have missed this week.

According to research done by Google, 1 in 10 web pages contain malicious code that could be used to infect a user's PC.  This based on a survey 4.5 million sites out of the billions crawled regularly by Google's web search spider.  In that number, around 450,000 were capable of "drive-by-downloads", sites that install malicious code without the user knowing.  Another 700,000 pages were considered capable of compromising a PC via other methods. The research being done by Google...