![]() ![]() New models of IBM Model F keyboard Mark II incoming. ![]() Ubuntu 23.04 'Lunar Lobster' beta is here in all its glitchy glory.Fancy trying the granddaddy of Windows NT for free? Now's your chance.Double BSD birthday bash beckons – or triple, if you count MidnightBSD 3.0.Infinisys still offers commercial macOS and Windows versions today. This has inspired many recreations over the years, including one implemented entirely in CSS. ![]() Probably the single most famous animation in all the collections was known as Flying Toasters, for the flocks of kitchen appliances that majestically flapped their way across the screen. The company later ported After Dark to Windows as well. The Reg FOSS Desk was especially fond of the Star Trek collection, and the Totally Twisted pack also offered considerable entertainment value for something totally non-interactive. One of the classic Mac screensavers was the great After Dark from Berkeley Systems, which also sold add-on packs of additional screensavers. (You might want to remove the gnome-screensaver program, if it's installed, as the two may clash.) It's included in many distros – for instance, on Ubuntu, you can install it with: sudo apt install xscreensaver* It mainly targets Unix-like OSes running X11, but it also works on macOS, iOS and Android. The sage of Netscape himself, Jamie Zawinski, or jwz as he's often known online, still maintains XScreensaver after 31 years. If you did like screensavers, you can still have one. Don't knock it – burn-in can still affect flatscreens today. But back when CRT hummed to CRT like mastodons bellowing across primeval swamps, they didn't have a sleep mode, and you needed something to prevent the unchanging parts of your screen display "burning in," where a faint ghost of the image is permanently visible, rendering a display either unpleasant or impossible to use. Now, of course, most of us just let our flatscreens go to sleep after a period of inactivity. Screensavers are a simple tech for a bygone era. It was never really about saving screens. Friday FOSS Fest If you're old enough to remember After Dark, you might appreciate this: a new screensaver. ![]()
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