Archive for December, 2007

How to remove the Google logo from the Picasa screen saver

Thursday, December 13th, 2007

I recently installed Google’s Picasa, and even though I ultimately decided to use Photoshop Elements, I really liked the Picasa screen saver. It lets you display random images from multiple folders, and has some pretty nifty transition effects. Much better than the XP “My pictures” screen saver.

I was quite annoyed but the Google logos displayed every now and then on top of my pictures, and decided to try to remove them. It wasn’t hard, here’s how I did it.

  • Install a resource editing program, such as the XN Resource Editor.
  • Open up the Picasa installation folder and make a backup of the file Picasa2.scr, just in case you want to switch back to the branded screen saver again.
  • Start the XN Resource Editor and open the file Picasa2.scr.
  • Locate the two JPEG resources in the resource tree, in my case it was 111 and 114 (this might differ between different versions of the screen saver).
  • Right-click on the resources and choose “Delete Resource”.
  • Save the file.
  • Done! The Google logos have now been removed from the screen saver!

A little tip: The same screen saver (atleast AFAIK) is available in the Google Pack, in case you don’t want to install the full Picasa suite. It’s called “Google Photos Screensaver”, but seems to be the same program that they bundle with Picasa.

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Posted in Windows | 1 Comment »

How to sync a Sony Ericsson phone with the Thunderbird/Lightning calendar

Wednesday, December 12th, 2007

If you’re using the Mozilla Thunderbird extension Lightning for your calendar, here’s a quick howto on making it synchronize with your Sony Ericsson phone. It worked great on my W910!

  • Install the excellent freeware program MyPhoneExplorer.
  • Enter the Options (F2), choose Sync and then choose Thunderbird Lightning in the “Calendar” field.
  • MyPhoneExplorer will automatically install the required Thunderbird plugin.
  • Click on “Advanced” to choose which calendar to sync and what mode (merge calendars or let phone override Lightning or vice versa)
  • Hit Ok, enter the Calendar and hit sync – done!

If you want to create a desktop shortcut to automatically start the sync – duplicate the shortcut to MyPhoneExplorer, enter the icon properties and add “action=sync syncitem=organizer” to the destination (after myphoneexplorer.exe). There are more command line options available in the English FAQ.

Hope this howto helps someone, it sure made my life a lot easier! Before I discovered this method, I was auto-exporting the calendar as an ICS file (through a dedicated Thunderbird extension) and then importing in manually into MyPhoneExplorer on a regular basis. Now I only need to connect the USB cable and click the dedicated shortcut – quite an improvement!

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Posted in Windows | 3 Comments »