We're just over a month away until the fall/autumn season arrives, and I am so ready for some hopefully cooler weather. Fall is a wonderful time to base some desktop themes on as we have many types of skins that fit perfectly with the season. We have an excellent selection of wallpapers , WindowBlinds skins, animated wallpapers for DeskScapes , and much more to choose from! We'll be featuring plenty of themes over the next few weeks, but here are some of our favorites to get started with...
If you play games as a hobby, chances are you have at least a little bit of a games backlog that you haven’t had a chance to get around to playing. Maybe it’s because you lead a busy life that keeps you away from the computer and your consoles most of the time - or maybe, if you’re like me, it’s because you keep going back to the same 5 or 6 games over and over again instead of trying something new. Why do we do that? Well, there are tons of reasons, and...
A few years ago, I built my first ever PC. I've had PCs before, of course, but this was the first one I'd ever built for myself from scratch - though I definitely had supervision! It was a nerve wracking experience, but I genuinely enjoyed learning all the in's and out's of PC building. Would I do it again, though? Hell no! That was too stressful. I get why people love building PCs, but I'd just rather have one of my enthusiast friends build it for me because it's something they love. I...
Stardock Restores Classic Start Menu in Windows 11 Beta version of Start11 is live today Stardock announced Start11 , a program that allows users to customize the Windows Start menu. As with previous editions of the StartX products, Start11 allows users to restore the Start menu to appears as it does in previous versions of Windows as well as customize it to their liking. The beta version is now availab...
If you are looking for a new desktop wallpaper, then you have some great choices from the past month in the WinCustomize gallery. It's also fun that we can get these through DeskScapes 11 without even leaving the app, which is what I've been doing on a couple of my PCs. There's plenty to choose from in the gallery here, and new ones come in just about daily. Check them all out here . Here are five of the top wallpapers on WinCustomize. Check them out! Futuristic Neon Cityscape ...
I am! Bring on the pumpkins!
Greetings, GalCiv IV fans! Over the last month, we have been hard at work turning out a new update to Galactic Civilizations IV for all of you. v0.45 released last week and focuses primarily on the ideology system. Let's take a look at what we added in the update! Before we get into it, though, please take note that this new update WILL break your saved games - sorry about that! We do our best to maintain game saves because we know how much time goes into them, but the new ideology system ...
The Internet can be a tricky place to navigate. I talked a little bit about keeping your PC secure in a blog last week , but to be honest I barely scratched the surface when talking about all the different ways hackers and malware are clamoring to get to your personal information. ArsTechnica reported this week that some hackers impersonated the site Brave.com and pushed malware to unsuspecting users. Their technique was so sneaky that the faux site was capable of fooling even the most sec...
We are getting into the final stretches of summer, and I for one am looking forward to fall. We still have some weeks of summer left, so let's take a few minutes and show off those hot August desktops to our community! Post your desktops to the monthly thread here: https://forums.wincustomize.com/506171/ (This is a news thread and will be locked. Screenshot taken by LightStar)
Somewhere around here I have the original image of the Yor from 1992. They don’t resemble the modern Yor very much. When I wrote the Yor origin story back in 1987 (when I was in high school) the Yor followed the common trope of AI servants who rose up against their masters. Their masters, in this case, were a race of beings known as the Iconians (who are also in the game). The Yor of 1995 Yor of 2021 As time has gone by, I’ve thought about making the...
I use CNC and laser engravers in my workshop, so PCs are also a big part of my workshop, not just my office. I have my main PC in my home office, and I have a Fusion5 tablet in my workshop that I use to control the machines. It's a great tablet for running the few applications I need. I previously had a cheap laptop but having a touch screen is so much easier when using these apps. So, my workflow for my shop is that I design the files in my main PC in the home office, then I move them to a...
We all love a good hacker movie moment, right? The clock is ticking, the success of the mission or survival of the world hangs in the balance, and one lone computer-whiz whips their hands across the keyboard and watches a bunch of scrolling lines on a screen, then - BAM! Database hacked, world saved, let's all go have cake. Hacking in real life is significantly less exciting - usually because, as an average person, we're often on the receiving end of those hacks. If you've ever ...
Discord has been testing the feature out on Twitter for the last few months or so, but was finally ready to launch its new "threads" feature yesterday. Threads has been a highly-requested update to the chat server, with its community of users looking for a way to make conversations in bustling servers easier to follow. Any server with "community" features enabled will be able to transform messages into threaded conversations on both mobile and desktop. Threads can be designated with their own...
How is that for a dramatic post title? Well, I'm only exaggerating a little as the WindowBlinds gallery has had a considerable number of beautiful skins added over the past few weeks. Some of these are new skins, some are updated, and some are being re-uploaded by "retired" members of the site. It's nice to see a wide range of distinctive styles and colors being used, and it's been fun to combine these themes with various static and animated wallpapers from DeskScapes to create some awes...
One of the challenges we have in setting up maps is the question of how quickly should players be meeting other civilizations in the game? How quickly should things show up? How much should the game direct you? I decided to take a hard look at GalCiv II and GalCiv III to see how different those first 20 turns worked out. GalCiv II: First 20 turns Turn 1: No on-screen direction but the UI is pretty clean and My ship is already selected to move. Selected ship has an a...