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Does your computer’s wallpaper look like one of these?

If so, then chances are your wallpaper might have a severe case of boredom. Luckily, I have the perfect cure: spruce up your desktop with some awesome photos from a few websites, or perhaps your own! Your mind and your computer will be a LOT cleaner and organized when you change your desktop…

…from this (tons of clutter, how can you find anything?)

…to THIS! (photo taken by a classmate during my Italy trip)

What, you don’t know how to change your wallpaper? It’s easy! Just drag your favorite photo into your internet browser, right click, and Set as Background. If that isn’t working, here’s some tutorials on how to do just that if you’re on XP, Vista, or OSX. Today I’m also going to share a few of my favorite wallpaper sites and feature a few select photo-based wallpapers.

InterfaceLIFT hosts a broad range of wallpapers, icons, and themes. I really love how they provide their wallpapers for nearly every resolution, even dual monitors and mobile phones! They have a fantastic array of high dynamic range (HDR) images that really bring out colors in scenes that you’ve never seen before in a digital picture. Some great examples of wallpapers can be found here: Dark Clouds Await by sn0dig, Syrphid Fly by Niels Strating, Giants Causeway by RGH Photography

WinCustomize also has a huge wallpaper gallery with a fantastic photography section. Although most downloads only come in one size, searching for your favorite subject or sorting by downloads delivers quite a few high-quality photos: Rock Face by AzDude, Rainforest Leaves by thecoolcrocodile, ZuBench by Zubaz

DeviantART, which has one of the largest art communities on the web, hosts not only a normal photography section but also a huge wallpaper section with categories like Landscapes and Scenery, Photo Manipulated, and Cities & Structures. Browsing through their galleries is a breeze, just make sure to click on the “All Time” sort for the real goodies: Remains by tonyelieh, The World in my Eyes by Burning-Liquid, Silence of The Storm by angelreich

Do you have a great wallpaper site or a favorite photo you’d like to share? Let us know in the comments!

So yeah, this is pretty much what I’ve been up to for the past, oh, 3 months/1 quarter of school. These are a few of the projects I’ve done for my Computer Graphics 2 class (which I just got an A in, booyah!)

First up, the classic CG application, a ray tracer complete with phongphongphong shading, procedural shading on the floor, reflection, transmission, and even some tone reproduction.

Secondly, my quarter long personal project, a simple particle system/b-spline curve generator in XNA, dubbed Q-Blizzard. Turned out to be quite pretty, not exactly configurable though.

And finally, an image that won me a $25 Barnes and Noble gift certificate in the Pixar Renderman Shader contest. I won third place out of around 30 images! My roommate noted that I should have added an OM NOM NOM caption in for kicks.

Hopefully this will mark my return to regular blogging (going to try monday, wednesday, friday) for the summer and onward. Hell, if mittens can keep up his Daily GameDev.net postings for 2 months, I can do it too. Right? …Right? (I seem to tell myself every few months or so…)

No post tonight, so in the spirit of @mittense, here’s a kitty.

I did upgrade to WP 2.5 though, and it’s working great. More on Tuesday!

It simply does. That is all.

Oh, you wanted to know why! Well, if you’re still reading and not playing it, there’s three reasons why Rock Band is an awesome investment (it’s still $169.99) for your Xbox 360, PS3, or (soonly) your Wii. First off, the UI is a lot cleaner than Guitar Hero 3’s. Let’s look at the two side by side.

I’ve become quite a twitterholic the past few days. In fact, let’s check the stats. Yeah, I’ve been pretty much addicted the past few days. Why? Well, there’s a few things I love about Twitter:

1. Twitter is short, sweet, and easy to use.

The concept is simple: 140 characters to tell the world what you’re doing. I don’t think you can get more simple than that. No complex forms, no huge commitments, just a simple request, and your simple answer. It has a wonderful web interface, and the settings allow you completely customize your page’s background along with colors for fonts. It’s just a breeze to use and easy to look at, which is a welcome change compared to Facebook or MySpace.

I had a slighty crappy weekend filling mostly with playing games and working on my ray tracer. Looks like it isn’t going to well:

That should be a sphere. Not some strange cone thing. Progress is slow, but steady.  Understanding the theory is key to this, and it’s pretty damn tough.

Well, Happy Easter everyone, and I hope if you made some sort of Lenten sacrifice (I gave up fast food!) you’ve kept it. A Wendy’s spicy Baconator is calling my name, and it’s getting harder and harder to resist…

Lately I’ve noticed that a few of my friends have been able to understand or even be aware of the Windows command line. I have a hard time myself pulling myself away from Explorer, but sometimes the command line is just quicker. However, it’s a bit drab by default. Today I’m going to show you just how you can pimp yours out a bit.

As always, I’m late to jump on the failboat, and this time I’ve decided to do some serious maintenance on my computer. I’ve had enough of having to rely on System Restore and worrying that I’ve lost all of my data, or that my computer is on the brink of death. So, I’m going to start maintaining my system more, and that’s starting with keeping my hard drive as tidy and speedy as possible.

I recently came across this post about a user who decided he had enough of the user-generated news community, Reddit. I’ve been a Reddit user for a quite some time now, and I’ve done my share of down voting Ron Paul stories as well submitting silly pictures that have made it onto the front page. Lately though, it’s become more than a habit to check this site.

I’m sure that this list could be a lot longer, but I’m going to focus on six issues that really piss me off when I’m playing video games. If games happen to have more than 2 or 3 of these traits they tend to collect dust in my game cases very quickly, or they will do the same at your local game store. So, without further adieu: