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This is a guest post by my friend Tobi, on how to create a fancy custom animated desktop wallpaper. —Jörn

Ever wondered if it is possible to create an animated background for Windows 7, since ActiveDesktop has been removed? The answer is: YES, IT IS.

Lets start with the last tweak and then putting the results to the desktop. With last tweaks I mean to put pictures with alpha channels to your movie. All you need for that is Avisynth, a “tool for video post-production”. You can edit your movie and play it with a media player without having any temporary files.

Here is a short sample of what I have done to place a transparent picture as overlay in a movie located at the given x / y coordinates – from beginning till end:

wmv = DirectshowSource("Test.wmv",fps=24.665)
png = ImageSource("Test.png")
pnga = ImageReader("Test",pixel_type="RGB32").ShowAlpha(pixel_type="RGB32")
Overlay(wmv,x=545,y=-20,png,mask=pnga) 

All files are located relative to this .avs.

After this you have to convert and store the video with Free Video Converter by simply dragging the avs file into the videos space of this application.

Now it is time to put the video on your Windows 7 desktop. There are six simple steps to provide this functionality to Windows 7:

• Download (DreamScene)
• Copy the DreamScene.dll to %systemroot%\System32
• Copy the DreamScene.mui to %systemroot%\System32\de-DE
• Copy the DreamScene.mui to C:\Windows\System32\en-US
• Execute the Dscene.reg
• Restart Windows

That’s it.

If you want to have some nice precreated movie desktops check out dreamscene.org.

From the (just created) category of the “Public Notebook”, aka things I don’t want to write again and may come in handy for someone else.

Here I needed to extract a column of text from a table in Freshbooks, to copy the timesheet descriptions into another document. A little bit of jQuery helps to get the job done quickly:

$('tbody td.text_wrap').map(function() {
    return $(this).text();
}).get().join("\n")

If we’d use text() directly on the selection, we couldn’t insert the line breaks.

That’s all.

With some background in Java, this is a lot of fun:

And also very sad, considering that there’s code with an actual ProblemFactory (that extend’s a DefaultProblemFactory):

Here’s a music video with five people playing on one guitar and singing along:

Its apparently pretty popular right now, but its also fun to watch and I like the song. Its popular enough that someone made a pretty fun parody:

Somebody get Tony!