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This is an old page from Rod Begbie's blog.

It only exists in an attempt to prevent linkrot. No new content will be added to this site, and links and images are liable to be broken. Check out begbie.com to find where I'm posting stuff these days.

Filed under 'windows'

July 6, 2011

Nyan Cat Progress Bar

Is it wrong to consider installing Windows 7 in a VM just to try this?

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May 12, 2010

Portal is FREE!

The free game is not a lie! To encourage download of Steam, Valve is giving Portal away for free for the next two weeks. If you haven’t already played it, YOU HAVE NO EXCUSE NOT TO.

April 24, 2009

Revealing Windows XP Mode for Windows 7

Windows 7 will ship with (effectively) a free copy of Virtual PC and license to run Windows XP. “Classic Mode”, if you will.

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February 20, 2009

Flux

“F.lux makes your computer’s lighting adapt to the time of day, warm at night and like sunlight during the day.”

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October 28, 2008

Bejeweled Twist

PopCap’s latest. When I watched the video, I was skeptical — it all looked a bit crazy and flash and overkill. But it is ace fun and a worthy addition to the Bejeweled family.

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October 14, 2008

2D Boy: World of Goo

Stonking little indie game, finally officially released. Filled with bizarreness and imagination, I’ve been having a blast with it.

October 4, 2008

July 21, 2008

Ophcrack

Windows password cracker. Has an interesting open-source business model: The cracker is GPL, and there are free (but limited) Rainbow tables. To get the full tables, you need to pay $99.

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June 25, 2008

An epic Bill Gates e-mail rant

Even billg gets frustrated by the pain of Windows Update.

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March 26, 2008

Crossover Games

Wine for OS X and Linux especially designed to play graphically-intensive Windows games. The Orange Box and its contents are supported, and Audio-Surf ran OK for me, with some minor resolution-based oddness. Not sure it’s worth $40, though, when I can just reboot to Boot Camp.

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February 26, 2008

Winclone

I bought a new laptop drive for my MacBookPro last week, and with SuperDuper, was able to copy my OS X partition and boot off it within hours. The Boot Camp Windows partition, however, stumped me. No amount of disk copying or dd’ing worked.

This tool did. It does all the magick required to successfully copy a Windows partition and tweak the partition table to make Windows boot again. Hurrah!

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February 17, 2008

Music using ONLY sounds from Windows XP and 98!

Posted mostly because it’s clever, but also because I miss hacking on MOD files.

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February 16, 2008

Audiosurf: Ride Your Music

An outstandingly fun Windows game: Drive a car over coloured blocks on a track generated by an MP3 of your choosing. Pick something mellow, and you get a relaxing low-scoring game. But if you want a challenge, throw some pumping techno its way. Works very well with Chemical Brothers and Pixies, I find. Best use of Digital Signal Processing ever!

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February 6, 2008

TrueCrypt - Free Open-Source On-The-Fly Disk Encryption Software

The excellent TrueCrypt now runs on OS X, as well as Windows and Linux. I’ll definitely be shunting some of my files onto an encrypted thumbdrive later.

December 17, 2007

Review: Windows XP - Coding Sanity

“I have finally decided to take the plunge. Last night I upgraded my Vista desktop machine to Windows XP”

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December 12, 2007

CDBurnerXP: Introduction and News

Freeware CD burner app for Windows. If this means I can nuke bloody Nero off my work PC, I’ll be a happy, happy man.

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December 4, 2007

BBC NEWS | 'Kill switch' dropped from Vista

“Microsoft says its efforts have seen a drop in piracy of its software.” Alternatively, the fact that no-one *wants* Vista could be a factor.

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November 30, 2007

PuTTY Tray

Improved version of the essential ssh client for Windows

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November 6, 2007

Synthesia, Piano for Everyone

The project formerly known as “Piano Hero”.

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October 23, 2007

Vista Is Still Plagued by Incompatibilities - Yahoo! News

“Vista has an aroma like [Windows] ME, and I am not interested in getting sick again.” Ooh, I hadn’t thought of it that way, but it’s pretty true. Vista and ME are not dissimilar in their not-worth-the-hassle-of-upgrading-ness.

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September 21, 2007

Shell Blog : The UI design minefield - er... flower field??

The problems with cultural-sensitivity when you’re shipping something worldwide.

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September 4, 2007

Jing Project: Visual conversation starts here. Mac or Windows.

Cool looking little screencast app from TechSmith — An easy way to grab images or video from your desktop, and share them quickly. Works in OS X and Windows.

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August 27, 2007

Lenovo Support & downloads - Downgrading from Windows Vista to Windows XP

Lenovo offering disks to let you “downgrade” your newly-purchased Vista-running laptop to XP. Prediction: These will be very popular.

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August 20, 2007

Even the Office 2007 box has a learning curve - Joel on Software

As someone who installed Vista on a PC in January, and regretted it for months, I echo Joel Spolsky’s summation: “I’ve been using Vista on my home laptop since it shipped, and can say with some conviction that nobody should be using it as their primary operating system — it simply has no redeeming merits to overcome the compatibility headaches it causes.”

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July 27, 2007

Very slow internet browsing - Vista x64 Forums

“netsh int tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled” — The magic incantation that stops network performance SUCKING BALLS (at least on the RhymesWithNose network) in Vista.

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May 17, 2007

ThisIsNotALabel.com - My Wiimote Drum Kit

Virtual drumming with a wiimote. The video gives a good idea how it works.

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May 2, 2007

Wakoopa - Software gone social

Social site tracking what applications you use and how long you use them for. Kind of a Last.FM meets IUseThis.

May 1, 2007

Frets On Fire

Open source Guitar Hero-a-like.

April 26, 2007

Hackety Hack: the Coder's Starter Kit

Simple easy-to-get-started programming tutorial, based upon Ruby and Mozilla. Written by “Why the Lucky Stiff”. The “Hackety Manifesto” is worth reading.

April 17, 2007

Port 25 : Windows Media Player Firefox Plugin - Download

From the “about bloody time” file, a plugin from Microsoft for Firefox which allows WMV files to stream in your browser. This has been broken (and required lots of DLL copying) for years.

April 4, 2007

filehippo.com Update Client - filehippo.com

Know when Windows programs you have installed need updateing — Like VersionTracker or AppFresh, but for Windows.

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March 28, 2007

Apple - Boot Camp

New refresh of Boot Camp - now with official support for Windows Vista.

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February 27, 2007

'Beyond Tetris' - Minesweeper

History of everyone’s favourite Windows feature.

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February 7, 2007

Perpetual Motion: FireFox Identity Selector Extension

CardSpace plugin for Firefox for Windows. Uses the underlying Windows CardSpace system interface, so it works with all the other (ahem) applications using CardSpace on your PC.

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February 2, 2007

Bill Gates on Vista and Apple's 'Lying' Ads - Newsweek Technology - MSNBC.com

Bill Gates trolls the Apple fanboy. “Nowadays, security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine.” I had to double-check this wasn’t some “Fake Steve”-style spoof!

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January 31, 2007

Seth's Blog: Wow!

Nothing says “Wow!” like seven aging men in suits.

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January 30, 2007

YouTube - Bill Gates in South Park

In celebration of BillG telling us all about how great Vista is today, here’s his appearance from the South Park movie, telling us all how great Windows 98 is.

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January 28, 2007

Twitteroo

Windows Twitter client. Very “inspired” by Twitterrific.

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January 25, 2007

Humanized

Interesting looking program launcher for Windows — It actually makes CAPS LOCK a useful key on the keyboard again — but I’m not sure it’s worth $25.

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January 11, 2007

CrashPlan

Impressive looking network backup software. Straightforward to set-up, you can either pay CrashPlan to backup to their servers, or use local or friends’ hard drives for free. Lots of nice touches, like using Bonjour to discover local backup destinations automatically. Once the Linux client is ready, I’ll be in heaven.

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January 4, 2007

Wormux

Open source Worms-a-like. Far too many of my student hours were taken up playing “Worms 2” against my flatmates. Admittedly, most of that time was taken up by giggling as we named our worms things like “Sean Is A Virgin” and “Jim’s Cock”, but I think the game was fun too.

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December 10, 2006

DVD Audio Ripper

Handy utility for ripping (stereo) music DVDs as MP3s.

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December 8, 2006

Pirates crack Vista Activation Server | APC Magazine

MS try to avoid the “Volume License Key” fiasco of XP (if you used FCKGW, or another volume key to install XP, you didn’t have to go through “activation” - ie. phoning into their servers) by not issuing volume keys for Vista. Instead, they created a server that enterprises could run, and installations of Vista would phone into local servers. Someone gets hold of said server, creates a VMWare image, voila! Anyone can install Vista without having to activate! Cat, meet mouse. Mouse, meet cat. Fight!

December 2, 2006

home of the nerd cave | taskbar shuffle

Drag’n’drop the buttons in your Windows taskbar, in case you, like me, are the obsessive type who gets quite out-of-whack when your mail client isn’t the left-most button.

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Parallels Desktop New Coherence Feature

The latest beta of Parallels Desktop for OS X allows you to seamlessly display windows from, erm, Windows on your OSX desktop. This is very cool stuff. Makes me wish I had an Intel Mac to try it out on.

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November 24, 2006

Twadget — The Twitter Vista Sidebar Gadget

I’ve knocked out a sidebar gadget for Vista which displays your friends’ statuses on Twitter.

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November 13, 2006

Sqlite Developer - Sqlite3 Database Manager

GUI for managing SQLite databases. Best one I’ve found, although it’s not free. Deals gracefully with the 4Gb database files we use at work.

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November 10, 2006

NPR : New Windows Has New Sound

NPR segment on the history of the Windows startup sound.

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October 26, 2006

Adobe Labs - Adobe Soundbooth

Beta of a new audio-editing app from Adobe.

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Windows Defender home

MS’s anti-spyware app is out of beta. Go install it on your relatives’ PCs post-haste.

October 12, 2006

AndreaMosaic Home Page

Really frickin’ good Photomosaic-making software. I’ve been having lots of fun with this, using around 15,000 album covers as the “tiles”, and it does an bang-up job, without “cheating” by tinting or repeating images (like some other software does).

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October 9, 2006

OpenPandora

Player for Pandora which supports the multimedia keys on keyboards, minimizes to your system tray, and uploads your track info to last.fm.

October 3, 2006

Listening Post: Winamp Adds Remote Access, Dashboard Widgets

New version of WinAmp (Remember them? It’s like an iPod, except you can’t carry it around with you. Ask your parents) includes “remote listening” — Stream music from your home PC to wherevers. Since Apple kept disabling hacks that did this with iTunes, I’m curious how AOL think they’re going to be able to keep this “legit”

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September 13, 2006

Foxit Software: Foxit Reader 2.0

Foxit Reader, the PDF viewer for Windows that doesn’t slow down your PC startup, kill your web browser, or take 45 seconds to load, has reached version 2.0. Recommended.

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September 11, 2006

What Slows Windows Down?

Installing Norton increases your Windows bootup time by 58%.

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September 8, 2006

Joel on Software: Installing Vista RC1 in VMWare Workstation

This gotcha caught me out too when I was trying to experiment with Vista RC1. Bloody Microsoft.

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September 4, 2006

REAPER - Rapid Environment for Audio Prototyping and Efficient Recording | Cockos Incorporated

Shareware Windows multitrack audio editor from Justin Frankel and co.

August 4, 2006

import this. » Blog Archive » HOWTO: Django on Windows

Links to all the pieces you need to get Django up-and-running on Windows. I’ve just started poking at Django, and I’m liking it so far.

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August 2, 2006

WinTabber - Tab your terminal, shell, browser or favorite application

Can be used with PuTTY to create a tabbed interface. Since I usually have four or five ssh shells open at a time, this’ll help me keep track of things.

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July 19, 2006

Adobe Labs - Project: Lightroom

Adobe’s Lightroom photo-processing beta is now available for Windows in addition to OSX.

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July 3, 2006

nLite - Deployment Tool for Unattended Windows

nLite’s hit 1.0. If you reinstall Windows with any frequency, it’s a lifesaver, allowing you to slipstream an install containing all Windows Updates, plus your favourite settings, tweaks, and apps.

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June 15, 2006

ClamWin Free Antiviru

Free and Free antivirus for WIndows, based on ClamAV. Imagine Norton Antivirus, but without all the masses of shite that slows down your PC. Doesn’t include “on-access” file scanning, but I’m happy with that.

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June 4, 2006

BixData | Cluster and Systems Management

Free but not-free tool for system monitoring. Looks like a usable alternative to Nagios.

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May 23, 2006

2007 Microsoft Office System Beta 2: Get the Beta

The first major public release of the next version of Office. Get your grubby hands on the shiny new UI for the first time, and try to imagine how you’re going to explain it to your parents over the phone.

May 22, 2006

SourceForge.net: UltraStar

Open-source version of the SingStar karaoke game.

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May 18, 2006

JungleDisk - Reliable online storage powered by Amazon S3™

Cross-platform mountable network file-system storing your precious data with Amazon’s S3 service.

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April 14, 2006

ANOTHER WORLD

Remake of the classic PC game, Another World. Bastard tough, but awesome fun, as I recall.

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April 7, 2006

Network Magic

Simplified home-network manager for Windows. A common interface for all the things you want to manage — routers, software firewalls, file/printer sharing, etc.

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April 5, 2006

DOSBox, a x86 emulator with DOS

Tool for running olde DOS games (Soundblaster emulation and all) in Windows/Linux/OSX. I’ll have to try getting “Jones In The Fast Lane” up and running with it.

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Apple - Boot Camp

Well blow me! Apple have made available a tool to help you install Windows XP on your new Intel Mac. Strikes me that a MacBook Pro is the best Windows laptop you’re gonna find at the moment.

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March 28, 2006

Safely install software in a virtual layer - Lifehacker

This looks handy. Install Windows applications into isolated silos so you can try them and uninstall them without leaving debris all over your hard drive and registry.

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March 27, 2006

Videora TiVo Converter

Free one-click conversion of video files to the specific MPEG format required to copy video onto your TiVo. No messing around with demuxers or codecs required. They also have one that converts to iPod Video format.

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March 19, 2006

Allmydata.com

Distributed P2Pish secure backups. You give up 10Gb of your hard drive, for the rights to distribute 1Gb of your files across hundreds of peers. Sadly Windows-only, and there’s no way to tweak how much *bandwidth* you’re willing to give up, but could come in handy.

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March 15, 2006

pywinauto

Control other Windows applications from within Python.

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February 8, 2006

VMWare Server

Fantastic news: VMWare are making their server product free(beer). I’m almost certainly going to use this for a dev server at work — Backup the virtual machine image every night, and if hardware crashes, just startup your backed-up image on a new machine. Also gets around the “You can’t create an image” limitation of the free VMWare Player app.

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January 31, 2006

Internet Explorer 7: Beta 2 Preview

Microsoft have released a public beta of IE7. The homepage is a staggeringly fucking awful flash animation, promising “Everything you need, nothing you don’t, and a few things you have yet to imagine”, before displaying a list of Firefox’s features.

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Why Reboot?

Small Windows app that tells you what an installer is planning on doing after the seemingly-compulsory reboot.

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TorPark

Tor + Firefox that you can run on a USB keychain to enable anonymized web browsing anywhere. Fantastic stuff.

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January 8, 2006

Vongo.com - Choose Now. Watch Now.

Starz’s online video download service: $9.99 for all-you-can-eat movies. Windows & US only, naturally.

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January 3, 2006

Hamachi

To be tried-out: Cross-platform app that creates VPNs between computers — even if they’re behind firewalls. Downside: Requires connecting to a centrally-run server to initiate connection, which will soon be charging $$$.

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January 2, 2006

Hex blog: Windows WMF Metafile Vulnerability HotFix

INSTALL THIS! INSTALL THIS! INSTALL THIS! If you’re running Windows? INSTALL THIS!

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F-Secure : News from the Lab - It's not a bug, it's a feature

The currently-circulating Windows WMF exploit “probably affects more computers than any other security vulnerability, ever.” Every PC running any version of Windows since 1990 — even if fully patched — is vulnerable!

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December 28, 2005

Tunatic: free music identification software

Shazam-a-like “hold a microphone up to a speaker and identify the tune” service that runs on your PC. Neither codebase or database is open, sadly.

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December 7, 2005

ratDVD - the DVD movie download format

Compression/packaging format to rip *everything* from a DVD — Menus, special features, commentaries, etc. Also allows you to unpack and burn back to a DVD! Windows-only at the moment, sadly.

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November 27, 2005

Paint.NET

New version of the excellent free^2 Windows image editing software.

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November 11, 2005

Celestia

Wow. An amazing free space “simulator” for Windows, OSX or Linux. Tip: Select “Demo” from the Help menu to get an idea of what it covers.

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November 7, 2005

Visual Studio Express

Microsoft have release the various versions of Visual Studio Express for free. Very smart move on their part — It reduces the cost of Windows programming to essentially zero for those who aren’t willing to pay, and MS can make up the money with their “professional” Team solutions and MSDN subscriptions.

October 31, 2005

Mark's Sysinternals Blog: Sony, Rootkits and Digital Rights Management Gone Too Far

Sony are now using Windows vulnerabilities to hide DRM software on Windows PCs so that users can’t uninstall them. Fuckers.

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October 25, 2005

Flickr.Net Screensaver

Flickr screensaver for Windows. Rather nicely, it displays different photos on each monitor if you’ve got multiple screens.

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October 21, 2005

VMware Player

This has great potential. VMWare have a free “player” allowing anyone to run pre-built virtual machines.

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October 7, 2005

the electric sheep screen-saver

My screensaver-of-choice — Collaboratively generate frames for gorgeously-trippy animations.


About This Site

This is an archive of groovmother.com, the old blog run by Rod Begbie — A Scottish geek who lives in San Francisco, CA.

I'm the co-founder of Sōsh, your handy-dandy guide for things to do in San Francisco this weekend.