Technology Insights

Disable Emoticons In XChat, List Of XChat Emoticons

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Emoticons get on my nerves so when I typed “:)” in a new install of XChat the other day I was pretty annoyed. Luckily disabling emoticons in XChat is easy and in the first part of this article I explain doing so. After disabling them I was curious what emoticons actually come configured with XChat for Windows so I tracked down where the emoticons were configured and then checked out the list of available emoticons which is described in the second part of the article.

Technology Insights

Photoshop ICO Plugin, How To Open Windows Icon Files In Photoshop

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Earlier this afternoon I needed to modify a .ICO, also known as Windows Icon, for some testing I was doing with X-Chat which is a GUI based IRC (Internet Relay Chat) client. Anyhow it slipped my mind that Photoshop does not even recognize ICO files by default. Adding Windows Icon (ICO) support to Photoshop is really easy though and I remembered from a previous experience the process to add a ICO plugin to Photoshop. Follow the directions below to open, edit, and save ICO files on Windows.

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Modify The Icon Of An Application Pinned To The Windows 7 Taskbar

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Modifying the icon of applications that are pinned to your Windows 7 taskbar is fairly easy in most cases however there are various scenarios where it can be a bit more complicated. I noticed that one of my applications appeared to have a default Windows icon of some sort so I wanted to modify it so I would know what the application was. In my case I have pinned all of the applications that I use on a daily basis to the Windows 7 taskbar. This is one of the features I love of Windows 7 as it makes it really easy for me to not only launch applications but also to manage applications that are currently running. I am a huge fan of only a little icon displaying and when you hover over it you can see how many windows are open and more detail about those windows. Below I describe how to modify the icon of applications pinned to the Windows 7 taskbar and some hints of what to do if you are unable to modify those icons easily such as if the Change Icon button in the shortcut properties is greyed out or inactive.