Firing it Up

    It lives! *thunder and lighting crash and clash as rain pummels against the window… light flashes on Vincent's newest monstrous machine…*

     I have finally reformatted and rebooted my computer. It took several whole days to hard-format the drives, then reformat them for Windows, then install Windows, then reinstate my programs and documents, and finally to customize the settings of everything to my liking. I have decided to save myself some pain and have installed Windows XP on it instead, relying on deviantART for themes, skins, and mods instead of myself. Usually when I build a new computer I invest days and days of time in it, coding, creating, and constructing everything myself. But, with the Europe trip around the corner, I just do not have time. I have since become more impressed with the devART community once again - a single search produces an abundance of skins of all kinds for me to use.

    I inadvertently stumbled onto the Rainmeter utility through viewing a skin on dA: BlackGlass

    Interesting program indeed. For those who don't know it's a very open-ended (skinning wise) utility that allows you to display graphics for the date and time, hard drive and memory usage, net transfer rates, etc. I did not find an official site for Rainmeter - just Google it. I also did not install Trillian and opted for, in my opinion, a less user-friendly but more powerful multi-messaging client Miranda IM. I stumbled upon this skin and loved it: Crystal QIP

    I removed many buttons and such from the windows and boxes because right now I want some simplicity and minimalism to ease my headache. It's great that IM programs can video chat and file transfer but right now I just want a freaking box where I type words into . On that note I grew tired of third-party operating system interfaces (such as Litestep) and was delighted to find a section of devART categories (Customization > Skins & Themes > Windows Utilities > Visual Styles) which run as Windows XP Themes that you paste into WINDOWS / Resources / Themes or some directory like that. currently I'm using: SHADED

    Very nice skin indeed. I wish I had IconPackager  or some other equivalent to use icons for this Theme, but I don't really like the icons that come with this - they all look too alike and are too bright; when I'm trying to find something I wouldn't be able to tell where it was. That's minimalism to a fault.

    Ah, what the hell. One more deviantART link. I guess it's just Whore dA Day or something: Blue ThruWay

    That is my current desktop. The wallpaper looked cool as it caught my eye browsing dA. And that is currently the visual build of my computer. For the sake of completion (if there exist such stalkers who want to clone my desktop) Xfire has the CleanX skin (from the official site) and Winamp is running smpl [Gray] (by Bunji of dA). By the way, windowed programs and games look pretty cool with these Visual Styles, for example Guild Wars or Yahoo IM (with the skin disabled).

    My future plans for this desktop: I wish to streamline everything on the desktop. Phase One would be to have all programs coded to autorun (for example, modding together all the skinlets of a Rainmeter skin and using the Rainmeter source code to create a standalone program). Phase Two would be to then unify - or at least package - all these programs together so that they initialize with one click. Perhaps after that's done I can also create a self-installer for everything, seeing as I've always wondered how to create an Installer - a useful talent I have yet to learn.

    But it will have to wait. Europe in a week! I'm excited. Oh, shoot, I still haven't posted that chapter I finished. Let me read it over again and I'll try to have it posted by tonight if I have all my errands finished by then.