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A couple of tips are provided here to make your computer programs more skater-friendly. First, if you play songs you probably know about the compressed song format called MP3 (song-title.mp3) which is revolutionizing the music business. The most popular mp3 player is Winamp from www.winamp.com and it accepts "skins" which place images on the player front panel. Many skins are available on the web but I made the first speedskating skin featuring Franziska Schenk shown below making it a "Skate to Winamp".
Yamaha just came along with the .vqf compressed song format giving .mp3 competition. A .vqf player plugin for Winamp is available from www.vqf.com so you can use the same winamp skins for .vqf .It turns out you can use the same skin technique to personalize your address book making it skating-distinctive. Download the A to Z Digital Address Book. When you have installed it locate the file BG.DAT in its installation directory. This is the background graphical image it places on the front of the address book. In Options select the graphical interface and not the standard one which is single colored. Now copy BG.DAT to a new file like BG.JPG and you can edit it in a photo editor program. Select any image for your background -- sizing it appropriately and use the original BG.JPG file as a mask to leave the white boxes where the address data is displayed. Note that BG.DAT is sized for very high screen resolution so if you're running 640 x 480 you can crop BG.JPG way down in size. Once you have the skin image the way you want it rename it back from *.jpg to BG.dat and move it to your AtoZ address book directory. Enjoy.
