Lachlan Grant17 July 2006, 7:26 AM
Electric sheep is an awesome grid-computing screensaver that was created by San Francisco-based video artist, Scott Draves. It's free, open-source, and generates inspiring fractal animations on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.
When I was young, I had an addiction to installing truckloads of software on the family PC, regardless whether we needed it or not.
This was usually followed by and drastically increased start-up time and reduced overall performance even when trying to load Microsoft Word.
If it wasn’t utilities that added useless GUI tweaks, it was eye-candy screensavers that loaded within 30 seconds of no mouse or keyboard activity… ahhhhh, good times!
Since then, I haven’t really bothered with screen savers and have been happy with the default, floating Windows XP logo.
Until the other day.
I was over at a friend’s house and found myself completely mesmerised by the morphing shapes and colours on his monitor, so much that I sat there watching for at least 10 minutes whilst slowly warming a beer in my hand.
I later found out that the screensaver in question was called “Electric Sheep”, named after the novel by Philip K. Dick, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep”.
Created by San Francisco-based video artist, Scott Draves, Electric Sheep is a free, open source, distributed computing screen saver project that generates colourful fractal animations on screen.
These animations, called sheep, are either created by individuals of the community; or by a genetic algorithm that mates other popular sheep to create new sheep, providing a non-stop show of psychedelic madness on your monitor.
Users can then vote for sheep on their screen by using either the up or down arrow keys on your keyboard.
Its not a good idea to run this on a machine other than one with a permanent broadband connection, as downloading sheep often takes quite a while.
I found this out after eagerly installing it the first time and repetitively hitting the test button in the screensaver dialog box.
You can download the screensaver now for either Windows, Mac OS X or Linux from here.
