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Best Desktop Customization Tool? [Hive Five Call For Contenders]Yesterday

Sure your computer's desktop may be functional out of the box, but some of us need to put the 'P' in PC before we really feel at home at a computer. We love looking at how our readers have customized their desktops, so for this week's Hive Five, we want you to share your favorite desktop customization applications. Keep reading for more details and to nominate your faves in the comments.

Hive Five nominations take place in the comments, where you post your favorite tool for the job. We get hundreds of comments, so to make your nomination clear, please include it at the top of your comment like so: VOTE: Desktop Customization Tool Goes Here. NEW RULE: Please don't include your vote in a reply to another commenter. Instead, make your vote and reply separate comments. If you don't follow this format, we may not count your vote. To prevent tampering with the results, votes from first-time commenters may not be counted. After you've made your nomination, let us know what makes it stand out from the competition.

About the Hive Five: The Hive Five feature series asks readers to answer the most frequently asked question we get—"Which tool is the best?" Once a week we'll put out a call for contenders looking for the best solution to a certai

Email Activity Random but Cyclical [In Brief]Yesterday

Looking at aggregate data of 3,000 email accounts over a three month period, researchers at Northwestern University say that emails are responded to randomly, but the volume of sent mail follows predictable patterns. Namely, late at night on the weekends it's much less likely you'll receive any reply, for the obvious reasons — sleep and time off from work on weekends. The study suggests that the best time to contact someone when looking for a timely response, such as Monday morning, and can help network administrators plan for high-volume periods. Connectivity at home is better than it was when the data was recorded, but is it just me or do you actively avoid email outside of business hours as well?

Forkbombs and Other Things Not to Type in Terminals [Linux]Yesterday

"Tell the noob to type rm -rf /," the troll types to his friend in IRC before you're a series of lulz after a friendly call for Linux tech support help turns into a formatted hard drive. If you don't know what a forkbomb is or what it looks like you might want to check this list of seven commands that could prove lethal if typed into a command line shell. If you're making the plunge into operating systems like Ubuntu but are worried about what not to do, check it out. Any horror stories you readers might want to pass along to save someone else a headache down the line? Photo by zakwitnij

The 7 Deadly Linux Commands [Tech Source From Bohol via Digg]

Integrate YouSendIt with Microsoft Office [Microsoft Office]Yesterday

Send that big PowerPoint presentation or Excel spreadsheet without clogging up your recipient's email inbox straight from Microsoft Office using previously mentioned file delivery service YouSendIt. Their new Office add-in puts YouSendIt into, appropriately, the Send to menu above the Email option. The YouSendIt Microsoft Office add-in is a free download. [via]

Process Manager Prioritizes, Kills Running Apps via Right-Click [Featured Windows Download]Yesterday

Windows only: Free application Process Manager adds an entry to your right-click context menu that adjusts an application's priority or kills the app. Once Process Manager is running, the kill and priority options are only available when you've right-clicked a window's taskbar item. That's pretty much all there is to it. The app runs in your system tray and eats less than 1MB of RAM. While Process Manager doesn't do anything you can't already do from the Windows Task Manager, it does provide quicker access to a couple of handy functions and is worth a try if you do much force-quitting. Process Manager is a free download, Windows only.

Process Manager [SourceForge via Life Rocks 2.0]