Some of the most well-known programs are: Tweaks.com Logon Changer for Windows 7, Thoosje’s Windows 7 Logon Editor and Windows 7 Longon Screen Editor developed by a DeviantART member called bcubing.

I will present in detail my favorite tool for this task: Tweaks.com Logon Changer for Windows 7. I like it because it is free, you only have to download and unpack it, it doesn’t require any installation and it has less than 1Mb in size. After you open the application, click on ‘Change Logon Screen’ and browse to the wallpaper that you want to set as a logon background.

One of the Windows 7 requirements when it comes to the background of the logon screen is that the image must not be bigger than 245KB. With this tool you don’t have to worry about it. If you select an image that is bigger that 245KB, the program will prompt this information and ask you to let it worry about that.

To preview the new logon screen, press the Test button.

The settings menu offers you the possibility of changing the logon screen at every logon, every day or every time you lock your computer.

Another cool option is selecting how the login screen button looks like: with darker or lighter text and shadows or no text shadow and darker button.

Somewhere on the web is the ultimate music site. It has virtually every album, EP and single ever released in a variety of high-quality formats with insanely fast download speeds. You’re probably not allowed in.

The Pirate Bay is dead. So is TorrentSpy, MiniNova, Suprnova and many other public BitTorrent trackers. But the most savvy and obsessive file hoarders don’t care about that stuff; they wouldn’t be caught dead using public trackers.

People serious about downloading pirated music, movies, TV shows, software and other media aren’t interested in getting a letter from their ISP or the RIAA/IFPI/MPAA/CRIA. They’re also not interested in getting viruses or fake files, often seeded on public trackers by copyright enforcers looking to make piracy annoying. So they’ve built up hundreds of private sites that only trusted users can access.

A private BitTorrent tracker is a site that you can only gain access to via an invite from a current user. Some of them are very basic, featuring merely a searchable list of torrents people have uploaded. Many feature forums with the trackers for people to announce and discuss files that are available. The most sophisticated feature gigantic databases that organize the files like the greatest online downloading store ever built, but with no checkout.

There are huge private trackers that, like The Pirate Bay, offer up everything and anything that you could want. But there are many more smaller, more specialized trackers. There are sites for music, for movies, for HD Blu-ray movie rips, for both Mac and PC software, for porn, for comic books, for console games, for anime, for TV shows, for E-books and for sporting events. If you know where to look, you can find a site that specializes in exactly what you care about downloading the most.

But downloading media isn’t the only thing going on at these sites. At some, they’re software development communities, with large numbers of developers donating time to building the site together into something more than just a place to grab files and leave. And it’s just this sort of development that gives these sites the ability to reappear in different forms if they get shut down. Because, when you’re in the illegal file-swapping business, getting busted is a fact of life.

The RIAA told me that while both public and private trackers are “enormously damaging,” they’ve handed the reins over to the IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry) to go after these sites. This is probably because many of these sites are hosted overseas. The IFPI told me that “it focuses resources on the top of the illegal supply chain of music, regardless of whether that is a public tracker, private tracker or other source.”

OiNK was probably the biggest private music tracker on the web when it was shut down in 2007 by the IFPI. It was huge and well loved. Even Trent Reznor admitted he had an account:

I’ll admit I had an account there and frequented it quite often. At the end of the day, what made OiNK a great place was that it was like the world’s greatest record store. Pretty much anything you could ever imagine, it was there, and it was there in the format you wanted. If OiNK cost anything, I would certainly have paid, but there isn’t the equivalent of that in the retail space right now.

OiNK was so well loved because, as Reznor said, it was amazing. If there was an album you were searching for, it was a couple of clicks away. And thanks to infamously strict bitrate requirements, it was available in a number of formats, all higher-quality than what iTunes was offering at the time.Furthermore, OiNK had very strict ratio requirements, meaning that if you didn’t upload as well as download, you’d be kicked off the site. This ensured that files were seeded for a long time and were continually available.

Last month, after a two-year legal ordeal, OiNK founder Allen Ellis was found not guilty and released in the UK. But immediately upon OiNK’s demise, multiple other trackers popped up to replace it, built by former members of the OiNK community and following the same ratio and quality guidelines that made OiNK so popular. And those replacements offer even more functionality than OiNK did, continuing to grow and improve in the years since it was shut down.

One of them, let’s call it Site X, has surpassed OiNK in terms of content and functionality. It’s run like a business, with multiple staffers putting in many hours a week to code it, manage it and work on new features. I talked to the founder and lead SysOp of Site X, who said when the site first started he put in a full-time job’s worth of hours. “Nowadays, a conservative estimate would be 15 hours,” which is still no small amount. And he is one of three SysOps. There are also two administrators, one developer and 17 moderators on the Site X staff. That’s a lot of manpower for something nobody is getting paid for.And according to this head SysOp, all money made from user donations goes to maintaining the servers and not into any wallets. “I’d be too scared to touch it, even if I could dampen my sense of morality enough to reach my hand into the piggybank.” (One of the main charges levied against OiNK founder Alan Ellis was that he made “hundred of thousands of pounds” from user donations.)

Site X’s main feature is its huge database of torrents. All are organized by artist, so you can find everything someone has released in one place. Many releases are available in multiple file formats, ranging from lossless FLAC to various bitrates of MP3 to AAC to Ogg, for weirdos that really want their music to all be in Ogg. And for major releases with multiple versions available, you’ll find every version, from the original to the vinyl to rereleases, available separately.Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, for example, has 20 different versions available on Site X spread across 60 different download options (click the image to the left to see the entire crazy list). Sure, most people will go for the basic V0 MP3 of the standard issue recording, but if you really want to find the 1981 Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab master digitized from vinyl as FLACs, or the 1983 Japanese Black Triangle Pressing in 320 AAC, they’re here. It’s a completists’ paradise.

But what about discovering new music? Site X has two features that help with that: collages and similar artist maps. Collages are basically user-made lists of albums. They can be something like Pitchfork’s 100 Best Albums of the 70′s or AllMusic 5 Star Albums or just one guy’s favorite 90′s ska records. At the bottom of every album page it lists what collages that album is a part of so you can explore other music that somehow relates to it.

Similar artist maps are visual guides that appear at the bottom of each artist page. Anyone can add an artist they feel is similar to an artist’s page, and as those suggestions get voted up and down, they appear in various sizes in the visual guide at the bottom. Like a band? Simply check out other bands in the map to try something similar.

All of this is built on a system that’s rooted in a community. There’s an extensive forum here, as well as a Wiki full of information on everything from site rules to how to digitize a vinyl perfectly. And the community helps build the site, coding features that are added to the system and creating hundreds of custom CSS skins to change the appearance.But what if Site X gets shut down like OiNK was? It has over 116,000 users as of this writing, a number far too large for it to escape the notice of the same people that shut down OiNK. The head SysOp admits that they’ve already gained some unwanted attention: “We’ve gotten multiple letters from the CRIA, but none in the past year and a half. It’s been very quiet lately. They’ve either realized they can’t do anything, or are busy launching an amazing assault.” Won’t all the work put into this system be for nothing if the latter is true?

Nope. Because the entire site was built as an open-source piece of software called Gazelle, one that’s continually tweaked and updated. Gazelle runs the whole structure of the site, and they’re currently working on writing an entirely original tracker from scratch for it. And so far, there are over 50 other private trackers running Gazelle. If one dies, another will pop up to replace it.

So does the existence of such a large network of meticulously-built private BitTorrent sites mean the IFPI and other trade organizations are losing the piracy battle? No, actually. These sites are very difficult to get into and just as difficult to stay in once you’re there. They are most definitely not for laypeople, and they’re also not at “the top of the supply chain.” The days of Napster and Kazaa making piracy easy enough for your mom to do it are gone. It’s actually harder to pirate media now than it was a few years ago thanks to the efforts of copyright holders.

Yes, these sites exist that are far, far better than any option has ever been before. But even a site as large and sophisticated as Site X has only 116,000 members. That’s nothing compared to the millions of people who populated the large peer-to-peer file-sharing programs a few years ago.

So yes, piracy is indeed alive and well, more sophisticated than ever before. But it’s been pushed to places that most people can’t get to, and though that’s an unlikely victory for the recording industry, I doubt they’d ever claim it as theirs.

The Parrot AR.Drone is a quadricopter that you can control with an iPhone or iPod touch. The quadricopter has two integrated cameras that will be used as eyes to deliver live video onto your iPhone. The AR.Drone will be used for real time video games. Tomorrow the Parrot AR.Drone will be available for review on the CES. Till now you can watch the videos below to see what you can do with it.

The AR.Drone includes two cameras. One camera at the front that broadcasts the video to the iPhone screen, this gives you a real time game play feeling like you where sitting in the cockpit. The second camera is located at the bottom that measures its speed and makes sure the quadricopters flies stable.

To control the quadricopters your Parrot AR.Drone generates its own WiFi network that will connect to your iPhone or iPod Touch.

Parrot AR.Drone : Flight Demo (HD version)

Until Vista’s launch, I’d always been a Windows and PC hardcore fan and used to make fun of people using a Mac… Then Vista was made available to the public… a couple of weeks later I bought a MacBook Pro with OSX 10.5 and have never ever regretted it.

Happy with my MacBook Pro but still struggling to find a decently powerful and affordable desktop replacement, lead me to buy several Mac Mini. And That also lead me to tweak them with more RAM, change the Core Duo 1.6GHz to a Core 2 Duo 2.0GHz CPU, add a 500GB HDD until realizing that nothing could beat a real desktop, not even these iMacs with their fancy mirrors more commonly known over at Cupertino as SCREEN… Leaving me with the only option to invest a lot, into a Mac Pro in order to finally get something that would fit my needs… But then again, Apple’s limitation as being capable of running only 2 OS natively on their computer as well as their insanely expensive options led me to seek another alternative.

Yep, I am a Geek and like most of you gals and guys who are reading this blog, you may well be able to understand my wish to experiment, to test new OS, to improve my hardware.. I had up to 2 or 3 Video cards just for the fun of it in my rig and also changed my computer’s CPU whenever I wanted or could…
However although so far I had been content with my MacBook Pro and OSX, I was still hoping to do more…

The Only solution I had was to go rogue, and jump into the dark side of OSX by installing Apple OS, along side with Windows 7 and Ubuntu on a PC… And since Apple made the stupid decision of switching from PowerPC to Intel (Stupid as now they have no way to control the way people use their OS anymore), I could find several ways to make my dream possible and to get a fully loaded i7 Desktop running whatever I want on it.

I believe I tried every single solution I could put my hands on, from “Shady” OSX version with some reptilians loader, up to Psystar’s latest and lamest Boot loader software that only worked once on my rig and failed to install once they updated it…

No, really, things were tough. I was desperate to get my ultimate system running… Then, after surfing the web, I found a Company, ASEM, founded by a German fellow and operating its business in Taiwan, that happen to develop and sell the ultimate Plug & Play EFI loader enabling you to install almost every OS (I said almost) on a Windows Based computer…

This little wonder is called EFi-X, and I am sure that lately you’ve heard quite a lot about it, either in good ways or very bad… I will try to ignore for a second the accusation that has been made on ASEM and just concentrate on the product itself.

EFi-X is a simple BPU (Boot Processor Unit) that will add on top of your motherboard BIOS and EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface), that will control ALL OS installed on your PC and let you choose between them in a simple menu and let you access your Windows XP, VISTA, 7 HDD or your Ubuntu one or OSX (10.5 /10.6).

Getting Started with EFi-X
Yes, the EFi-X delivers what it promises, but you will have to make some sacrifices, in many different aspects.

First of all, despite being a “simple” USB 2.0 BPU, EFi-X cannot be installed on any PC. You don’t purchase an EFi-X and just plug it on the first computer you may own. You actually have to build up your system based on ASEM HCL (Hardware Compatible List). An HCL restricting you to only 3 Motherboard brands (Gigabyte, Intel and DFI) and what’s more, the same applies for Video Cards, where NVIDIA is the big winner and just only 5 ATI cards are supported.

For CPUs, things are even more limited since AMD is not yet supported, however, Intel CPUs ranging from the Atom to the i7 (i5 not yet officially supported) are.
When it comes to the additional network card, only 4 cards are listed on the HCL and for sound cards things are a bit better but once again… not more than a few choices.

Once you selected your hardware and made sure to be 100% EFi-X HCL compliant, it is still possible that something goes wrong and locks you out. Many EFi-X users had different experiences with normally supported NVIDIA Chipset. For some the system worked, however, they could plug 1 Screen only on their card… So, yep, in spite of ASEM’s work of testing many different pieces of hardware, it is still probable that something goes wrong. But on the other hand, you have to admit that it is almost impossible for a company to test everything, so just cross your fingers just like I did when you setup-up your PC.

My Setting
As for my test, here you have the hardware that I am running, and I hope it will give you a better understanding of what to get if you are interested.

CPU = Intel i7 920
RAM = 6GB (3×2) of Century Micro CK2GX3-D3U1333
MOTHER BOARD = Gigabyte EX58-UD4P
VIDEO CARD = MSI GeForce N9800GTX PLUS-2D512-OC
HDD = Barracuda 7200.12 Desktop Hard Drives 500GB 3X, Barracuda 7200.11 Desktop Hard Drives 1500GB 1X
POWER SUPPLY = Antec TP-750
ENCLOSURE = Antec P183

Installing and running EFi-X
Once you get your hardware fitted together, you have plugged your EFi-X to your motherboard via its internal USB 2.0 port, tweak your BIOS first to get your EFi-X run as well as other small tweaks including AHCI and so on…

Once everything is in order, you are now ready to boot-up your computer and install your OS (several of them)… The good news is that OSX can be installed directly from its DVD drive, but first you will have to remove your AHCI setting in your BIOS in order to see the OSX DVD installed. Once done, and once landed on EFi-X boot page, select your DVD drive and just install OSX like you would do on a regular Mac. Installing XP, VISTA, 7 or Ubuntu is a bit different, you will in fact have to install these OS without EFi-X running and once done, just plug your EFi-X back to your computer. You should normally see your other OS in the EFi-X Boot menu and run them smoothly. Beware, however that for Ubuntu you will have to play with GRUB to get it running, while with Windows XP, Vista or 7, it is probable, well actually for me it happened ALL the time, that the first run will disable your EFi-X from the Bios and will force you to reset your computer.

Once All 3 OS have been installed on their own HDD (EFi-X do not support Drive partition) and once you succeeded to boot them all… You will get a real multi OS computer that you can maintain and upgrade at will, and despite some small glitches while running OSX 10.6, each OS are running like magic and you won’t notice anything as if EFi-X does not exist at all.

The true wonder of EFi-X is that it won’t install any crap unlike other boot loaders on your HDD, and you could virtually take your OSX HDD out of your PC for example and plug it into any real MAC and won’t suffer any glitches…

Now while Windows XP, Vista & 7 (32 or 64bit) as well as Ubuntu are running just fine, OSX 10.6 is however a bit different. As for today, for example, there is a nasty bug where both reboot and shutdown won’t physically reboot or shutdown your PC. Other EFi-X users running no i7 PCs do not suffer from this bug.
All other features like Time Machine or Apple update are fully operational.

Conclusion
Now that everything is running and after weeks of testing… I have to admit that I am impressed. I’ve finally got my dream come true with a powerful Computer capable of running what the hell I want to run on it… This being said and despite ASEM efforts to make EFi-X the ultimate tool, our small BTU is still dedicated to a niche of Geeks (like myself) who happen to have time in their hands and who are not scared of tweaking both their hardware and software… Building an entire “fleet” of EFi-X powered computers for a company would be a risky thing to do with several difficulties and maintenance issues. And also installing OSX on a non Apple Hardware is breaking Apple EULA and this could, depending your country of residence, go from harmless to being pretty serious.

But once again, I have to admit that I am very impressed by the EFi-X and hope that ASEM will continue to improve this product with a better support with future hardware… Made by Geeks for Geeks, EFi-X is truly a blessing and it will be hard for me to get back to a single OS oriented computer.

Last week The Pirate Bay confirmed it would shut down its tracker permanently, instead encouraging the use of DHT, PEX, and magnet links. This move confounded many BitTorrent enthusiasts, who were confronted with confusing new terminology and technology. Time for some explaining.

The Pirate Bay’s recent confirmation that they had closed down their tracker since DHT and Peer Exchange have matured enough to take over, was coupled with the news that they had added Magnet links to the site. This news has achieved its aim of stimulating discussion, but has also revealed that there is much confusion over how these technologies work.

The key thing to understand is that nobody is being forced to use Magnet links or trackerless torrents. While these long-standing technologies may prove to be the future, they will co-exist with tracker-enabled torrenting for quite some time. For now, nobody will be forced to immediately change their existing downloading habits, although it may be wise to switch to a BitTorrent client that is compatible with these technologies.

In an attempt to clear some of the mystique surrounding DHT, PEX and Magnet links we will walk through all three briefly, hoping to assure those who’ve become confused earlier this week.

DHT and PEX in action

DHT

Using DHT instead of trackers is one of the things The Pirate Bay is now trying to encourage, and torrent downloads that rely solely on this technology are often referred to as “trackerless torrents.” DHT is used to find the IP addresses of peers, mostly in addition to a tracker. It is enabled by default in clients such as uTorrent and Vuze and millions of people are already using it without knowing.

DHT’s function is to find peers who are downloading the same files, but without communicating with a central BitTorrent tracker such as that previously operated by The Pirate Bay.

DHT is by no means a new technology. A version debuted in the BitTorrent client Azureus in May 2005 and an alternative but incompatible version was added to Mainline BitTorrent a month later. There is, however, a plugin available for Azureus Vuze which allows it access to the Mainline DHT network used by uTorrent and other clients.

Peer Exchange (“PEX”)

Peer Exchange is yet another means of finding IP addresses. Rather than acting like a tracker, it leverages the knowledge of peers you are connected to, by asking them in turn for the addresses of peers they are connected to. Although it requires a “kick start”, PEX will often uncover more genuine peers than DHT or a tracker.

Magnet links

Traditionally, .torrent files are downloaded from torrent sites. A torrent client then calculates a torrent hash (a kind of fingerprint) based on the files it relates to, and seeks the addresses of peers from a tracker (or the DHT network) before connecting to those peers and downloading the desired content.

Sites can save on bandwidth by calculating torrent hashes themselves and allowing them to be downloaded instead of .torrent files. Given the torrent hash – passed as a parameter within a Magnet link – clients immediately seek the addresses of peers and connect to them to download first the torrent file, and then the desired content.

It is worth noting that BitTorrent can not ditch the .torrent format entirely and rely solely on Magnet links. The .torrent files hold crucial information that is needed to start the downloading process, and this information has to be available in the swarm.

Pirate Bay links cf. Mininova links: When the Magnet link specification first came out, in January last year it called for a particular format (“base32 encoded”). The links that EZTV, Mininova and ShareReactor have displayed for some time all conform to that original specification. In May of last year the specification was changed, in favor of “hex encoding”, and that is the format of the links being displayed by The Pirate Bay. Torrent clients should accept either format.

Compatible Clients

All the main torrent clients: uTorrent 1.8.5, Vuze 4.3.0.2, BitTorrent 6.3, BitComet 1.16, and Transmission 1.76 (and others) support Peer Exchange and DHT (via a plugin in the case of Vuze). Neither BitComet nor Transmission yet support Magnet links but Transmission is planning to include Magnet link support in the upcoming 1.8 release. Bearing in mind that no site, including The Pirate Bay, has yet abandoned support for traditional torrent files, there is plenty of time for support to be added.

We hope that this article has cleared some of the smoke that was generated by The Pirate Bay’s announcements earlier this week. There is no need to panic, cry or be angry, and it’s not a problem if you’re still confused after reading this article. Torrents will still be available and aside from some extra downloading options thanks to sites that add Magnet links, nothing drastic will change in the near future.

The cherries (and various other icons) are part of Waze’s new “Road Goodies” program, which essentially turns the navigation service—which has, by most counts, gotten a lot better over the past few months—into a simple point-gathering game. The point of these points? Well, the treasures are placed wherever there are gaps in Waze’s map data:

The points don’t get you anything outside of Waze, ahem, street cred, so this is basically just a big ploy by the company to extract free labor from their user base. Which is fine! Though I feel Waze should probably scatter a few di, for when people start driving into deadly ravines in the name of fake treasure.

The new version of Waze is live in the App Store and Android App Market right now. [iTunes]

Early this morning, the endlessly ingenious iPhone hacking community released Blacksn0w, a carrier unlock for the iPhone 3G and 3GS. Even if you have no need to plug in a different SIM card than what was originally intended, however, Blacksn0w still has its perks. Namely, it brings the aforementioned unauthorized data tethering right on back.

We’ve just walked through the process, and it went off without a hitch. If you’re interested in doing the same but don’t want to do it alone, we’ve thrown together a handy step-by-step guide, just for you.

Disclaimer: We are not your mom. We are also not the ones who made any of this stuff, nor do we recommend doing it. There have been reports of this process bricking (read: breaking) phones, though it seems to work just fine for everyone we’ve talked to. If your iPhone breaks, melts, or runs away, or if AT&T somehow figures out you’re tethering and charges you a million dollars per megabyte, it’s not our fault.

We’re seeing some reports on Twitter that some users are having issues with WiFi, GPS, or YouTube after unlocking with Blacksn0w. If you have any such issues, go to Settings > General > Reset> and hit “Reset Network Settings”. Once that’s complete, do a hard power cycle by holding the sleep/home button for a few seconds and then sliding the on-screen power toggle.

With that out of the way, lets begin. The entire process is drop dead simple, and should take roughly 10 minutes. This should work on both Windows and OS X. The steps below assume that you have not yet jailbroken your iPhone, and will walk you through that process.

• 1. Download BlackRa1n for either Mac or PC here.
  2.Plug in your iPhone
  3.Run BlackRa1n

• 4.Hit the “Make it rain” button to jailbreak your iPhone. Your iPhone 3GS will almost immediately reset, and will   soon display a picture of iPhone hacker Geohot. The entire process should take about 45-60 seconds. Do not interrupt this process by unplugging the cable or tinkering with your iPhone.

• 5.Once your iPhone has fully booted: Congratulations! Your iPhone is now jailbroken.

• 6.Look for the Blackra1n icon on your iPhone’s homescreen. Open the Blackra1n app

• 7.Tap the label that reads “sn0w”, then hit the Install button in the upper right. This will unlock your phone for use on any SIM-compatible carrier, and reenable the IPCC hack required to enable tethering.. This part should take about 30 seconds.

• 8.Once the unlock is complete, open Safari. Navigate to:
• http://m.peacefulinsanity.com/Tether.mobileconfig

• 9.Hit the “Install” button in the upper right. Confirm the resulting prompt, alerting you that the file has not been signed. Allow the IPCC file to install, which will take about 10 seconds.

• 10.Close Safari. Hold the sleep and home button until your iPhone resets. This reboot may take a bit longer than normal.

• 11.When your iPhone resets, go into Settings > General > Network > Internet Tethering. If you can successfully switch the “Internet Tethering” slider to “On”: Congratulations! Everything seems to have worked as expected.

From here, tethering is a matter of following the on-screen instructions. Enjoy your jailbroken, tetherable iPhone 3G/3GS on OS 3.1/3.1.2! If you’ve gotten this far, we’d recommend installing Cydia (just open up blackra1n and tap the Cydia label). You should also consider allowing Cydia to record the signature hashes of your device once installed; be it that Apple patches this exploit in the next release, you’ll most likely need those to get back to a jailbroken state.

The iPhone Dev-Team has confirmed that it is safe to jailbreak iPhone OS 3.0.1 with the current release of RedSn0w

You can re-use redsn0w v0.8 we released a few weeks ago to jailbreak today’s 3.0.1 update. Just let iTunes update or restore you to official 3.0.1 then run redsn0w. The only “trick” is that when redsn0w asks you to identify the IPSW used, point it at the 3.0 IPSW instead of the 3.0.1 one. After the jailbreak, reinstall ultrasn0w 0.9 if you need the unlock.

The iPhone OS 3.0.1 update was release by Apple to fix a SMS flaw that allows hackers to take control of your iPhone. It is not functionally different.

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