Alternatives
Products that do what I recreated a flying toasters screensaver for XScreensaver does
"After Dark" by Berkeley Systems was a collection of screensavers for Macintosh and Windows from early 90s; "Flying Toasters" is probably the most famous and loved among them. Using my very limited knowledge of C and X11 programming, I recreated it as a XScreensaver module for Linux. Hope you find it useful or at least amusing!
- 1AH
So, I was about 11 years old and just got my first Mac, a IIsi, and of course everyone had AfterDark, but there was this other screensaver program called "Dark Side of the Mac". And within it was, I think now, the most beautiful screensaver ever written. It was called Kaos. Kaos would take anywhere from 10 to 30 seconds to slowly iterate on a single image, starting with a few colored dots and growing into webs within webs of algorithmic beauty. I'm not sure how Tom Dowdy actually wrote the program. What I've done here is to try to reverse engineer how it might have worked, but to animate it…
2025 · thestrikeagency.com
- 2
- 3BS
A github project to collect a bunch of bash-based screensavers/visualizations.
Oct 2025 · github.com
- 4IM
Hey HN! A few years ago someone kept trying to steal my motorcycle, so I decided to make a small camera with really long battery life to catch them. The hardware/software is totally open source, but the companion app only supports macOS currently. (I'm a big fan of native apps, and didn't want to block releasing on Linux/Windows support.) I wrote some blog posts about the process: PCB design: https://toaster.llc/blog/pcb Enclosure design: https://toaster.llc/blog/enclosure Image pipeline:…
2024 · toaster.llc
- 5IR
After 25 years of writing software, I was feeling nostalgic for the kinds of things that got me into programming in the first place: the old DOS demoscene. I spent a weekend seeing if I could recapture some of that INT 13H VGA magic using today's web tech, but with the old-school constraints of doing it from scratch. The result is this portfolio of ten classic effects running in a single HTML file. It's all vanilla JavaScript writing to a element, with no external libraries. It was a fun challenge to implement things like: * The color palette cycling and smooth fading in the Plasma demo. *…
2025 · jdfio.com
- 6
- 7AS
Hi, I've been working on something I've been thinking for long time but since I had no experience with macOS screen savers I always posponed. Now thanks to Claude I was able to create a screensaver that scroll ANSI files while your computer is idle. It allow to use local ANS files or packs directly from 16colo.rs. Repo: https://github.com/lardissone/ansi-saver
Mar 2026 · github.com
- 8
- 9SF
2024 · github.com
- 10
- 11
- 12
- 13ML
Oct 2025 · github.com
- 14AD
2018 · themes.gohugo.io
- 15
- 16FC
2017 · github.com
- 17
- 18
- 19
- 20
- 21AL
I have always wanted cool features in Linux because I use it day to day as my OS. I have always wanted to implement this feature and do it properly: one that automatically adjusts keyboard and LCD backlights using data from the Ambient Light Sensor. I enjoy low-level programming a lot. I delved into writing this program in C. It came out well and worked seamlessly on my device. Currently, it only works for keyboard lights. I designed it in a way that the support for LCD will come in seamlessly in the future. But, in the real world, people have different kinds of devices. And I made sure to…
Nov 2025 · github.com
- 22
- 23IB
I've never posted on ShowHN before, but I wanted to share my Xmas 2025 project; to try a new approach to controlling our kids screen time. This also involved massively over-engineering a solution in order to play with a shiny new gadget (and avoid the in laws at Christmas, obviously) I've shared some learnings on AI coding with embedded devices, and how I approached the product design/hardware selection side of things. The Web App is at https://screenie.org - and I'm Open Sourcing the device and web app code later today (links to follow on that site)
Jan 2026 · partridge.works
- 24
Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Refine with a description →