Dreaming of Electric Sheep

I was working on my wife's computer the other day when I noticed that she had changed her background to a fractal image. Nothing special, just something nifty. It sparked a memory of a project I had looked at a few years ago called the electric sheep screen-saver.

Back then, electric sheep was in it's infancy. I'm not even sure they had come out with version 1.0 and I think it was only out for Linux at that time too. Well, it looks like the project has grown all up and gotten a few thousand users (sweet) and even has it's own spot as a permanent online exhibit at moma.org. So, if you are tired of your boring old screen saver (admit it, "Starfield" has its intellectual limitations) and need something with a little more spunk for your desktop, Electric Sheep is at LEAST worth checking out. (By the way, if you haven't figured it out, the shot above was generated by Electric Sheep) There are versions available for Linux, FreeBSD, Windows, and Mac OS X.

Note: The screen saver runs at 640x480, so if you want a real crisp looking screen saver run it in "Normal" mode not "Fullscreen"

4:00 AM Edit: Don't be discouraged if the screen saver runs for a couple of hours and doesn't show anything this elaborate. It has a lot of information to download while it works. Let it run one night while you sleep and you should be greeted in the morning with something very cool. I know I didn't say a lot about the technical side of the screen saver in this post. I'll probably get into a long winded rant about distributed computing here in a few days.