A recent build of Windows 8 was recently leaked online. The build version Windows 8 M3, is quite similar to Windows 7. Windows 8 is rumored to have some new features like backups through "History Vault" and more.

Windows 8 also features a new wallpaper which looks pretty. The wallpaper was leaked as a part of the new Windows 8 build and is now available for downloads thanks to ZDNet.

If you are looking to download the Windows 8 wallpaper for your desktop, just click on this link and save it to your computer or set it as a wallpaper by right clicking on it and setting it as a wallpaper. If you are using Google Chrome, you can download an extension to add the set as wallpaper ability to right clicks on images. Learn more about Setting an image as wallpaper in Google Chrome.

One of the great features of Windows 7 is it’s theme support. The ability to enable wallpaper slideshows with only the images you want is good, but the ability to automatically download images is priceless. Once a dynamic theme is installed, new images come in via an RSS feed whenever they’re available.

One of the best examples of this is the Bing Dynamic theme. With this theme, you’ll be getting new wallpapers from the Bing search page, every day.

In addition, you’ll also have a choice of 4 different Best of Bingwallpaper themes.

If you don’t have Windows 7, you won’t feel so bad once you find out that there are several freebies that let you download wallpapers from Bing and other image sites. Here’s a few to pick from.

JBS Free Wallpaper Switcher for Windows

Bing Background Wallpaper Downloader | Bing Wallpapers

Download Bing Bing Background Images and Use as Wallpaper

A Visual Search Gallery For Bing Wallpapers

How to Open and Use Windows 7 Themes in Windows XP

If you’re a wallpaper fanatic, don’t miss out on all the other wallpaper collections we’ve written about.

Is Halloween a popular holiday in your neighborhood? It’s certainly a fun and exciting day for millions of kids who are dreaming of all the candy they can grab. Trick or Treat!

In case you are curious, here’s some facts about Halloween from Wikipedia.

Halloween (or Hallowe’en) is an annual holiday observed on October 31, primarily in the United States, Canada, Ireland, and the United Kingdom. It has roots in the Celtic festival of Samhain and the Christian holiday All Saints’ Day, but is today largely a secular celebration.

Below you’ll find links to 25 websites that will lead you to weird and spooky wallpapers to help you get into the Halloween spirit. I’ve checked these sites using the Web of Trust plugin, so the sites are safe to visit. However, please be careful, because you could still be led to sites that are less than trustworthy. I also recommend using the free OpenDns Family Shield service while surfing for free stuff.

First, here are a few examples of what you’ll find.

25 Halloween Wallpaper Sites

1. Download High Quality Halloween Wallpapers For Your Desktop or Mac

2. Halloween Wallpapers

3. Beautiful Halloween Wallpapers And Halloween DIY-Tutorials …

4. Halloween Wallpapers, Halloween Desktop Backgrounds on Kate.net …

5. 50+ Be-Bewitched Halloween Wallpapers

6. Halloween Wallpaper, Halloween Wallpapers

7. 25 Killer Halloween Wallpapers « PSDFan

8. 75+ High-Quality Halloween Wallpapers for your Desktop | Tutorial …

9. Halloween Round-Up: Wallpapers And Tutorials – Smashing Magazine

10. Halloween Wallpaper Originals – Halloween Desktop Wallpapers – Mac …

11. 65+ Beautiful and Scary Halloween Wallpapers

12. Free Halloween Wallpapers, Halloween Wallpaper, Halloween Desktop …

13. HALLOWEEN DESKTOP WALLPAPERS

14. 1920×1200 Halloween illustrations – Halloween Haunts – Wallcoo.net

15. 60 cute Halloween wallpapers HQ | Garmahis

16. Halloween Wallpapers and Social Media Icons from TNerd.com

17. 55+ Amazing Halloween Wallpapers to Charm Up Your Desktop …

18. 50 Exquisite Halloween Wallpapers for Your Desktop

19. Free Wallpapers CSS Creme

20. Freaky Halloween Wallpapers « INDEZINER

21. Halloween wallpaper | Vladstudio.com – free desktop wallpapers …

22. Celebrate Halloween with Hershey’s: Halloween Wallpapers

23. Think Halloween by ~Zefhar on deviantART

24. Free Halloween Wallpapers – The Best Free Halloween Wallpapers on …

25. Halloween 2010 – halloween, halloween ecards, halloween wallpapers …

Have a happy and safe Halloween.

With Halloween just around the corner, the time is ripe to get into the spirit of Halloween with some spooky Halloween apps. You can already dress up your computer for the festival of scares with Microsoft’s Eerie Autumn theme. Now, I will share a few Android apps that will help you prepare your mobile devices for the occasion.

• Countdown: Countdown the days to Halloween with Days 2 Halloween and Halloween Countdown (paid) widgets.
• Plan: Plan your Halloween party with the nifty Halloween Planner (paid) app.
• Dress up: Dress up your Android with Halloween wallpapers and themes.
• Wallpapers: You can use Halloween Wallpapers by Sancron to download free static Halloween wallpapers to your Android mobile phone. There are also quite a few nifty Halloween themed Live Wallpapers; however, all the good ones seem to be paid. I would recommend the ones from KittehFace Software, Access Lane, live wallpaper, BigMountainSoftware and Wolf Labs.
• Themes: Android doesn’t support themes out of the box. However, many of the 3rd party home screen apps are skinnable. Panda Home users can enjoy Owl’s Prayer and Dark Night Falling themes, while Open Home users can install the series of paid themes created by Bubamara for $1.33. There are quite a few Halloween themes for aHome users too. Happy Halloween for aHome is free, while Halloween Theme 1 and Halloween Themes are paid. Some of the other catchy Halloween themes (for PandaHome, Crazy Home, OpenHome, aHome, LiveHome & dxTop) are Disney Halloween , Pooh’s Halloween and Cutesy Halloween.
• Ringtones: Finally, choose an especially creepy ringtone to finish up preparing your device for Halloween. You can use any of the soundboards available in the market. The ones I liked are Halloween Soundboard Ringtones and Halloween Soundboard Scary apps.

Have a great Halloween and don’t forget to share your favorite Halloween Android apps.

If you have been using Google Chrome, you might come across the lack of an option to set any image as a wallpaper in Chrome. This has been an annoyance for hundreds and thousands of users and as MG from TechCrunch points out, a bug filed with Chromium about the issue has tons and tons of comments.

So how do you set an image as a wallpaper in Google Chrome? Quite simple, just use a new Chrome extension  created by one of the Chromium developers to add this feature to Google Chrome. The extension is called, Set Image as Wallpaper and can be downloaded from here.

Once you download and install the extension you will get an option to set any image you come across in Google Chrome as a desktop wallpaper. Have fun. This only works in Windows right now with a Linux and Mac version under works.

If you are expecting this feature to be part of Google Chrome out of the box, you are in for a disappointment, it’s not going to happen. And it hardly matters anyways. Look at me, I didn’t even notice that it had been missing for past two years .

Bing’s approach for its home page has been tremendously  successful. Not only do the users love it, Google is even accused of trying to copy it for a short bit. the only thing users aren’t too happy about is the lack of any feature to search and view all the past wallpapers in a neat tool. Well, Bing has just launched a visual search gallery for all the previous wallpapers.

The visual search gallery is extra-ordinarily organized and lets you get to the desired image within seconds. The top row displays filters based on regions such as Asia, Europe or North America, while a series of filters on the left let you narrow down your results even further. These include filtering results by country, regional groups, categories, sub-categories, colors and even seasons.

The images can be sorted by date or by name and each thumbnail includes the date of the wallpaper and the location of the image. Clicking on any image displays a larger picture along with the ability to zoom in/out of the image and more information about the venue/subject of the picture. There is also an option to browse through some of the editor’s picks as well as viewing all the past wallpapers on the same screen. The gallery is part of Bing’s visual search beta that allows users to search through images rather than using text.

If you are interested in downloading Bing wallpapers, here is an excellent tool that downloads the fresh Bing wallpaper every day and make it your desktop wallpaper.

The Indian Rupee Symbol which was decided yesterday has been liked by many and disliked by many. However, it now gives Indian currency an official way to be represented just like dollars and the pound. Many people have liked the new symbol, whereas several have disliked it too.

If you are someone who has like the new Indian Rupee Symbol, you can now decorate your desktop with some cool wallpapers which make use of the Indian Rupee Symbol. The Indian Rupee symbol is made up of the Devanagari "Ra" and Roman capital "R" without the stem.

Here are some cool looking Indian Rupee Symbol wallpapers which you can download and set as your desktop background. To download these Indian Rupee Symbol Wallpapers, visit this link and right click on the images and save it to your PC.

(Source)

[Windows Only] Those of you who are using Windows 7 may already be familiar with the awesome built in wallpaper (background) switcher. It allows you to choose a set of wallpapers and set them up so that they change at certain time intervals. You might want the wallpaper to change once a day or once every hour.

Actually, the only reason I call it an awesome feature is that it’s built right into the Windows settings. There have been third-party applications around, long before Win7, that allowed you to switch wallpapers as needed. Keith has written about one of them here.

Sometime after Keith wrote that piece, I saw a comment from one of our readers. Mitchell McKenna wrote: I recommend John’s Background Switcher. Let’s you bring in photos from facebook, picasa, etc. to use in backgrounds as well.

I’ve taken a look at John’s Background Switcher (JBS for short), and I have to agree with Mitch. It’s far better than any wallpaper switcher I’ve tried before. Here’s a brief list of the functions in it.

You can choose to display:

• Individual pictures on your computer.
• Folders containing pictures on your computer such as My Pictures’.
• Flickr photo sharing selecting pictures by person, tags, sets or just plain random. You never know what you’re going to get next!
• Facebook your friends photos on your desktop!
• Vladstudio wallpapers choose from the coolest wallpapers on the net!
• Any Media RSS feed choose pictures from sites like DeviantArt, Photobucket,LOLCats and Zooomr amongst many others!
• Phanfare web albums keep up to date with your friends and family.
• smugmug photo galleries yours, your friends, anybody’s!
• Picasa Web Albums choose from specific albums or any search text.
• Webshots if you’re a Webshots user, you can choose from your online or downloaded photos and collections.
• Google Image Search get pictures from anywhere across the internet.
• Bing Image Search not a Google fanboy? Then Bing is for you!
• Yahoo! image search the internet is your oyster!
• Runs on 98, ME, XP, 2000, Vista, 7

When JBS is running, it will show as an icon in your system tray. To get to the settings, just right click on the icon. Here’s what the settings applet looks like:

Based on what I’ve seen so far, I’d have to say that JBS is much better than the built in wallpaper switcher in Windows 7.

Check it out for yourself: Download John’s Background Switcher

Techie Buzz Verdict:

If you get tired of seeing the same old wallpapers on your Windows desktop, John’s Background Switcher may be the best solution for you. I have to rate it highly recommended, because I haven’t seen anything that does as much or does it any better.

Techie Buzz Rating: 4/5 (Excellent)

[Windows Only] Media Spider is free portable tool that helps you download pictures from Google Images, Devian Art and 4Chan. The tool supports batch downloading of images from the above mentioned websites. Media Spider uses tabs for the 3 websites with relevant options for each of them.

Google Images : Google images can be searched based on a particular search string, number of image results, image size, image offset and whether or not adult.

Devian Art : To download images from Devian Art you have to define the following attributes,

• Search string
• Category
• Sort by popularity over time
• Number of Results
• Image offset
• Account details

4Chan : This uses a very simple search by category with no need of using any particular search string.

With all options properly configured, press the Search or Download (for 4Chan) button to start the download. You will be asked to locate the download location of the images during the first run. From the next run the last downloaded location will be used.

Download Media Spider

Techie-Buzz Verdict :

Media Spider is an open source project and hence lot of improvements are yet to come. The portability makes it more handier for people who prefer to download lots of images at one go. The tool can be used by any PC user.

Techie-Buzz Rating : 4.5/5 (Excellent)

There are currently several programs that let even novices create abstract wallpapers without prior knowledge of complicated design tools. These programs have friendly interfaces and are generally rather easy to use. In one of my previous posts, I had talked about the wallpaper creator tool by X3Studios, which lets you create abstract vector-based wallpapers. Now, if you have a weakness for abstract fractal-like wallpapers, then you will find the free Flash-based Flame nothing short of addictive!

Compared to X3Studios, Flame does not provide you with as many options. Yet, there is tremendous potential for variety within its limited options. You have either a black or a white background, and are also provided with a brush tool which can be customized. Apart from color, saturation and opacity, you can even adjust other options such as size, softness, chaos and noise to change the nature of your brush strokes. All that you have to do to create fractal-like shapes and doodles is move your mouse around!

The trick lies in exercising control over your mouse movements. For smoothly flowing sheer color strokes, it is best to move your mouse quickly without keeping it in one spot for too long. Slow mouse movements simply translate into a harder, more intensely focused color, which may not be a bad thing if that is what you’re aiming at in the first place.

Finally, once you deem your masterpiece completed, you can save your artwork to your computer. There is, however, one rather crucial limitation. Your wallpaper can only be saved at a resolution of 1680 × 1050 pixels.

In spite of this, you can easily find yourself whiling away your time with Flame, enthralled by the sheer diversity present in every entrancing endeavor of yours!

Here, I have shared a couple of wallpapers that I made using Flame and would love to see the ones you create! I hope you have as much fun as I did!