Filed under: Fun, Utilities, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Web services, Freeware, Open Source, Mods
Electric Sheep screensaver - Today's Free File
by Victor Agreda, Jr. Feb 9th 2006 at 2:32PM
This has been
around for a while, and I know a couple of designers who use it on a regular basis just because it is gorgeous to
behold. Electric Sheep is a screensaver, open source, cross platform, and free.
However, it uses distributed computing of a sort to generate massively complex fractal animations that grow over time,
and evolve in complexity. It's impossible to describe the images created. You can view a gallery here. My tip when you run this is to give it some time.
The best images take several hours to generate, but they are worth it. There are music videos with the Sheep, a high-def
version, and you can get more Sheep via Bittorrent. All cool
stuff, but ultimately just some neat eye candy.
So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do.
Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game.
The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Bennington Purcell said 4:18PM on 2-09-2006
I downloaded this a while back and JUST LOVE IT!!!!! it is beautiful. i really wish that they made better musical visualizations for itunes and such.
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Tanner said 7:36PM on 2-09-2006
Wow! Brilliant!
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Neek said 7:52PM on 2-09-2006
Ok, so i downloaded it, and i set it as my screensaver, bus all it says is that it's downloading the first sheep, but its been saying this for a while. whats wrong?
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Peter said 10:04PM on 2-09-2006
Neek - it can take a few hours to get started. I found the best thing was to leave it run overnight and you will have a few sheep in the morning.
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tpp said 2:19PM on 2-10-2006
So I left this thing up all night to download my sheep.
Nothing turned up by this morning, so I decided to look at what's going on. Turns out it's downloading the sheep from http://ethereal.net.nyud.net:8090/~spot/ That's all good, except that port 8090 is filtered where I work, so no electric sheep for me.
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tpp said 2:31PM on 2-10-2006
You can download the sheep directly as well. Once the download is done, save them onto the mpeg sub directory of your electric sheep cache directory.
There's plenty of them available on the Electric Sheep website. Check out the samples section.
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Scott Draves said 5:20PM on 2-11-2006
Thanks glad you like the Sheep.
The best way to download more sheep faster is with BitTorrent.
See http://draves.org/blog/archives/000364.html
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tpp said 6:50PM on 2-13-2006
BitTorrent ports are most DEFINITELY going to be blocked if 8090 is.
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