Spending (or wasting) time in retirement

[Bernie_by_the_Sea]

Retirement allows certain luxuries, if that’s what they are. I retired 26 years ago. These days I never have anything regular to do to occupy my time. Today I spent about six hours working on a screen saver for Puppy. After going down a number of dead ends, including some reverse engineering hacking, installing or trying to install some deb and rpm packages (with dozens of dependencies) and learning a few more beginner tricks in Gimp I ended up with something I could have done in five minutes.

I now have exactly what I wanted, not a screen saver as such, but an icon I can click and get some moving patterns on the screen that look like a screen saver. It’s my understanding that LCD screens no longer need screen savers to avoid burn-in but I’ve used them so long I really miss not seeing toasters or giraffes flying across the screen.

What I ended up with is a non-Puppy version of xlock that doesn’t move a whole row of icons to the right side every time the X server starts. It has an icon I selected after looking at dozens and dozens of them in out of the way places. Xlock-settings doesn’t work with this version of xlock so I have to set the mode with an extension to the exec file. The -nolock option allows any key press to close the “screen saver

[Flash]

...It’s my understanding that LCD screens no longer need screen savers to avoid burn-in...

I've seen an LCD screen with a pattern apparently "burned" into it after years of sitting with that pattern on the screen virtually all the time. The pattern was faint and only visible when that part of the screen wasn't illuminated, but it was definitely there.

[Lobster]

I really miss not seeing toasters or giraffes flying across the screen

I really need a flying giraffe . . .
Will you be sharing this screen save option?
MU did a really great screensaver that used PuppyBasic
and used old Amiga game graphics.
However not sure if that is still around?
http://puppylinux.org/wikka/PuppyBasic

Come to think of it I need a flying giraffe that sings . . .
possibly using Mongolian throat singing.
You never know when this could come in useful.
Info from this thread could be useful . . .
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 126#429491

[Bernie_by_the_Sea]

I really miss not seeing toasters or giraffes flying across the screen

I really need a flying giraffe . . .
Will you be sharing this screen save option?

Those giraffes were in prehistoric times I think on Windows 3.1. I haven't seen them in a long, long time... but I still miss them. I'm sure I have them on a floppy somewhere but I have hundreds of floppies for 3.1 and they're unorganized. They have tiny, tiny printouts listing files taped to them but it takes forever to find anything. For several years I didn't have a floppy drive so they got pushed to the back of the closet. I did put a floppy drive on my new computer last summer. I missed those, too. I have no idea how hard it would be to convert ancient Windows screensavers to Linux even if I could find them.

I can share part of this option. I tried to upload the version of xlock that I'm using with my original post but this forum doesn't like binaries. So... I wrapped it up in a package to smuggle by the inspectors.

[L18L]

Watching the screen now is like watching a fish tank (I have got none)
Very nice!

... this forum doesn't like binaries...

Will you be sharing the sources, too

Maybe it could be improved by adding internationalization ( just descriptions and display of date/time),
as this is in which I am spending (or wasting) time in retirement.

[Bernie_by_the_Sea]

Will you be sharing the sources, too

I don't have the sources. I stole that version already compiled from who knows where. I have a suspicion that version might be the standard one in Linux and Puppy's is modified to be the odd one.