I spent some time today cleaning out my desktop(computer desktop, that is), removing some unused programs, getting a dark looking theme for some frequently used web sites, and switching to Opera.
Cleaning out my desktop
I have removed all desktop icons - that's right, ALL, including the recycle bin(for context, I use windows XP). The bit with the recycle bin required a registry hack, as did removing the bluetooth icon. With my completely dark desktop, it looks so peaceful. Oh, and I also set the taskbar to auto-hide to maximize this effect.
Removed Unused Programs
Did an uninstall on many programs that I don't use anymore. This frees a bit of disk space but more importantly de-clutters the start menu.
Getting some dark themes
Seeing how nice the dark desktop is, I wanted to go farther and get some more "darkness" into my routine. The Obvious places to start were google reader and gmail. I started investigating using greasemonkey to re-style these pages. But it turned out there was an easier way for firefox with the Stylish plugin, and people have already written themes for it. I picked up a couple and got the dark effects I wanted for those 2 pages.
Next, I decided to give Opera another try. Opera is becoming more and more of a contender to Firefox in terms of functionality, especially now that Firefox is constantly eating up most of my cpu. Opera renders noticably faster than firefox, it runs google reader and gmail just fine, I think it still does not run google docs, I haven't tried just now. There is a greasemonkey counterpart for Opera which the themes I found firefox also works for, this is great. The only hiccup now is that this wiki does not seem to work with Opera. Being that I wrote it myself though, I should be able to fix it. I am not done with this evaluation of Opera, but it looks good so far. Btw, Opera also has themes you can download.
Update: I didn't follow up with this because Opera doesn't work with my Wiki, or is it the other way around?