First of all, you have to prepare your new background. Crop your image to 1:1 to your screen resolution. The catch is you should save your image not to be larger than 256kB. You might think it turns to crap one, but believe me that’s good enough =)

After getting an image you want, rename it to “backgroundDefault.jpg”. Then copy to the folder

%windir%\system32\oobe\info\backgrounds

in case it doesn’t exist, create your own.

Secondly, enable the background in Registry, by getting into “regedit”

HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Authentication\LogonUI\Background

Create new key DWORD 32-bit, value 1 (1 as enable, 0 as disable) Also, if any of these doesn’t exist, create your own =)

That is it!, you may lock the computer and appreciate your personal login screen. Make your PC personal again!! lol

Also, it has a lot of interesting wallpapers which, of course, are nice. It’s like looking through Flickr with rotating desktop wallpaper, a feature which Microsoft eventually get after Apple has for many years

Check it out @ Personalized Gallery

Palm made news again! Palm Pixie, aka. stripped down version of Pre or Centro series of webOS. It looks badly similar to Palm Centro, but with webOS, it’s much much more interesting (or not?) At the very first, I was about to grab if Sprint doesn’t tie this tiny phone with any plan. Now I just see that it’s missing WiFi. WTH? My best bet would be like Sprint has something to do with it. They just want everyone to have this tying with data plan, so they can get $ more. No-go for me indeed. Why would I have to pay $30 for data while I’m paying $10 a month for data on my Treo and get the same thing. But if Palm won’t release either Pre or Pixie on GSM board + Wifi on board. Then PALM, this 4-letter, will fall out of the market pretty soon. Not to mention whether they are following App store’s policy from Apple or not.

Last November, security researchers first showed how WPA could be broken, but the Japanese researchers have taken the attack to a new level, according to Dragos Ruiu, organizer of the PacSec security conference where the first WPA hack was demonstrated. "They took this stuff which was fairly theoretical and they’ve made it much more practical," he said.

The earlier attack, developed by researchers Martin Beck and Erik Tews, worked on a smaller range of WPA devices and took between 12 and 15 minutes to work. Both attacks work only on WPA systems that use the Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP) algorithm. They do not work on newer WPA 2 devices or on WPA systems that use the stronger Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) algorithm.

According to the report, the best practice so far is like what we already know, moving to WPA2 with AES encryption: you will have a strong defense and gain the performance as well, as you may know, with WPA2 with AES, you will lose only less than 10% of bandwidth to all encryption stuff while the rest will waste more than 25% to all the key & stuffs. That’s like a bonus. Nonetheless, if you still carry stuffs from 2006 or older, using WPA/WPA2 might be the best practice. Well, putting your guard down can’t be that bad if you know what you are doing!

via Yahoo! Tech

Hardware specifications have been changed just tiny bit from what we have known back in March.

• Texas Instruments OMAP3530 with Micron 256MB (RAM) + 256MB (NAND) Memory
• 8.9 inches 1024×600 A+ screen
• Main storage: 8GB SD card — we decided to change from Micro SD to standard SD, so that you can easily upgrade it
• Internal USB wifi 802.11 b/g/n powered by a Ralink 3070 chipset
• Internal USB bluetooth class 2.1
• FCC, CE, UL-certified, 5V, 3.5A power adapter
• 8.9 inches pressure sensitive touch screen
• US Qwerty 24cm-large keyboard — around 95% of the size of a standard keyboard
• Cirque Touchpad
• Two Owolff high-quality internal stereo speakers
• 3D accelerometer
• Two internal batteries 6000 and 12000 mAh — it can be replaced with a screw driver
• 7 USB ports: three external, four internal, three of them may be reserved for wifi, bluetooth and keyboard
• Bi-color silver/black case — see photos — with a beautiful dark-red back cover (we decided to go only for red for the first batch as it really jumps out, you won’t regret it).
• Secured attachment system of tablet into keyboard
• Independent magnet system for the tablet — we don’t want your Touch Book to un-magnetize all your credit cards while carrying it in your bag!

For the time being, twitter might be the best resource catching up all info about this machine.

These above pictures have been posted by sfeger. Follow him if you are interested in Touch Book.

For me? it seems to be too thick for my taste, but you’ll never know, if you haven’t touched/seen in person. I still look forward to getting a good news from Pandora, or Zune HD if I can’t resist when it comes out next month.

Pre-order @ alwaysinnovating.com if you feel this is right for you!

Not like Google at all huh? I started wonder whether Google will force everyone paying for used-to-be-free service or not although Google said that it was free before.

However, in this transient state, you still are able to signup for Google Apps: standard edition by this link. It works now. I don’t know how long this link is going to last though and more importantly, how long this free Google Apps lasts. If you are using it, just backing up all your mail data more often. That should do it! =) I just hope that Google would honor free edition as they claimed when we signed up. No new features? that’s not a problem. For me, GMail engine solely is the factor here. I bet most users are the same.

However, System Update made its way back by tons of requests. I’m really happy to see it back and it works just fine with Win7 (which I don’t have complete set of ThinkVantage software such as Fingerprint and Active Protection System) but CSS still doesn’t get along with clean install Win7. Oddly upgrading Win7 from Vista, CSS works flawlessly!

This can be either the way to waste Lenovo’s bandwidth or it’s the way to keep the crowd with Thinkpad. But the bottom line is happy customers. You are on the right track, Lenovo!

Download TVSU 3.14.0024

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I won’t deny that it feels great in my hand. The rubberized texture on the back does help a lot, but I hate to say the qwerty keyboard is too small & too thin—like Centro which I couldn’t even type comfortably and correctly. When sliding the screen up, I almost lost how to control the device between keyboard and the screen. It’s like keyboard couldn’t do anything to control stuffs and screen is way too far. I wish Pre was taller, had larger screen and used only on-screen keyboard or make the keyboard like what we have on Treo! That would be much better, but with only $199, that’s tough decision! haha

On software side, webOS does give such a nice feeling. Although I hadn’t tried to get to know it much, I feel it has potential to be real successor for Palm OS day, but what I couldn’t figure out is where the zen of Palm. Ease of use? Well, let me tell you one thing, Calendar, and all PIM are only the reason why I still wait for Palm. However, when I made new event for calendar, I had no clue how to get out of that page to the day/week/month view. I have to get to main page, throw the card away and call calendar again. At least, one thing I can say is it’s not that intuitive like what I’m waiting for. Learning curve is definitely helping here, but it’s sad somehow losing all that feeling from this company. Other than not quite intuitive UI like what we have on iPhone, I don’t feel Palm Pre has the edge over iPhone much. Honestly, I don’t like iPhone much, but it still rule mobile’s world.

Time… is the factor here. This is only first time—10 mins perhaps. I might not know the OS and the phone enough to say that it’s worse than iPhone, but the smaller screen, below-par keyboard, not any notification besides screen doesn’t help Palm Pre cuts the edge over iPhone. We’ll see how 3rd generation of iPhone looks like. Then I definitely make a decision whether I will be Palm fanboy like old days or turn myself to be cool carrying iPhone.

I still wish webOS found the way to have PDA-style device on its own. I would buy it in matter of second for sure =)

After trying for a while, I don’t see anything much interesting or persuasive enough to convince me that it’s much more than a re-brand & putting useless features like category, search history. I honestly don’t know if you feel the same way, to me, search is built to destroy any classified, categorized data since if you do arrange stuffs neatly, you don’t need search, but if you do need “search, “ then you have no need of organizing them [that includes others’ stuffs which is categorized in the different ways of your brain]

In short, if Bing couldn’t change attitude about putting more and more bots for much larger coverage, like Google, and try to get most out of those huge database, they are not going to be even close to the first choice. Don’t think Google is the only competitor here. Yahoo, which gives the results much different than Google, might be much better alternative to Google rather than old archive search like Bing.

ps. I really feel sorry for Microsoft that they have soo much potential in every ways, but they couldn’t come up with the ace solution to the market. They might need to re-organize or something to aim their goals much more efficient. For instance, if they happen to amalgamate all E-mail clients’ teams such as Windows Live Mail, Windows Mail, Outlook Express, Outlook 2007, into only 1 e-mail client—might be 2 sub-divisions: web-based & desktop-based. I believe they can have GMail-equivalent easily. But, they are dividing into small groups to achieve in everything as far as the products go. Consequently they just divide themselves… and think of it as a good plan. Hurr what a waste..

Anyone that knows me knows that I don’t care having antivirus on my PC since most of the time you know how virus get into your computer. Network?, flash drive? or whatsoever. If it’s severe one, there is always a separate tool to check and kill it. That’s the way I choose.

However, with some of my wrack nerving clients, they just prefer to have something make them feel more secure although that’s slow them down. Most of the time, I recommend free one such as AVG, Comodo, etc. These anti-viruses works pretty well according to many people, but after a while, I still have to do cleaning up all infected PC with all free or paid tool installed. What the heck? What do they do really? Don’t they have recent virus signature? I don’t know. Signature/definition update issue might be one of them.

Recently I found our that Panda Could Antivirus, it’s still BETA last time I check, and it will likely to be free. What distinguish this antivirus from others is they loading definition on-the-fly while scanning. I am not sure if they send some info to the server for scanning or just downloading new signature, but it works to me. This can kill the hidden virus that Comodo Antivirus (installed) can’t in only 1st times of full scan. I don’t think they do on-access stuff which is good, no waste resource. You can just go do full scan once in a while. That should do the trick.

It, nonetheless, has a cons as well. It does take forever at 99%, but it is known issue and should be fixed in next release. Go check it out! at Panda Cloud Antivirus

ps. I still stop it all the time on my system unless I really want to scan anything =) This way works for me. It left only 1MB or so while turning off and about the same while on, but will consume like regular apps (20MB+) while scanning =)

added 2009-05-15: my worst fear happened. Panda deleted almost any of my tools, e.g. Cain and Abel and all kind of that stuff -_- darn it. That’s why I never like having Antivirus on my machine :’(