Wednesday.Website || WayBack Machine: Historical Internet

Nick — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 20:41:32 +0000

For anyone who has grown up using the Internet, it is sometimes fun to think of what it once was. Remember when Hotmail wasn’t owned by Microsoft? What about how absolutely horrid everything used to look 10 years ago? On the other hand, some sites haven’t changed all that much. Maybe you used to have a website way back in the day, and you’d like to find it again. I’m not sure how this works, but just try entering a website and see if there are any snapshots of it from the past.

*Hat tip to my sister-in-law, Jeni, for telling me about this.

Now, check out the

Some Stuff I Searched

Hotmail Pre-Microsoft (December 1997)

Wow, do you remember when it looked like this?

YouTube (June 2005)

I wasn’t even into YouTube when it looked like this. Were you?

Facebook (January 2006)

I vaguely remember this. I was a late adopter of Facebook, but eventually succumbed.

CNN’s Site on 9/11/2001

Eerie, isn’t it? Seeing it as it was that day.

Wednesday.Website || Smashing Magazine: Design, Inspiration and Free Stuff

Nick — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 19:45:59 +0000

Smashing Magazine

If you’ve never heard of this site, I highly recommend it. While it is aimed mostly at designers and web developers there is a lot of content there to keep the non-geek interested. Today I’m going to highlight a particular post on the site:

Desktop Wallpaper Calendar: October 2009

Seeing as how tomorrow is October, I figured I would point you to some awesome computer desktop calendar backgrounds. Now, in order to fully enjoy your new calendar, you’ll want to free up your desktop of all those pesky icons. Here’s how:

Windows

I’m sure there are other ways of doing this, but here are a couple that I know.

Windows XP

Right-click on your desktop, select Arrange Icons By, uncheck Show Desktop Icons.

Windows Vista

Same steps as above except you select View and then uncheck Show Desktop Icons.

Software Solution

There is a little application called Iconoid that gives you WAY more flexibility in how you control your desktop icons.

As you can see above, there are a lot of tabs there that will allow you to customize your desktop icon experience.

Mac OSX

While I was looking into hiding the desktop icons on my Mac, I came across this interesting post at osxdaily.com. Rather than try the solution proposed, I checked out one of the apps recommended in the comments: Camouflage. It lets you hide icons, and double-click on your wallpaper to go to your Desktop folder in Finder. Right-click on your wallpaper and you’ll see an option to show your icons again. I suggest having this launch at login, to save you the trouble of activating it every time.

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