I just looked over at the Folding@Home project descriptions and there's some pretty neat stuff there. It's kindof neat knowing that your PC is helping do some noble work on proteins and such. I've finished up 2 work units (I think about 900 frames of simulations), and consequently got about 390 Folding@Home points for it. Nifty, although you can't redeem 'em anywhere. It does give you gloating rights, though.
I used WindowBlinds to make my desktop look very Macish, and the Aqua Dock pretty near finished the change over to Maclikedom. You never notice how clean a mac's interface is (or how confusing to PC users, since the minimize\maximize\exit buttons are on the left) until you've tried it in this way. I have to tell you that where it worked it was suweet
. Then I tried the MacOnPC theme that imitates OS 9 and I think that I wouldn't switch over to an OS 9-based mac for the interface by any means. It's kindof creepy, the greyish titlebars and such. OSX's look is way more cheerful, if not a little toylike, but that's OK. I then installed ObjectBar and tried its Mac theme running in tandem with WindowBlinds' theme (both are free for basic typa stuff), and it looked more like a mac than ever before. I had less of a preferance toward the OSX theme for this, but I still had that tendancy. If ObjectBar really took out the menu bar and put it into its bar, then I think I'd really look into it, but it doesn't do I'm not really, but I'll use it from time to time. As I will with the OSX Windowblinds theme. Right now everything on my system is OSX-looking except the taskbar, windows, and some icons. That means that quite a bit of the icons, the pointers and the sounds, as well as the background, is straight outta OSX practically (and totally, with some of the icons).
I'm downloading Digital World right now from PCWorld's site. I'm getting the HiRes version. I think the much longer wait will be worth it. I don't want to see low-res graphics. I want something I could print and it still look good.
I'm also trying to connect and failing to with MSN messenger. It seems I'm having a problem connecting to MSN's service no matter which program I run on my PC at least, which is annoying, given it says that everything is fine with Messenger on MSN's site...but I've tried again and it just won't work. Ah well, I can't work on it tonight really.
Over the past few months or however long it's been, I've been downloading lots of programs. One of them is the ZipGenius Suite. This handy little set of utilities (made in Italy) gives you a very comprehensive zipper, a nifty file cutter, and an FTP program that looks promising but I haven't tried out yet. ZipGenius, the main part of the suite, supports nearly all of the major zip formats out there (with the exception of the aging Stuffit and Stuffit X file types, which nobody supports and I don't see why they should quite frankly, more on that later, or maybe dyasfrom now). It also does slideshows and optimizes OpenOffice documents so that they're even smaller than how small they already are. Cutter (the cutting program) takes your file and spits out segments of a size you choose, plus a batch file that reassembles the parts, and a readme file that tells you how to go about the reassembling. Very useful.
Okay, about Stuffit. I tried compressing several things and in a race\compression contest between the free and very powerful (albeit a little techie) 7-Zip and it, 7-zip won on speed against Stuffit X and won in compression most of the time. Why pay for something that's slow, unstable and doesn't give you the best compression when the best things in life are free?
Well, I've gotta go to bed now. I hope I've been informative. I hope you've learned something from all of these rants and things. :)
