- New hacks, GravityWell and DeepStars.
- GLPlanet now supports the Mercator projection, which is as horrible as it sounds.
- BouncingCow now supports mathematically ideal cows: spherical, frictionless.
- Foggy toasters (they fade in the distance now).
- Unknown Pleasures can now use an image file as a clip mask, so you can simulate your favorite meme t-shirts.
- WebCollage updates for recent search engine changes.
- macOS: Fixed BSOD fonts on UWQHD+ displays, I think.
- X11: Added some sample unlock dialog color schemes to the .ad file.
- X11: On systemd 221+ systems, closing your laptop lid might actually lock your screen now, maybe. Thanks to Martin Lucina for doing the heavy lifting on this.
- X11: Sonar can ping without being setuid by using setcap, which is kind of "setuid lite".
XScreenSaver 5.43
Tags: computers, firstperson, linux, mac, mpegs, phones, xscreensaver
12 Responses:
Shouldn't the gravity wells be hemispehrical at the bottom? Also, it would be nice if some of them were infinitely* deep, like black holes.
* just off-screen-deep, probably.
I tried making them round, and also floating spheres in them (at the top or bottom) and that just kinda looked weird. "Black holes" (cranking mass way up and radius down) just end up being very, very large and dominating the scale of the display.
Given the acceleration at the center is zero, maybe the bottom should be an upward pointing spike?
I was immediately reminded of this (released ~40 years ago):
...presumably based on an earlier visualization?
Same here. Not that the movie aged well.
I'm judging you all for remembering that instead of this.
I loved that episode.
"closing your laptop lid might actually lock your screen now, maybe. "
I can't remember where I read this from, probably a /. comment or a comment here, but someone once compared Linux power management to "having an epidural with a lawn dart."
It was a comment on this blog, back in 2011, by Mike Hoye.
https://www.jwz.org/blog/2011/10/has-gnome-3-decided-that-people-shouldnt-want-screen-savers/
I don't linux much, but I did mess with it a bit earlier this year, and it still appears to be true that you can't rely on it to automatically put your machine to sleep when you aren't using it.
As a reluctant Windows user, this sounds awfully familiar, going back a couple of years to when I had to use Windows 7.
Hilariously I also have Windows 10 on an elderly Mac that cannot be allowed to sleep, because even with the Bootcamp tools running in Win7 compat mode, it has no clue how to wake back up.
Power management is something that was done very early and very right by Apple.
Hi! Thanks for xscreensaver and all the modules. My favourites are cloudlife and xrayswarm.
But starwars doesn't work as advertised in the documentation. It doesn't recognise the option -program. I'm on Debian (5.42+dfsg1) but I also tried 5.43 from your page and 5.31 from Zygo's github.
Without the -program option it works but only displays the boring system information. I guess I'm doing something wrong. Best
LOL. I can use Advanced -> Text Manipulation. Sorry for the noise. :)
I still think the documentation should reflect that better.