OK, so I’ve been playing with a new Core Image screen-saver as my background, and this one was just too awesome not to share.
Basically, your desktop picture is underwater and there are randomly-generated gentle ripples across the surface that reflect off the sides of the screen properly.
Click screen-shot for video (768*480 h.264 mp4, scaled from 1440*900, approx 15MB)
Or, a YouTube link for the h.264-impaired.
As you can maybe see when I invoke top, the ScreenSaverEngine is using ~11% of one core, with the bulk of the CPU being eaten at that point by the screen capture tool. It’s not tons, but you’re certainly going to want to kill it if you have an encoding job to do, or you want to play a game.
The one downside is that you basically have to feed an image to the screen-saver to overlay the water onto (I use the same image as my desktop background). That is to say, you can’t have it running transparently above your actual desktop, for example so that it could be overlaid on cycling random backgrounds.
Apple put out some slightly different MacBook Pros (MacBooks Pro??) today.
They’re not fancy enough to make it worth eBaying mine and upgrading, but they’re just fancy enough to make me a little sad 
I’ll definitely take the plunge when some sub-13″ model appears. Currently the rumour sites have this time-tabled for some time in the first half of 2008, so I think I can slum it with my measly X1600 graphics and merely bright-as-the-sun display until then.
Published on
01/06/2007 in
music.
Oh man, Of Montreal were so freaking awesome last night. I can’t believe we went, honestly. Never mind either of us rarely do that kind of thing, we only actually noticed they were playing five hours before the doors opened as we were walking to the cinema. It was in this tiny little venue above a bar, I guess there was room for ~200 people at most?
They were supported by The Video Nasties and The Strange Death Of Liberal England, neither of whom sucked. This was a nice surprise, since the last time I saw a warm-up act that didn’t suck was the Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster warming up for Placebo when I was still in school (Placebo, on the other hand, sucked pretty bad that evening).
But yeah, Montreal blew all that came before out of the goddamn water. It was all psychedelic and disturbing, partly from the background visuals, and partly because over the first few songs Kevin Barnes removed layers of clothing until he was performing in a red cravat and a pair of pink glittered y-fronts. Then someone brings a step-ladder on-stage and he climbs on top and dons this bizarre silk clown-outfit-poncho-thing that went right to the floor. I think that was for I Was Never Young? I really don’t remember.
They played some old stuff, some new stuff, the stuff I knew all the words to by heart, and then they finished up with a cover of All Day And All Of The Night that had the crowd going fucking nuts.
From there Helen and I went to The Alley cafe, where it was open mic dub night or something? We forgot it wasn’t Friday though, so it was panic o’clock when we realised we missed the last Red Arrow. Long story short: we’re wandering around and see a bus that takes around an hour just about to leave and leap on just in time.
I love it when a plan comes together~