Cool Google Talk Themes
GTalk users are increasing day by day. Maybe because of its simplicity. A large number of bloggers use GTalk to interact with their fans and blog friends. Well, I?m also no different. 
I also use GTalk to catch up with all my friends and fans. Few days ago, I Google?d for some GTalk themes and stumbled across a cool site that offered free GTalk themes.
I got the same themes sometime ago through an underground forum, but the author of the post didn?t post the source, so I wasn?t sure where he got them from. But now when I know the it, I have been able to get a few cool themes that you will surely love using on GTalk.
Enough time wasted, eh? Let?s get on with the themes part. 
NOTE: If you don?t know how or where to install GTalk themes, please read this first!
CandyBars
A port of the Candybars theme used in Adium.
Download: CandyBars.zip (Mirror)
Forum
A theme with a ?forum? appearance to it.
Digital Ecstasy
A colorful glossy theme for your Google Talk!
Download: DigitalEcstasy.exe (Mirror)
Joy
A nice blue and green theme. One of my favorites! 
DOS Box
For those who can?t get enough of the MS-DOS Command Prompt or the Linux terminal.
Download: DOSBox.zip (Mirror)
Lidibrium
A very slick theme, similar to Candybars.
Download: Lidibrium.zip (Mirror)
Gemstone
A shiny theme from Shoop
Download: Gemstone.zip (Mirror)
Spotlight
Make Google Talk look like Mac OS X Spotlight
Download: Spotlight.zip (Mirror)
Finish?! These were my picks of the day. You can find more themes at Customize Talk. For some reason, the site?s server keeps going down so I have included a mirror for every theme. I hope you liked the above themes.
Do tell me about your favorites. If you have any new themes, do share them below And yeah, one more thing, I?ll also make a similar post on Google Talk skins soon? So go subscribe to the feed now!
How To Change/Install Themes In Google Talk
What?s up readers? How was your weekend? I hope you had a great one. Last time, I wrote about GTalk (Google Talk) was when I found how to unblock blocked contacts in it. This time, I?m going to tell you how you can change or install new themes in GTalk.
Remember, themes are not skins. Gmail themes only change the layout of the conversation window. Where as skins change the entire design of the application.
How To Change Themes In GTalk
Just follow the steps below and you will have a new theme in no time:
- Open GTalk.
- Go to Settings.
- Click Appearance.
- Below Chat Theme, you?ll see a drop box. Choose whatever theme you want.
- Click OK and start chatting with someone to try the new theme.
There are about 10 pre-installed themes in GTalk, excluding the default one. I like the ?orkut Picture? theme.
How To Install Themes In GTalk
Already knew change themes and tired of the default ones? Wanna install custom themes? Just follow the following steps:
1. Make sure you have the skin (usually as ZIP file).
2. Extract the files anywhere in your PC. (I don?t think I need to explain how to extract files Just do it with Winzip or any other good app.)
3. Copy the theme folder and paste it in:
C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Local Settings\
Application Data\Google\Google Talk\themes\user\chat
USERNAME is your Windows user account name. If the chat folder (in the end) is not in the user folder, then create one and paste the theme folder in it.
4. That?s all! Now open GTalk, go to Settings > Appearance > Chat Theme and apply your new theme.
This was easy, right? There are some interesting tricks and articles coming up in the next few posts related to Google Talk. So, subscribe to my feed and catch the latest tricks first!
Office 2007 SP1 Coming Out Next Week
Recently, Microsoft rolled out the first release candidate version of Windows XP Service Pack 3 to some beta testers, and is now planning to roll out Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista next week.
And with all these, guess what? Microsoft is also going to release the first service pack for Office 2007. Amazing, isn?t it? Microsoft didn?t left out its remaining flagship product. Initially, it was slated for an early 2008 release with Vista SP1, but now it will be available to public for download on December 11 through Microsoft Download Center!
This will be served as a critical update for Office 2007. Office 2007 SP1 will bring some significant stability and performance improvements to the applications, plus improve their product?s reliability and security.
By the way, Office 2007 SP1 will not be released for Automatic Updates. Actually, it will, but not so soon. John Rajunas, Microsoft Account Technology Specialist, said:
The use of Automatic Update (AU) Deployment has been a concern we have heard from many customers in recent months. Because of this, the 2007 Office System SP1 will not be released to AU immediately. Instead, the Microsoft Office System team will provide guidance as to a date at which we will begin throttling up so that you have time to educate yourself on what is in SP1 and determine the best method for you to deploy it in your environment
Excited? Do tell me what you think of this!
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Download Yahoo Messenger 9 For Vista
Yup, it?s out! The preview version of Yahoo Messenger 9 is now available for download for Vista users. XP users got the beta release couple of months ago, but Vista users still had to wait because Yahoo still had some work left for the Vista version.
As you can see in the image above, the whole interface has been re-designed and many new features have been added. As this is a preview version (pre-beta version), all features that are available in the past versions will be there in this release.
Features:
- New interface
- Adjustable display picture size
- Tabbed conversations
- Contacts list in multiple columns
- Windows Sidebar gadget
- Skins for conversation windows
- Better emoticons
- Windows Live Messenger contacts support
- Send files (2GB max)
- Spell Checker
and many more?
Download:
I?ll leave the rest for you to explore If you are a Vista user, click here to download yours now! And XP users can try the XP version from here.
Extensions That Power My Firefox
I always want to share my experience with different things. This time, it?s about different extensions I use with my Firefox. First, let?s take a look what Firefox is.
Firefox is the next generation browser which is more faster, secure and fully customizable to surf the web. As of October 2007, Firefox has 14.85% of the world?s market share in Web Browsers. It comes for Microsoft Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. The current stable version available for download is 2.0.0.9, which was released on 1 November 2007. Download here. That?s enough, I guess? Eh?
Firefox Extensions
Using extensions (add-ons) with Firefox can enhance your browsing experience by 200%. I also use many extensions to get the most out of it. Below is a list of extensions I use:
1. Boost for Firefox
Boost is an extension for Firefox which customize your Facebook experience with custom skins, 30+ special features, selectable options, pop-up notifications, an integrated toolbar, custom album viewers, hidden access and a lot more! Download here.
2. Download Statusbar
With this little extension, you can view and manage your downloads from a tidy status bar at the bottom, without the download window getting in the way of your web browsing. It auto hides itself when not in use, and you can even pause downloads and resume them in your next session. Get yours from here!
3. FEBE (Firefox Environment Backup Extension)
FEBE (Firefox Environment Backup Extension) allows you to quickly and easily backup your Firefox extensions. In fact, it goes beyond just backing up ? It will actually rebuild your extensions individually into installable .xpi files. Now you can easily synchronize your office and home browsers. Read the full review or download it.
4. FireFTP
FireFTP is a free, secure, cross-platform FTP client for Mozilla Firefox which provides easy and intuitive access to FTP servers. Plus it has some really cool advance features like directory comparison, syncing directories while navigating, SSL encryption, search/filtering, integrity checks, remote editing, drag & drop, file hashing, and much more!
5. Google Browser Sync
Google Browser Sync for Firefox is an extension that continuously synchronizes your browser settings ? including bookmarks, history, persistent cookies, and saved passwords ? across your computers. It also allows you to restore open tabs and windows across different machines and browser sessions.
6. Google Notebook
With Google Notebook, you can browse, clip, and organize information from across the web in a single online location that?s accessible from any computer. Planning a trip? Researching a product? Just add clippings to your notebook. You won?t ever have to leave your browser window. If you note down every small thing, then this one?s for you.
7. Greasemonkey
Greasemonkey allows you to customize the way a webpage displays using small bits of JavaScript. Read a brief review here or download it.
8. Screengrab!
Screengrab saves what u can see in the window, the entire page or just a selection, a particular frame. It can save whole pages as images.
9. StumbleUpon Toolbar
Channel surf the internet with the StumbleUpon toolbar to find great websites, videos, photos and more based on your interests. StumbleUpon learns what you like and makes better recommendations. With StumbleUpon you can also connect with friends and share your discoveries, meet people that have similar interests, and check out what other people are discovering.
10. User Agent Switcher
User Agent Switcher adds a menu and a toolbar button to switch the user agent of the browser. You can have multiple user agents and select which one to use with the help of the menu. No need to manually change the user agent I basically installed this to bypass the MegaUpload slot limit, but the trick doesn?t work anymore. lol
11. WML Browser
WML Browser allows you to simulate WAP browsing by viewing WML (Wireless Markup Language) pages in Mozilla, SeaMonkey or Mozilla Firefox. Unfortunately, WBMP (Wireless Bitmap) images are not supported.
My Disabled Plugins
I also have few more extensions, but are disabled.
1. Adblock Plus
Adblock Plus filter ads from web-pages.
2. Better Gmail
This extension is a compilation of the best Greasemonkey scripts available for Gmail. It doesn?t work with the new Gmail, Gina Trapani says that she is currently worknig on the new version.
3. CoRank It!
CoRank It! is a social bookmarking service similar to Digg.
4. Gmail Skins
Gmail Skins doesn?t work with the new Gmail version. I?m still waiting for an update. It has skins and some other extra features for Gmail.
5. ImgLikeOpera
ImgLikeOpera allows you to load only the images that you want in Firefox browser (similar to Opera). This extension is very useful for non broadband users.
These were the extensions that power my Firefox. What extensions do you use? Do share them with me.
Bonus!
Yesterday, I found this very cool Firefox wallpaper. I hope you guys like it Download it from here.
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November 07 Roundup
Well? A very bad month for me 
Maybe because of my exams. My traffic and the earnings dropped approx. by 200%. Even though I got a PR4 in October, still no change. But at least, I got something to be happy about. My feed readers count went up And you guys must have noticed the theme change in October. Unfortunately, it was full of errors and problems. So I decided to fix it this weekend. And guess what? Huh, I had to redesign the whole thing again LOL. You can now see the better-than-before and tweaked version of my theme. I hope you guys will like it
Now coming back to the stats, the most popular posts of the previous month are as follows:
Blog Posts:
- Trick To Remove Ads From Yahoo Messenger
- Diwali Theme for Orkut
- Download Windows XP Service Pack 3 RC1 (The most popular one!)
- Bypass Likeness Quiz Limit In Facebook
Blog Traffic:
Unique Visitors: 11,706
Pageviews: 22,903
Page/visits: 1.95
New visits: 89.00%
Average Time: 00:01:30
My major traffic source was Google followed by StumbleUpon. I?m also happy that my organic traffic (Google, Yahoo etc.) has increased than inorganic traffic (SU, Digg etc.).
Earnings:
Google Adsense: $27~ ($90~ in the previous months)
Konetra: $9~ ($16~ in the previous months)
Total: $36~
Top Keywords:
- vlc skins
- gmail emoticons
- vlc player skins
- pc_efi v5.2
- yahoo mash invitation
Feed Readers:This is something I?m very happy about: 170+ readers in November! Now my target is 200+ readers this month. I hope I?ll achieve it.
That?s all?! You can compare these stats with my September stats (was busy in Oct.) and see how much I lost this month.
Windows Live Messenger 9.0 Beta Leaked
The news about Windows Live Messenger 9.0 (WLM 9.0), also known as MSN Messenger 9.0, has been around since many days now and I was very eager to give it a try. I even signed up for Microsoft Connect, hoping to get an invitation. But, didn?t got any! LOL! They only gave out invitations to their old members, which included some 5000 beta testers.But guess what? I just found a way to try it out, thanks to Tech Today. And my readers too grab it and try the next version of the world?s most popular instant messenger
WLM 9.0 Features
Some of the features that are expected to be included in the coming builds are:
- Sign-in from multiple locations
- Report and block users who spam via IM - SPIM feature
- Clickable links in Status Message like GTalk
- Animated display pictures (I always wanted this! :D)
- Personalized signature and per contact sounds
Download
The leaked WLM (build 9.0.1407.1107) can be downloaded from here.
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Bypass Likeness Quiz Limit In Facebook
Facebook is a social utility that connects people with friends and others who work, study and live around them. People use Facebook to keep up with friends, upload an unlimited number of photos, share links and videos, and learn more about the people they meet.
I recently started using Facebook, and got addicted to it in just 3 days I found most of my old school buddies there If you are a Facebook user, you can add me too. I?ll be very happy to meet my readers there.
Today, while playing with different applications on Facebook, I found a very cool application called Likeness. With this you can compare yourself with your friends and movie stars like Angelina Jolie, Jessica Alba, Keira Knightley, and many more. All the results are based on the quizzes you take.
Only one quiz can be taken every 24 hours. I went to See Your Matches page through the app, and started looking for some interesting quiz to take. As I have this very bad habit of opening every link in a new tab (I use Firefox), I opened the Take Quiz link in a new tab, and completed the quiz.
After completing, it asked me to invite more friends to take that quiz. I did as it said. Finally, it came back to the See Your Matches page. This time above the quiz list, there was a counter on the top, which said that my next quiz will be available after 23 hours, 59 minutes and 52 seconds! I couldn?t take more quizzes :S All the Take Quiz links were gone, and it displayed Coming Soon there.
I closed the tab and returned back to the old tab. It still had the page I opened when I added this Likeness app. Take Quiz links were still there I opened two of them in separate tabs, and they worked lol!
Later on, I found out that even after you get the next quiz counter, if you go to the Available Quizzes page, you can still play more quizzes and retake previous quizzes as well. I took 5 quizzes in 10 minutes lol!
Heheh, oh yeah, I forgot to tell you guys. I made a page to promote Sizzled Core on Facebook. Come, become a fan! If you enjoyed this post, don?t forget to subscribe to my RSS feed for more updates and latest posts.
Have a nice day!
MAC OS X Leopard on PC!
This is a guest by Pumzee of Kreeminals!
Hi Folks,
Here is a quick how to which will be fleshed out over the next little bit as to a full installation method for Leopard with a properly created Brazilmac disk, the Kalyway Make Boot CD for Leopard and the kexts you need for a perfect system.
First off, see my sig for the computer used in this build, YMMV but I picked up my motherboard for 56.00 and its well worth it.
Note - terminal commands are bolded
Items you will need:
1 USB Flash drive (that you know the volume NAME of)
On the USB key, put the following items, unzip where needed.
pc_efi V5.2 (its the latest)
dsmos.kext
AppleSMBIOS.kext
NVinject for Leopard (only if you have an Nvidia based card, if not - ignore any references in the guide to NVinject)
1 Copy of a properly prepared Brazilmac disk
1 Copy of the Kalyway boot prepare cd for Leopard
First make sure your assembled computer is able to boot off the DVD drive, insert the Kalyway cd and press any key to boot the cd when you are prompted.
After about 5 minutes you will come to a slimmed down tiger install, go to Disk Utility and partition, prepare your drive as you require.
Once you are happy make a note of what you called the drive, it will be the [Volume Label] and you will need to know it during patching later.
When the disk utility completes, exit it and continue through the installer, there will be 1 package already selected, install it and you are done.
Reboot with the BrazilMac dvd in place of the Kalyway disk, same procedure - it will take about 20 minutes to fully boot to the install screen, go have a drink or some food while you wait.
At the installer do NOT use disk utility, instead continue with the installer, make sure CUSTOMIZE is selected and DESELECT all packages (Printers, Fonts, X11 etc) that you can, just install the bare system. If you want to have the system check your installation media go ahead, otherwise skip - it takes about 10 minutes.
Once the installation is complete you will have to shutdown the computer manually, power on, and again boot into the installer (again, another 20 minutes or so).
In the installer, this time go to Utilities -> Terminal. At the #prompt cd to /Volumes/[usb drive name] I called mine PATCHER.
Now its time to get friendly with the command line, the commands are simple you are changing the location and ownership of the kext files you have on your usb key.
Edit:
The first step to do is to remove the original AppleSMBIOS.kext file as you will be putting another in its place and it will not copy over correctly if the one that
was installed by Brazilmac exists. skipping this step may cause your computer to have a stop error on bootup.
You can do this by typing in
rm -rf /Volumes/[Volume Label]/System/Library/Extensions/AppleSMBIOS.kext
first: dsmos.kext
cp -R dsmos.kext /Volumes/[Volume Label]/System/Library/Extensions/
then AppleSMBIOS.kext
cp -R AppleSMBIOS.kext /Volumes/[Volume Label]/System/Library/Extensions/
Optional if you have an Nvidia card:
cp -R NVinject.kext /Volumes/[Volume Label]/System/Library/Extensions/
Now chown the lot of them:
chown root:wheel /Volumes/[Volume Label]/System/Library/Extensions/dsmos.kext
chown root:wheel /Volumes/[Volume Label]/System/Library/Extensions/AppleSMBIOS.kext
chown root:wheel /Volumes/[Volume Label]/System/Library/Extensions/NVinject.kext
And change permissions
You can change the permissions of all of them at the same time
cd /Volumes[Volume Label]/System/Library/Extensions/ [enter]
chmod -R 755 dsmos.kext AppleSMBIOS.kext NVinject.kext
And delete the CPU Power Management - Netkas says its useless and removing it hasn?t hurt my system at all.
rm -rf AppleIntelCPUPowerManagement.kext
It is time to patch EFI/Bios - the command is pretty straight forward, but you will need to know your RDISK information - if you don?t know, at the terminal prompt type enter -
mount [enter]
it will spit back information like this:
/dev/disk0s2 on /Volumes/Storage 500 A (hfs, local, journaled)
/dev/disk2s2 on /Volumes/Storage 500 B (hfs, local, journaled)
/dev/disk1s1 on /Volumes/LEOPARD (hfs, local, journaled)
The Volume label you are looking for is the one you installed Leopard onto earlier.
At this point, you should exit terminal and load up disk utility
unmount the drive that you installed LEOPARD to, when done exit disk utility and go back to terminal to your USB drive
cd /Volumes/[usb drive name]/pc_efi [enter]
type the following:
./startupfiletool /dev/rdiskXsX ./boot_v5 [enter]
where rdiskXsX is the drive and slice identifier you saw in the mount command
in my example, mine is disk1s1 (just put an r in front of it)
It should write about 7 lines of text, and exit.
Quit Terminal.
Now back to Disk Utility, and do a repair permissions on your drive, this is optional, but it probably won?t hurt - safe to do and it might save you another 20 minute bootup into the installer just to do this.
Shutdown your computer, power on, eject the disk - and if all goes well you are now booting a completely unmodified kernel right to the welcome screens.
Once at the desktop check to see whats working - if you have a realtek based motherboard, like the one in my signature - you should have internet, audio will not yet be working most likely - if you have the Gigabyte 945GCMX-S2 You can seek out and add in the ALC888 patch now to get all 6 audio ports functioning (including audio IN). You can?t reboot now, if you try the computer will HANG, you must shutdown and manually restart if you need to.
When ready to patch up your system to 10.5.1 - simple use the software update tool, when it completes manually shutdown - bootup but when you see the DARWIN bootloader hit F8 until you get a prompt and boot in single user mode with -s [enter]
At the prompt you must type in:
fsck -fy [enter]
this will verify and repair any permissions that the update altered.
when its done, power off - reboot
check your system profile, if all is well, it?ll look like this:
Hardware Overview:
Model Name: Mac
Model Identifier: Mac Pro
Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo
Processor Speed: 2.4 GHz
Number Of Processors: 1
Total Number Of Cores: 2
L2 Cache: 4 MB
Memory: 2 GB
Bus Speed: 1.07 GHz
Boot ROM Version: Hack.int.0sh
Serial Number: LALALALALALALALLA
YOU NOW HAVE A MAC PRO !
EDIT: TIME MACHINE FIX
To fix Time Machine, you need to get the modified file IONetworkingFamily_581.zip from the usual places,
unzip it onto your desktop, and navigate to /System/Library/Extensions - Right click or Command Click to show package contents. Then further navigate to Contents ?> MacOS and drop the file there simply replacing the old one. You will be asked to Authenticate, enter your password to do so.
Of course we need to go into the command line again for proper permissions, open terminal and type the following.
sudo su [enter] put in your password when prompted.
cd /System/Library/Extensions/IONetworkingFamily.kext/Contents/MacOS/ [enter]
chown root:wheel IONetworkingFamily
chmod 775 IONetworkingFamily
And you are done ! TIME MACHINE is now fully working 
Have fun - you have a Vanilla Kernel and the machine will rock.
post pix of your builds
Any questions - let me know.. I?ll constantly edit this guide
Special thanks to my buddy Stellarolla who stuck with me through 6 hours of broken installations until I finally gave in and got the Kalyway disk (GET IT, none of this will work without it.)
Of course thanks and greets out to Netkas for making PC_EFI work, Torque for sticking with us and answering questions, EVERYONE involved in the grand exchange of ideas for making this house of cards actually work
You know who you are.
*** This is a working guide is bye ?Onetrack? fromt the OSX86PROJECT.
***Downloading software off the net is ILLEGAL.
***This guide is 100% working!
Download Windows XP Service Pack 3 RC1
Yes.. Yes.. It?s true! Microsoft has finally finished working on the most awaited Service Pack 3 Release Candidate 1 (RC1) for Windows XP. And now, it?s even available to some beta testers. Microsoft has promised to fix a good set of bugs in SP3 RC1, and has some new features borrowed from Vista.
Want to try? Desperate? High five to Karthik from Daily Apps for sharing a method to download Windows XP Service Pack 3 Release Candidate 1 directly from Microsoft?s website.
DO NOT install SP3 RC1 if you don?t know what release Candidate versions are!
Follow the steps below and you?ll be enjoying SP3 RC1 in no time
- Download this file ( WindowsXPSP3Hack.cmd ). Once you have downloaded the file, login as administrator and run the file by double clicking it. Wait for the Confirmation Message on screen.
- The Above file adds a few entries to the Windows Registry that makes Microsoft think that you are a part of the Private beta program.
- Check for new updates on Windows Update. You should now see Windows XP SP3 listed in the available updates.
- Download and install it. Reboot whenever necessary.
This hack will make Microsoft think that you too are a beta tester, and you won?t have any problems downloading the service pack.
Just in case if you are forgetting, this is the final service pack for the world?s biggest operating system. So do get your hands on it before everyone else does!
A few people who tried this SP3 at Daily Apps have reported that this SP3 RC1 doesn?t work for non-English Windows XP versions. So download this only if you have an English Windows XP.
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And sorry guys, I?ve postponed my plan to showcase the SC wallpapers tomorrow, because of my busy schedule next week. But don?t worry? If I?ll get time, I?ll definitely post them!
Happy downloading and enjoy!