Edit: the best part was running it a couple dozen times to get an entire flock walking, falling, and rolling all over your desktop, and watching everything grind to halt under CPU strain!

- https://archive.org/details/virtuagirl265

It has been found worthy of preservation.-

https://dustinbrett.com/

Now with state of the art GFE AI!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neko_(software)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40756670

I miss that simplicity / playfulness / aesthic of that era (yes I am old, please get off my lawn)

(She’s still there, doing flips and precision bitmap alignment)

First rule of troubleshooting was always “turn off all extensions.” :)

... while we gladly just "prompt" - which, in itself, might be an exporatory technique. We'll see.-

(hello, fellow old!)

Arguably the Kaleidoscope fits into this category too. While there were tame themes for it that did more tame things like make your Mac look like Windows/BeOS/NeXTSTEP/etc, many third party Kaleidoscope schemes skewed more whacky and fun than your average theme software. Ever wanted your desktop to look like a pair of jeans[0], a dwarven forge[1], 2D top-down space shooter[2], or cute cartoon jungle[3]? Kaleidoscope has you covered.

[0]: https://i.ibb.co/x1YsFqt/denim-scheme-dtdenimsit-vbpf.png [1]: https://i.ibb.co/fdXKKV2/eritis-forge-2-eitrisforge2sit-p5vq... [2]: https://i.ibb.co/TryF6VQ/boilerplatetm-boilerplatesit-vrao.p... [3]: https://i.ibb.co/cCLYpKL/monkeyparadise-monkeyparadisesit-ss...

Apple knew it lived and died by third party developer adoption.-

(Now is all "app stores", walled gardens and "where is our 30%", first and foremost ...)

TL;DR: playfulness is killed by the arms race of constantly upgrading to the latest version of everything.

https://web.archive.org/web/20110301011442/http://gogoredbal...

This is the best thing I could find so far to put on an extra monitor. Note you can click to interact with the penguins and also feed them.

https://www.petpenguins.com/

Maybe try Bonzi Buddy?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BonziBuddy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neko_(software)

https://kyome.io/runcat/index.html?lang=en

Jim Sachs’ Serene Screen is still going strong. I have it running on Apple Silicon, no problems.

(Which somewhere deep in the EULA grants then rights to crawl your hard drives to train their models ...

... after all, with the coming "data starvation" our PCs might be the last frontier? Insane amounts of (varied) data and some free, distributed compute. What's not to like, from their perspective?

Edited: "CatGPT" will bring about the Singularity :)

[1] - https://samperson.itch.io/desktop-goose

Windows only though, so maybe not what you're looking for

> defaults write com.apple.dashboard devmode YES

Maybe there was also a glitch to do it without the Terminal command; if there was I don't know about it.

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=tonybalo...

I’ve looked for those a couple times in recent years but with no luck. Are they lost to time or am I just not looking well enough?

https://tenor.com/search/man-smashes-computer-gifs

PS. They would use up an obscene amount of memory and wholesale freeze your entire computer every 20 minutes. Didn't matter :)

I spent hours downloading one that was macaroni doing the Macarena.

-- A. A. Milne, _King John's Christmas_

So early that they got de-facto replaced by MenuItems in 10.1 just six months after 10-dot-0 (though Docklings were in DPs/PB too)

I wish someone would resurrect the Das Blinkenlights Mac screensaver. I think it was frozen in the Power PC age.

'member when computers used to be fun?

First time I saw that Amiga ball bounce, mind = blown.

Dont forget to notice how old the video is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSZtTo1lXP8

But I think there were sheep, dancing babies (ugh!!), something like Bonzi Buddy rings a bell (I once had to clean something named that off a colleague’s workstation when he reported it thinking it was malware).

There was also toys like this on Linux and Unix too. Most famously xeyes.

I miss the playful era when things like this and novelty screensavers were “cool”.

But if you read the description of its spyware behaviour from a current perspective, it's not that different from the telemetry that’s implemented everywhere and Windows bugging you to use Bing as a search engine.

There was also this desktop program where you would choose from different weapons, I don't remember for which purpose... anyone knows what I'm talking about?

(Then again, some people like the mobile version better - kind of like a "reader mode" - and link to it because of that ...

The behavior you mention should be an user configurable setting, perhaps ...

I should still have a screenshot somewhere of lesstif/mwm with xsnow + xeyes (and xclock of course)

We also set it up at school (IT degree) on the shared computers, but I think a sysadmin found out. We didn't get in trouble, but a classmate was caught and nearly expelled.

https://archive.org/details/win3_TELV150

[1] https://youtu.be/8eqLzcvVpiM

Fun toy though. Kind of like a tamagotchi.

Tamagotchi. Now that's nostalgia for you.-

Gravity vs thrust, with left + right controls, the idea was to carefully land on any of the windows on your desktop.

Analogous to breaking the fourth wall, in a way.

I still recall the scrolling message in that game -- Space is big, Space is dark, It's hard to find, a place to park.

This needs to be on a Tshirt.-

(Sent to Musk. For the reusable rocket team :)

That was nice sometimes.

packaged for debian :)

I remember playing with this on Windows 95, but it turns out it was made for Windows 3.1 initially.

YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sesM1fygKDs

Internet archive: https://archive.org/details/desktoptoys_201911

Edit: Noooooo I was playing some other program! It looked slightly better than this. Can't find it now :(

I want clock, calendar, notes, CPU and system stats, pull out or slide out menus with shortcuts, quirky ones like this one.

Instead what I have is ads.

And copilot everywhere.

With touch screen laptops today you can do so much more. My levono also folds 360 and let's me use it as a full touch screen desktop. There is so much potential for productivity hacks and interactive UX ideas if Windows customization and widgets ecosystem was alive and thriving.

But they were really sluggish, which made them useless in my opinion. If I have to wait seconds for my widgets to load or react, I'll just write my notes in notepad++ and look at the clock on the taskbar.

> And copilot everywhere.

You raise a serious point, oft discussed here (about the sorry state of the OS)

I actually think the "whimsical", nostalgia these kind of apps (toys?) point to is actually indicative of a more serious "yearning" for simpler, higher quality, more user-configurable computing. As it was not so long ago ...

There was little to no spyware or malware risk because this was a time when stealing CPU cycles couldn’t make you money, machines couldn’t be used to anonymously generate internet traffic, and exfiltrating captured data was essentially impossible.

As soon as all the computers went online, the frivolity had to stop.

Very insightful. They ceased to be "our" (user's) machines and became "everybody else's" (vendors, criminals, scammers, "debug-by-update" OS-vendors, etc., etc.)

Though you are probably thinking about rainmeter: https://www.rainmeter.net/

Enshitification ensues.

> Instead what I have is ads

laughs in kde

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Dangerous_Creatures

the holdout was gaming, but Steam and Proton work practically flawlessly. one or two other occasional challenges -- a big one was MS Access that was needed for Master's program -- but other than that nothing on Windows that can't ignored / discarded

That was back when Google was a respectable company that in addition to the mandatory EULA had a separate notice that informed very very cleary, something like:

  READ THIS CAREFULLY

  THIS IS NOT THE NORMAL YADDA YADDA

It had an amazing RSS feed reader widget that would automagically subscribe to feeds from pages on sites I visited and present a relevant selection of links.

It would be nice to have a taskbar calendar with appointments and notifications though. But Microsoft will never make something that is both pluggable and simple here. (Android used to have a mainscrean one, but it stopped being pluggable a long time ago. For some reason Linux people don't write those things.)

So you set a good example. You don’t install frivolous widgets. You tell everybody never to install things that claim they will just make a cute animal appear on their desktop. And even though you know that this bouncy ball widget is safe and fun because you built it from the GitHub repo… you can’t install it because you can’t explain to average user why it’s okay for you to install the fun bouncy ball but they can’t install the kitten that chases a ball of string.

So we can’t have nice things, sorry.

And is a real hacker anything like a true Scotsman?

Assange news is pretty big. I guess I was surprised that wasn’t top of the page.

And I always defer to the Jargon file for my own axioms. It’s been a long time with that as a North Star.

Now that's a thought.-

Apart from amusement, this served as a nice example when you are giving talks at universities trying to motivate students to tinker. Just multiple gravity by -1 and voila!

Bring back the Dashboard, Apple! The original Dashboard was dropped because of it's shaky technology foundations, but the UX was fantastic and much better than the widgets buried in the notification centre or cluttering the desktop that we have today.

Now that we have modern native Widgets on macOS X, they need a place where they can thrive, and look cool, and be quickly accessible. Dashboard!

The physics can seem a bit floaty, particularly with space or moonscape wallpapers, but overall it’s good.

We've submitted numerous GH issues and even tried to chase the developer down on LinkedIn. But he treats the project like a fun, novelty "gift" to the community and doesn't respect the SLAs that any repo maintainer needs to adhere to for my org to put their free code in production.

Currently, we are using Unreal Engine 5 to do our hundreds of architectural physics simulations - the major issue is that UE5 is very slow on *the EC2 instance* (we only have one 2048 core EC2 instance shared between the entire office; we used to use Vercel and Cloudflare but we had to sell our homes to suddenly subscribe to Cloudflare Enterprise (the CF sales guy told us that we would not be allowed to run a CF Worker for more than 30 days without it, even though we had a CF worker run for 37 years, and many of our CF workers have been running before the creation of CF (nobody knows why)) and a giant spike in our Vercel Cuda Function Invocations (for GPGPU compute on the Edge, allowing architects to view the collapse of their buildings with only ~53 ms of latency (compared to ~53 ms without Next.js))). Ball seems much faster (it can run on a Macbook Air), potentially allowing us to save at least several tens of millions of dollars per year on AWS costs.

(I'm totally not a state actor looking to socially engineer you to hide an exploit, by the way.)

(Totally :)

More devs need to be good to OSS maintainers. Breaks my heart when I see folks treat public repos and GH issues as a service desk and not a collaboration! (Not saying anyone is doing that for this fun project, but a message I'll use any excuse to promote. Btw... that issue filed was I think someone genuinely helping the project.)

Good point. (They are two and different things ...)

> Breaks my heart when I see folks treat public repos and GH issues as a service desk and not a collaboration!

This is also well said, and on point.-

PS Still in work, as per the issue tracker :/ :)

Classic, am affraid.-

Tried R2?

:)

PS. Incidentally, "lightheartedness", humor, might just be the ultimate Turing test.-

All that's missing is about 3 more README's of warnings and disclosures ending with "Do not taunt Ball." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmqeZl8OI2M

I always know where my recently downloaded files are, and I have visual feedback of when I should delete them.

I also use it as a temporary launchpad for sorting uploads.

A desktop hygiene tip I read years ago (but can't remember where) is to increase the size of your desktop icons almost to the point of being ridiculously large, like 96x96. This way your desktop will "fill up" faster, forcing you to clear it more regularly.

Great great piece of software. Bought by Adobe, I believe.-

Speaking of fun desktop toys, Compiz effects used to be wild.