Stardock CursorXP is a freeware program that enables users to have spectacular mouse cursors. Unlike the basic Windows mouse cursors, CursorXP mouse cursors can be both alpha blended and fully animated at the same time. It's also incredibly easy to make your own mouse cursors with CursorXP as the different cursor states are just "bit strip" in PNG format (every frame of animation stored in a single .PNG file).

Stardock also makes CursorXP Plus which adds additional features to CursorXP such as color changing and changing the size of the cursor on the fly.  There are hundreds of Stardock CursorXP mouse cursors available on most customization websites (including WinCustomize, deviantART, Skinbase, and elsewhere). You can download it at www.cursorxp.com. 

New in version 1.31: Various performance tweaks along with support for 64bit Windows (for those of you with the AMD64).

I regularly get emails sent to me from websites that want free products to run as part of a "contest" or other promotion. We often do this kind of thing.  But the first thing I do is make sure I'm on a computer that has Alexa toolbar installed and hop on over there.

The reason I do that is that Alexa's toolbar will actually display the numerical ranking of a given website.  If it's ranked in the top 100,000 websites, it's very popular.  So with it, I can quickly find out the relative ranking of a given website.

Now, spyware programs report this program as Spyware. That's because, technically, it is.  The way it works is that it tells a master server what domains its millions of users have visited and that's how it compiles its rankings. But it's not Spyware in the negative sense, it's providing a valuable service to the net.

Give it a try for yourself. It has a serach bar in it too.  It also displays related websites which is also very invaulable.  So when I go to WinCustomize.com, it has links to Stardock, WindowBlinds, Deskmod, Skinbase, Deskmod, etc. all as part of the toolbar automatically because those are other sites that visitors here go to according to its user base.

DiskInternals Flash Recovery is a flash memory file recovery tool that every digital camera owner should have handy. Essentially, this program is a "first aid kit" for digital photographers and comes to the rescue at the exact time when it's needed.

Unfortunately, photographs are often accidentally deleted or lost due to hardware (camera or memory) malfunction. Sometimes, flash memory gets re-formatted. The good news is that in all of these cases the images are not lost. DiskInternals Flash Recovery can undelete and restore photographs in a matter of seconds or minutes.

Download: Flash Recovery

Download Accelerator Plus (DAP) increases download speeds by up to 300 percent. It searches for mirror sites that most effectively serve your downloads through multiserver connections for optimal utilization of dial-up or broadband connections. DAP automatically recovers from shutdowns, lost connections, and other errors. It is fully integrated into Internet Explorer, Netscape, and Opera, and offers a toolbar for Internet Explorer with a links catcher and a highlighter. It features auto-hang-up after downloading, proxy settings, scheduling, and a unique AlwaysResume service.

New features in version 7.4 include a filter pane that filters files on your files list according to various criteria (download status, file type), and a history manager that allows browsing through previously downloaded files by time frames. DAP also offers multilingual support for German, Dutch, French, Chinese (traditional), Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Russian, and Italian.

Download: DL Accelerator 7.4?

2004 was a big year for Object Desktop users.

Object Desktop is Stardock's premiere suite of Windows enhancement utilities. When a user gets Object Desktop, they can really turbo-charge their Windows experience.

This article below goes through the changes made in Object Desktop. You can also learn more about Object Desktop at www.objectdesktop.com.

Expert blacksmithing gets you to 150.  Artistan starts at 200.  So what do I need to do to get from 150 to 200?

I dunno but I'm finding black smithing to be kind of a waste of time so far.  Aldar is a much better blacksmith and we have no enchanters in our guild.  So I've thought about being an Enchanter but I fear that's too much work to get started and I'm already at 150 on blacksmithing.

DeepT had this to say on professions:

After doing all the professions to a reasonable level (not including specialist blacksmithing), I have decided none of them are that good.

Alchmey:
None of the potions give fantastic buffs or effects. Powerful, usefull effects are very short lived. For example one potion gives 1000ac, but for a mere minute. Another gives invisibility, for a mere 30 seconds. And then healing potions have timers which is stupid. I can understand the 'diablo' effect being worrysome, however there seems to be one key factor blizzard missed. In diablo you can buy an infinite supply of potions, in WoW you can not. If they removed timers people would got nuts for a short while and then suddenly the supply would dry up. Healing potion prices would go through the roof. Still maybe you might suck down 3 or 4 potions in a fight, but then you would have to ask yourself, was spending 1gp in potions worth killing 1 mob? You want a money sink? Remove those timers.

Tailoring / Leather working / Smithing: At low levels this is great, but the problem is player made items quickly cease being usefull compared to common 'green' drops. While there are a few specialty items that have very nice benifits, the vast majority of this stuff is crap. I thought all crafting was supposed to be slightly better then common quest rewards and worse then speical quest rewards. Blizzard really needs to buff these professions to bring them up to the level they need to be.

Engineering:

Explosives -- These are garbage. They do no scale up enough to be useful and are not worth thier cost. The top bomb does like 450 pts of damage. It costs materials worth a few gold in the AH. My spells I can cast for FREE can double that damage easily, the better ones can do 1000s in a much larger AOE. My theory on a bomb is that each level of bombs (geared toward a certain character level) should do like 50% or MORE of a mobs health, maybe even 75%. Remeber this is a large economic cost to using the better bombs.

Bots -- Actually quite usefull for a few levels and somewhat expensive. I would only add more bots for granulairty.

Trinkets -- Mostly worthless. The unreliability factor is way to high. Net-o-matic is far overrated. Its rare to not miss or miss-fire. In PvP maybe 1 out of 5 times I use it, it has desirable results. They need to remove or tone way way down the misfire probability.

Gadgets -- normally they replace some armor piece such as belt, helm, boots, etc... rarely, if ever, are any of these better then what you would have to replace them with. For example, do you want to wear your +10 int / Stamina boots that give you +6 shadow damage or gnomish rocket boots that let your run fast for 20 seconds, have a 15 minute cooldown, and a 45% chance of simply exploding instead of working? Further worsening the fact is that you can not change armor in combat, so if you need a quick getaway you just cant hot key them on and run for the hills.

Overall I am dissapointed in the quality of crafted items in the game. With the exception of engineering which has just a very very few useful items (Green Lense, Shrink ray, Death Ray) I would just make a gatherer. Herbs/Skinner or Mining/Skinner and then just buy the good shit from the AH.

I walked into the living room and my wife was watching one of those fat people losing weight shows.

I said, "Deb, why are you wasting your life watching this junk?"

To which she responded, "Big talk from the man who just spent his entire day playing World of Warcraft."

A pause.

"Well, I did make it to level 30 today."

At which point my son Alex chimes in, "Yea, now daddy can wear a helmet!"

My wife looks at my son and then looks at me and says,

"Brad, I think you need to wear a helmet."

..

I'm just saying that World of Warcraft is a better waste of time than biggest lower or whatever it's called. Because...Because..well...because!

Last month we released SkinPlant's Unorthodox skin pack.  It was a collection of 5 skins that took on totally unique ideas on how the Windows GUI might be done.  It's been a hit with users.  But many users loved the designs so much that they requested that we provide them with "normal" styles as well.  That is, ones with the standard Windows configuration.

So this month, Unorthodox has been updated to include Orthodox skins. If you already have Unorthodox, just go here and put in your email address and it'll send you a link to the updated pack.

Here's an example using Tablet PC (Unorthodox/Orthodox):

Gives me a headache just seeing someone compare evolution to space alien seeding as being "equally plausible".

Evolution is a theory. But some people here don't seem to grasp that there is a big difference between a theory and a hypothesis or even a hypothesis and a random guess pulled out of ones rear end.

There are a lot of things we don't know "for a fact".  We don't know, for a fact, precisely how gravity works. We don't know, for a fact, precisely how magnetism works.  We have pretty solid theories on these things.  Evolution is one of those kinds of theories.  Luckily, most educated people do believe in evolution as it is how many of our medical advances are arriving. Whether that be genetically modified foods, DNA based medicines, studies on fruit flies and other past control systems, etc. Evolution, as a theory, is something that is applied by researchers all the time.  To equate that to a hypthesis that some magical super being just whipped everything out as-is defies any sort of sense.

Believing in evolution does not make religion false or wrong or whatever. But I'd be pretty pissed off if some ignorant religious zealots forced stickers onto my kid's science books.  Because why not stop there? Let's put stickers on everything that's a theory.

Because when you come right down to it, there's not a lot of things we know "for a fact".  Evolutions, however, is about as close to a fact as we're going to get minus a time machine to be able to sit through and watch some large bear spending increasingly high amounts of time in the water until one day, one is born with paddled feet (a deformity) and it turns out that he is better at catching food than the rest. Over time, that gene is passed on to others and fast forward millions of years and you have whales who still, in their skeleton, have the remnants of leg bones.  Or the example of birds in the Pacific where flightless birds dot Pacific islands and no mammals or reptiles live since you would need flight to have gotten there in thef irst place.  Or the cases of elephants who got trapped on Madagascar milliosn of years ago when the island broke off from Africa and ended up tiny (unfortunately, the natives killed them all shortly after they arrived). 

The fossil record AND the DNA record is replete with examples of how evolution has worked. The actual lab evidence backs up the theories of specieis evolving into new species.  Reading some of these posts make sme wonder if some people have bothered to even read up on evolution or whether they're stuck with the propaganda fed to them 30 years ago.  Just in the past 5 or so years, thanks to DNA research, we've confirmed many aspects of evolution. And we rely on the mechanisms of evolution for all kinds of research that we benefit from every day.  If you don't believe in evolution, you should probably stop eating things like corn or oranges and when you see a dog, just close your eyes and say "you're not here..you're not here" because one wouldn't want to recognize the obvious changes dogs have undergone just in the past 10,000 years due to human tampering with dogs (imagine how much they'd change given 10 million years).