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Show HN: Parallax wallpaper engine for Linux and Windows

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41–50 of 70 posts

Re: Show HN: Parallax wallpaper engine for Linux and Windows

#41

You need to use the Wii remote in reverse so you can make a fake window. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd3-eiid-Uw (can't believe this was 15 years ago now..)

I remember him, Johnny Lee. I actually bought his Poor man's stabilizer ~15 years ago because I couldn't afford to buy Steadicam. EDIT: He also worked as dev for XBox Kinect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Lee_(computer_scientist...

XBox Kinect had so much potential but sadly smart phones appeared to eat up the entire market. Even ARKit hasn't really done much. VR just doesn't seem to be much of a market except for things like VRChat.

Re: Show HN: Parallax wallpaper engine for Linux and Windows

#43

This is exactly the sort of fun, random, small project that reminds me of the more anarchic and playful older days of computing and the web. Those days are gone and not coming back, but their spirit lives on in things like this. It’s not some earth shattering YCombinator thing, it’s not a SaaS, it’s not (at least to my eye) about money — it’s a neat thing to do with a piece of screen real estate we all look at a mill…

Not so early internet but what happened to over the top Compiz 3D cube desktops and wobbly windows that catch on fire when closed?

Wayfire is like compiz but as an independent Wayland compositor: https://wayfire.org/

Re: Show HN: Parallax wallpaper engine for Linux and Windows

#44
If only I was using a "wallpaper". With dark mode on, even a dark grey wallpaper emits enough brightness to make things distracting for me e.g. when watching movies on the main monitor while the other monitors don't have anything on them. Nowadays my wallpaper is a jet black Image.

Re: Show HN: Parallax wallpaper engine for Linux and Windows

#46

This is exactly the sort of fun, random, small project that reminds me of the more anarchic and playful older days of computing and the web. Those days are gone and not coming back, but their spirit lives on in things like this. It’s not some earth shattering YCombinator thing, it’s not a SaaS, it’s not (at least to my eye) about money — it’s a neat thing to do with a piece of screen real estate we all look at a mill…

I remember this kind of purely for fun desktop stuff was all over Windows 3.1 and 95. There'd be shareware apps with no purpose other than making bullet holes appear randomly on your screen, or snow flakes fall everywhere. It was wacky and fun vs. the all serious business that operating systems have become today.

Re: Show HN: Parallax wallpaper engine for Linux and Windows

#47

You need to use the Wii remote in reverse so you can make a fake window. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd3-eiid-Uw (can't believe this was 15 years ago now..)

This is brilliant! Why haven't we seen this idea developed further into consumer devices by now

Amazon's failed Android phone infamously had this feature. There was a front facing IR camera IIRC which tracked your face/gaze and made the environment change as you looked into it. https://venturebeat.com/games/how-3d-works-on-the-amazon-fir...

Re: Show HN: Parallax wallpaper engine for Linux and Windows

#48
@czikenix: first thing I went for was checking the AUR for this by searching for `lwp`; the name exists in AUR as a "Lightweight process library"; names are hard so good luck if you end up re-naming it .

will get to testing it out soon and looking forward to it

Re: Show HN: Parallax wallpaper engine for Linux and Windows

#50

This is exactly the sort of fun, random, small project that reminds me of the more anarchic and playful older days of computing and the web. Those days are gone and not coming back, but their spirit lives on in things like this. It’s not some earth shattering YCombinator thing, it’s not a SaaS, it’s not (at least to my eye) about money — it’s a neat thing to do with a piece of screen real estate we all look at a mill…

I remember this kind of purely for fun desktop stuff was all over Windows 3.1 and 95. There'd be shareware apps with no purpose other than making bullet holes appear randomly on your screen, or snow flakes fall everywhere. It was wacky and fun vs. the all serious business that operating systems have become today.

Also interesting is the fact that such software was perfectly capable of rendering those effects with decent performance on hardware of the time --- single core CPUs with a few hundred MHz, barely anything resembling a GPU, and memory usage in the low MBs if not kilobytes. Now even the completely bland and boring, mostly borderless UI of an IM application is ridiculously sluggish on a high-end multicore machine with a "gamer"-class GPU and takes insane amounts of RAM.
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