automaticable

Screen savers lost their utility as screen-burn preventers years ago, but that doesn’t mean they don’t serve a purpose. The main reasons I still use a screen saver are for privacy, through locking my computer whenever a screen saver comes up, and for aesthetic reasons. The latter is what I will be discussing here, and my favorite screen saver for aesthetic reasons is Electric Sheep.

Electric Sheep is an open source screen saver that is ever changing, and more importantly, ever adapting. It started as just a few video files, but through user ratings, evolution, and individual creations has grown to include a library of thousands of “sheep.” Sheep is the term used for each individual video file, while a flock is a group of video files you can get all at one time.

The best aspect of Electric Sheep is that your sheep evolve over time. Users can rate whether they like or dislike the current sheep that is playing with a simple press of the up or down arrow. This rating is taken into account when the computer, or more specifically everyone’s computers (Electric Sheep takes advantage of your computer’s downtime to run small computations instead of only using in-house servers), to take the higher rated sheep and breed them together. Through the magic of torrents, your computer also uses its downtime to constantly download small bits of the new sheep that are always being produced, thus you are provided with new and beautiful screen savers all the time.

I think I’ve missed the most important aspect of Electric Sheep while explaining all this technical stuff; Electric Sheep is absolutely beautiful. The videos that play are entrancing, dynamic, and vividly colored. I honestly have never seen anything like it before. The picture above is a single frame of a single video. As good as it looks up there, it can’t even compare to how it moves in video form, which I am lucky enough to have playing on my laptop currently.

Electric Sheep is free, open source, and cross platform. One suggestion I have is to download a mega-pack of sheep with your initial download, as the screen saver does not come with any videos at first. If you do not want to download a separate pack, it may take a few hours for sheep to start since they need to download, so let the screen saver run overnight so you will have beautiful sheep to wake up to in the morning.