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Berkeley Systems “After Dark” screensavers recreated in CSS

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Re: Berkeley Systems “After Dark” screensavers recreated in CSS

#111

Post by cwizou »

giantrobot wrote: post #110
mmcconnell1618 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of the reason these are so captivating is that they are slowed down instead of real time. This gives them an other-worldly quality where you can see extreme detail but in a different motion than you would normally see it.

Many of the cityscape ones I don't believe are slowed down, at least the ones I have seen. If you watch the movement of traffic it appears to be moving at normal speeds. Even the orbital ones appear to be real-time. The otherworldliness of the video seems to come more from the smoothness of the motion and the uncommon perspective. Because many of the scenes are captured with drones instead of helicopters or airplanes…

It's been an ongoing debate I've had with some Aerial users, but I agree with you. Most if not all are real time or barely slowed down (latest beta I've put a slider to speed a video up/down partly to try and settle this).

They definitely are massively stabilised though and Apple used to update videos from time to time, tweaking stabilization, colors or sometimes length and pushing new versions. They haven't done that in a long while though.

Some seem shot from fairly high altitude and may use planes instead, and at least for some videos, I've heard they used 3rd parties to shoot them.

Re: Berkeley Systems “After Dark” screensavers recreated in CSS

#112

Post by k__ »

moftz wrote: post #94
k__ wrote: post #18

When I "played" with the PC of my step dad, I somehow made everything a game. Paint, PowerPoint, even screensavers. Counting elements, making bets with my brother which will appear more often. Pointing fingers at the screen in the hopes nothing will touch it. Good times.

I used to make little movies on our Gateway 2000 with PowerPoint 97 using clipart and slide animations.

Yes, me too!

Re: Berkeley Systems “After Dark” screensavers recreated in CSS

#113

Post by vidanay »

willis936 wrote: post #13
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Screensavers are a thing again on modern TV because OLEDs have a pretty serious burn-in problem apparently. Not much creativity there, probably because it should not be annoying, so it's stuff like art galleries or subtle fireworks effects that also 'train' the pixels. Best screensaver I used to have was the BSOD one from xscreensaver, so many people fell for it. Second best is the nyan cat screensaver. Currently hav…

The electron guns in CRTs also take about 30 minutes to warm up. Before then the black level is pretty high and the image is washed out. So there is benefit to running a screensaver on a CRT but OLEDs do best when just put to sleep quickly.

Uhhh, no. I've never seen a CRT take more than 10-15 seconds to "warm up", and I've been looking at CRTs since the early 70's.

Re: Berkeley Systems “After Dark” screensavers recreated in CSS

#114

Post by toast0 »

joezydeco wrote: post #98
ctoth wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This new medium doesn't wait for clicks. It doesn't need computers. It means personalized experiences not bound by a page - think of a how-to origami video channel or a 3-D furry-muckers VR space. It means information that cascades, not just through a PC, but across all forms of communication devices - headlines sent to a pager, or a traffic map popping up on a cellular phone. And it means content that will not hes…

I think writers for Wired in the 90s were paid by the buzzword.

In the most generous framing, Wired was (is?) a monthly magazine focused on how tech and the people in it are changing the world, oriented to a general audience.

Every article needs to be about something that's world changing (positive or negative) and they need enough articles to put in between all the ads they sold. If there isn't enough world changing stuff in a given month, or the writers got started on the wrong things, they've got to hype up what they've got.

Re: Berkeley Systems “After Dark” screensavers recreated in CSS

#115

Post by danudey »

elondaits wrote: post #32
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Screensavers are a thing again on modern TV because OLEDs have a pretty serious burn-in problem apparently. Not much creativity there, probably because it should not be annoying, so it's stuff like art galleries or subtle fireworks effects that also 'train' the pixels. Best screensaver I used to have was the BSOD one from xscreensaver, so many people fell for it. Second best is the nyan cat screensaver. Currently hav…

The Apple TV 4k screensavers (city flyovers filmed in slow motion with a drone) are beautiful and I always end up staring at the screen for a while. https://youtu.be/lbj9kihTwcc

I grabbed a screensaver app for my Sony TV that uses the AppleTV 4K HDR screensavers, and... yeah, it's really, really nice.

Not all of them are city flyovers; there are also long, slow pans of areas like the Great Wall. Generally, it's just gorgeous.

Re: Berkeley Systems “After Dark” screensavers recreated in CSS

#116

Post by danudey »

cwizou wrote: post #104
jdmichal wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow! Is there anything similar that you know of for Android TV? I would love to have something like this over the stock photo slideshow.

I only make the mac version, but I've seen this "port" for Android TV. No guarantees from me that it's any good : https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.codingbuff... It's open source too, according to the description, it streams and doesn't cache videos and apparently it handles 4K HDR. If data usage is a concern to you, be aware that some videos are close to 1 GB.

I use this one on my TV, and it's great, highly recommend.

If bandwidth is a concern, you can also point it towards a local JSON file with whatever URLs you want, so you can mirror the screensavers locally and then stream them from there.

Re: Berkeley Systems “After Dark” screensavers recreated in CSS

#118

Post by fubar2018aug »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #6
fredley wrote: post #3

Beautiful. The nostalgia hit me very hard with this. I remember in the original version you had all sorts of options, and could even combine screensavers. For people who may not remember: screensavers used to be a neccessity as old CRT tubes would 'burn in' an image if they held it static for too long - leaving a shadow of the static image permanently. Screensavers kicked in after a few minutes and displayed somethin…

Screensavers are a thing again on modern TV because OLEDs have a pretty serious burn-in problem apparently. Not much creativity there, probably because it should not be annoying, so it's stuff like art galleries or subtle fireworks effects that also 'train' the pixels. Best screensaver I used to have was the BSOD one from xscreensaver, so many people fell for it. Second best is the nyan cat screensaver. Currently hav…

Working on a next-gen operating system for a large tech company in the Pacific NorthWest in the previous century, I was able to reliably bluescreen the OS when stressing the network using an internal network protocol driver.

Later that day, I read in one of the trade rags about a columnist talking about the efficacy of a bluescreen screensaver.

1+1 = 2

Less than an hour later, most of it spent transcribing the bluescreen text output, I had a BSOD screensaver. Released it to the company intranet and waited for the ensuing hilarity.

Wasn't long before the guys in the build lab took advantage of the screensaver.

They installed the BSOD screensaver and disconnected the mouse and keyboard.

The main dev on the project comes in, sees the bluescreen and proceeds to restart the computer! Oops.

A few years later, on another multi-year large software project at this PNW tech company, the morning that the software was supposed to be signed off and released to manufacturing, the build lab, different group of people, installed the BSOD screensaver and disconnected the mouse and keyboard on the dogfood server for the project.

When the project manager arrived, he went to check on the status of the server, only to find the BSOD. This time a server restart was averted.

So, it's all fun and games until a server is hard rebooted.

Re: Berkeley Systems “After Dark” screensavers recreated in CSS

#120

Post by twiddling »

Cockbrand wrote: post #60
joezydeco wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oooh now let's talk about PointCast. Who remembers when the future of the Internet was push ? https://www.wired.com/1997/03/ff-push/

Haha, PointCast was one of the earliest "next big thing" apps I installed on my Mac in the Dot-com era. I never really found it useful apart from the always available implementation of SameGame.

PointCast was what I what load up with new content for long flights. Catch up my news.
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