Payton Place

No matter how clear you write it, some folks just can’t grasp that you’ll be out of the office for a certain period.

The Outlook development team’s blog explains how you can insert a miniature, HTML-formatted calendar into your auto-replies. You basically email yourself an Outlook-formatted, date-selected calendar, copy it from that email, and then paste it into an Out of Office message. You could also likely paste that same calendar into any email service that supports HTML signatures, and if you give that a shot?or find another way of creating mini-format calendars?let us know in the comments.

All platforms: Free and open source virtualization software VirtualBox gets a “major upgrade” to version 2.1 which is now available for download.

Besides a gaggle of fixes, the changelog details new features:

• Support for hardware virtualization (VT-x and AMD-V) on Mac OS X hosts
• Support for 64-bit guests on 32-bit host operating systems (experimental; see user manual, chapter 1.6, 64-bit guests, page 16)
• Added support for Intel Nehalem virtualization enhancements (EPT and VPID; see user manual, chapter 1.2, Software vs. hardware virtualization (VT-x and AMD-V), page 10))
• Experimental 3D acceleration via OpenGL (see user manual, chapter 4.8, Hardware 3D acceleration (OpenGL), page 66)
• Experimental LsiLogic and BusLogic SCSI controllers (see user manual, chapter 5.1, Hard disk controllers: IDE, SATA (AHCI), SCSI, page 70)
• Full VMDK/VHD support including snapshots (see user manual, chapter 5.2, Disk image files (VDI, VMDK, VHD), page 72)
• New NAT engine with significantly better performance, reliability and ICMP echo (ping) support (bugs #1046, #2438, #2223, #1247)
• New Host Interface Networking implementations for Windows and Linux hosts with easier setup (replaces TUN/TAP on Linux and manual bridging on Windows)

We’ve already shown you how to run Windows apps seamlessly inside Linux with VirtualBox; what OS combinations are you using it with? VirtualBox is a free download for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

Free application UnChrome bolsters your browsing anonymity by removing the unique ID from Google Chrome that Google associates with your Chrome installation.

UnChrome isn’t the first app to do this; we highlighted another program called Chrome Privacy Guard in our power user’s guide to Google Chrome. But for the many who installed Chrome for the first time after Chrome officially left beta last week, it’s worthwhile to highlight this kind of tool once more. UnChrome is a free download, Windows only.