Update: Part 2 of this post is now up here to allay some of the drawbacks that were pointed out.

There has been so much hype over the “Incognito” (or Private Browsing) mode of Google Chrome / Microsoft IE8, with many internet users screeming Hallelujiah. But I don’t understand what the hoopla is all about. This mode has always been there in Mozilla firefox as well. You just need to devote less than one minute (yes, you read that right, less than one minute) to set it up. Well, actions are better than words, so here it goes:

I recently wrote a simple answering machine program/plugin for pidgin and someone asked me to port it to 32 bit. So I fired up pidgin within my virtual box installation at work (as I have only a 64 bit machine at home) but couldn’t get it to connect. Tried all sorts of methods found over the net of changing ports etc, set port forwarding in Virtual Box NAT, even switched to using a bridged host interface but still no go. On a whim, installed pidgin in the host, i.e., windows and still the same issue. Hmm, interesting.. But wait, gtalk client works, then what gives.

Guys, for the past few days if you downloaded any “.tar.gz” packages from this site (like my splert or shantz-xwinwrap tools), then you’d have got a corrupt package. Turns out there was some issue with mime-types with my setup. I haven’t been able to resolve it still but have re-upped the packages in “zip” format. Please download them again. I apologize for the inconvenience.

XWinWrap is a small utility written a loooong time ago that allowed you to stick most of the apps to your desktop background (Thanks to fsckin for introducing me to it). What this meant was you could use an animated screensaver (like glmatrix, electric sheep, etc) or even a movie, and use it as your wallpaper. But only one version of this app was released, and it had a few problems, like it wasn’t exactly “sticking” to the background and geometry option didn’t work as well.

XWinWrap is a small utility written a loooong time ago that allowed you to stick most of the apps to your desktop background. What this meant was you could use an animated screensaver (like glmatrix, electric sheep, etc) or even a movie, and use it as your wallpaper. But only one version of this app was ever released, and it had a few problems, like:

1. Well, sticking didn’t work. So if you did a “minimize all” or “go to desktop” kind of thing, your “wallpaper” got minimized as well.