Change Your Windows 7 Logon Box

Windows only: We’ve seen utilities to change up the background picture on Windows 7′s logon screen, and insert Picasa and Flickr pics, but one deviantArt user provides a file swap that changes the logon box itself, back to an early-stage “Longhorn” appearance.

To swap out Windows 7′s small, square logon box for the more rectangular and glass-framed look it had back in the early days of Microsoft’s Longhorn drafts for Vista. CyberNet News explains how to make the swap, using a DLL file picked up from a crafty deviantArt tweaker:  Read more... (213 words, 1 image, estimated 51 secs reading time)

Set Bing Backgrounds as Automatically Updated Wallpaper

Even if you don’t love Bing’s search, you probably appreciate its home page backgrounds. Now you can set those Bing images as your desktop wallpaper through an official theme, and keep it updated automatically through an RSS feed.

Windows 7 users need only to download the theme package from Microsoft’s offering page and double-click it to set up a “Bing Dynamic” theme. By default, the wallpapers rotate every minute or so, so you’ll want to head into the settings to slow things down a bit (click the “Desktop Background” link at bottom). You’ll get three months of Bing wallpapers through the feed, automatically updated each week. Each image has a Bing watermark, but it’s not too ostentatious.

Create a TOR Button in Chrome for On-Demand Anonymous Browsing

The TOR Project provides free, distributed worldwide proxies for anonymous browsing and private downloading. TOR comes with a built-in Firefox add-on, but Chrome users can get a handy on/off button for TOR with this setup, explained by commenter brssnkl.

• Step 1: Install TOR (Note: The “Installation Bundle” packages for Windows and Mac are the preferred downloads).

• Step 2: Install Proxy Switchy! in your Chrome browser.

• Step 3: Change the profile name with “Tor” (or which name you want but remember it). Make the http proxy “127.0.0.1″ and the port “8118″. then check the box “Use the same proxy server for all protocols”. Hit “Save” at the bottom. The full set-up is pictured here:  Read more... (256 words, 3 images, estimated 1:01 mins reading time)