You know what would be cool? If I could throw my ball into your dock. And then it's yours. You can throw it back to me.
Ball: A ball that lives in your dock
141–150 of 305 posts
Re: Ball: A ball that lives in your dock
#142I remember having these kinds of desktop toys in Windows, way back when, probably 95 or 98? Just a little joyful thing you could play with. This rules.
I loved the one that would take a screenshot of your current desktop and you could smash it with a hammer and set it on fire. Little me had some anger issues
What was this thing called?
Re: Ball: A ball that lives in your dock
#143This is awesomely reminiscent of the old school 68k macintosh era - dogcow, oscar the grouch in the trash can, etc I miss that simplicity / playfulness / aesthic of that era (yes I am old, please get off my lawn)
Oscar! Thank you for the trip down the memory lane.
Re: Ball: A ball that lives in your dock
#144I still miss my desktop sheep every once in a while: https://github.com/Adrianotiger/desktopPet?tab=readme-ov-fil... 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!
Wow, thank you! That brings back unexpected memories of playing on my dad's first laptop.
Re: Ball: A ball that lives in your dock
#145I want widgets on Windows desktop as well. 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 U…
totally reminded me of the days with Windows Blind(?) some crazy dock... you could customise widgets showing bandwidth/disk io/ram/cpu the usual. man those were FUN. but possibly quite power hungry so wouldn't fly nowadays...
Re: Ball: A ball that lives in your dock
#146Re: Ball: A ball that lives in your dock
#147Reminds me of a toy that would let you break/destroy the screen with a variety of tools like hammer, drill, bomb, etc.
Desktop Toys!
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
Re: Ball: A ball that lives in your dock
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
There was a few programs like this. The earliest one I recall was Neko https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neko_(software) 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 play…
Ooh I remember eSheep! 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?
I know it as "stressr.exe" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6NKouWa_o0
Re: Ball: A ball that lives in your dock
#149This reminds me of a Lara Croft desktop(?) Screensaver? She climbed onto the window's edges -that were open on your windows screen, rolled, jumped, etc. Sometimes made a comment about you not having cleaned up your desktop. It was a small executable, than ran with or without sound. It wasn't very random, but it made for an interactive mind distraction on a rough day. She also walked across the bottom of the screen, o…
There was a few programs like this. The earliest one I recall was Neko https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neko_(software) 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 play…
On X11 systems there were also things like xsnow, with snow piling up on your window borders and santa flying in the background. xlemmings, walking/falling on your windows and various variations on this. Xeyes is the 'biggest' or most famous one, but in early linux distro's there were various of these things in the 'games' sections.
Re: Ball: A ball that lives in your dock
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
There was a few programs like this. The earliest one I recall was Neko https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neko_(software) 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 play…
Bonzi Buddy was widely classified as spyware: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BonziBuddy 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.
Was wild reading the talk page for that and seeing Jimbo Wales weighing in.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:BonziBuddy