If you’ve started to get bored with the general Windows XP desktop then the following might be for you.

Step 1 – Replace the desktop theme

Microsoft has put out a really sharp-looking XP desktop theme based on Windows Media Player 11. It simply installs as another desktop theme in your Display Options; no need for any third-party applications.

Update! You might also want to try out Royale Remixed by “~oddbasket”. Less bugs and and a very beautiful theme indeed. Thanks to Balu for sharing!

Step 2 – Add a new background image

If you haven’t replaced the background image already you could visit Deziner Folio and get the set of 74 Hi Res Windows Vista Wallpapers.

Step 3 – Live it up a little

Install Google Desktop and add live search and all the gadgets you can fit on your desktop. After a minute or two your Windows XP could look something like this:

There you go, 3 simple steps to make your welcome screen less boring. Feel free to add more steps through the comments below if you know of any other eye-candy’s worth having!

Microsoft made their next browser version, Internet Explorer 8, available for download on Wednesday. It’s still an early beta release but could prove useful for designers and developers as they now have some time to adapt their websites to yet another IE browser.

According to recent MS blogs IE8 will be more focused on staying with the web standards. However, you can also make it render pages like IE7 and also like it did in older versions. Hopefully most people will stick with the forward compatible mode so that designers for once can have only one stylesheet for media/screen and one for print (wishful thinking ).

On a side note, even though IE8 passed the Acid2 test, they still struggle with the new Acid3 test recently made available by WaSP. Let’s hope Microsoft manages to improve the code before releasing their first RC.

On March 3rd the Web Standards Project (WaSP) announced the release of Acid3, the latest in a line of tests designed to expose flaws in the implementation of mature Web standards in Web browsers. By making sure their software adheres to the test, the creators of these products can be more confident that their software will display and function with Web pages correctly both now and with Web pages of the future.

The Acid3 Test is designed to test specifications for Web 2.0, and exposes potential flaws in implementations of the public ECMAScript 262 and W3C Document Object Model 2 standards. Collectively known as DOM Scripting, it is these technologies that enable advanced page interactivity and power many advanced web applications such as web-based email and on-line office applications.

As a series of 100 mini-tests, Acid3 has already been found to expose flaws in all tested browsers, including Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, and Safari. WaSP hopes that Acid3 will prove useful to browser makers during the development of future versions of their products.

There’s a lot of services available on the Internet that claims to be able to let you browse behind proxies and firewalls. However, even though most of these services work the bandwidth you get is close to what you had back in the nineties. A decade later you simply wont be happy surfing with the speed of an old dial-up modem.

Today I discovered Tor. Tor is a network of virtual tunnels that allows people and groups to improve their privacy and security on the Internet. Tor helps to reduce the risks of both simple and sophisticated traffic analysis by distributing your transactions over several places on the Internet, so no single point can link you to your destination.

The idea is similar to using a twisty, hard-to-follow route in order to throw off somebody who is tailing you — and then periodically erasing your footprints. Instead of taking a direct route from source to destination, data packets on the Tor network take a random pathway through several relays that cover your tracks so no observer at any single point can tell where the data came from or where it’s going.

I successfully bypassed the company’s proxy server today after only a few minutes configuration. Not only did the whole set-up process run smoothly, but the end result was quite amazing. Previously blocked URI’s opened fast, not as fast as normal, but fast enough. Through the Torbutton Firefox add-on you can turn it on or off with a single mouse click. Finally it appears I’ve found a solid HTTP tunnel that works!

Sounds good? Well give it a try! Windows users should follow the Windows howto, OS X users should follow the OS X howto, and Linux/BSD/Unix users should follow the Unix howto.

I’d be happy the hear what you think of it if you decide to give it a go…