A bunch of bug fixes, but most notably this time, I finally retired a bunch of screen savers that suck. Also I rewrote Jigsaw and Sonar as OpenGL programs, and they are a lot slicker now. The pieces in Jigsaw come in many more varieties, and it rotates the pieces as well.

Dear Lazyweb,

How do you load an NSImage with proper EXIF rotation applied? I can't figure out how to determine the correct rotation. The following doesn't work. I get a dictionary containing a bunch of EXIF keys like exposure and shutter speed, but the "Orientation" tag is notably missing, and the image is displayed sideways. Preview and Finder display it properly, and exiftool says the field is there.

  NSImage *img = [[NSImage alloc] initWithContentsOfFile:filename];
  NSArray *reps = [img representations];
  NSBitmapImageRep *rep = reps ? [reps objectAtIndex:0] : 0;
  if (rep) {
    NSDictionary *exif = [rep valueForProperty: @"NSImageEXIFData"];
    if (exif) {
      NSString *rot = [exif objectForKey:@"Orientation"];
      NSLog (@"rot = %@", rot);
      NSEnumerator *e = [exif keyEnumerator];
      id key;
      while ((key = [e nextObject])) {
        NSLog (@"%@ = %@", key, [exif objectForKey:key]);
      }
    }
  }

XScreenSaver 5.07 out now. Mostly a bug fix release, fixing up a few lingering Xinerama/RANDR bugs, and a bunch of UI tweaks to the preferences dialogs. But most notably, I'm really happy with how the new cartoony cel-shading option to SkyTentacles came out.

And now, a poll!

Screen Savers That Suck, Second Try.

Two years ago I asked you all which screen savers, if any, you thought I should remove from the xscreensaver distribution. That didn't work out so well. A lot of it went like this: "I hate XYZ." "You're crazy, XYZ is my favorite!"

Several people suggested partitioning them into categories (e.g., "Retro", "Math", etc.) but nobody came up with a set of categories that really made sense.

So let's try it another way: please vote in this poll for the screen savers you think I should delete. BUT, please only vote for TEN. The poll will let you select hundreds, but please don't do that. Only select your ten most hated. The ones that make you say, "this screen saver is completely without merit, and anyone who says they like it is lying."

( The "Screen Savers That Suck" Poll   --More--(20%) )

XScreenSaver 5.06 out now. Only one new hack this time, but it's a fine one, if I do say so myself. Also this includes a bunch of fixes related to adding, removing and resizing monitors (RANDR/Xinerama) on X11 systems, as I mentioned earlier. So please stress-test that junk. Or be devoured.

Dear Lazyweb,

I could use some Linux xscreensaver debugging help. I made some fairly large changes to make it cope with the brave new RANDR world where monitors can be hot-swapped and have their resolution changed willy-nilly. Please apply this patch and test some things for me, k? Launch xscreensaver with -verbose to see what it's actually up to.

"Bad" would be 1) crashing, 2) part of your desktop ever being incompletely blacked out by a screen saver, 3) running savers on video outputs that don't actually have monitors attached to them.

If you have (or can has) more than one monitor:

• Do they all go blank when xscreensaver activates?
• Do things look right if you add a monitor while the screen is blanked? While it is non-blanked?
• Likewise when changing the resolution of the monitors using the "xrandr" command.
• Does it correctly realize which monitors are actually attached to the system and in use?
• Try configuring your machine to use the old-style multi-screen mode (where you have displays :0.0 and :0.1, and no Xinerama or RANDR.) Does it still behave sanely?
• Can you configure your X server to use just the Xinerama extension and not the RANDR extension? Try that too.

If you have only one monitor, you can still test this. Use Ctrl-Alt-KeypadPlus and Ctrl-Alt-KeypadMinus to change the resolution of your monitor without changing the resolution of your desktop, so that bumping the mouse against the edge of the screen pans across your desktop. (You might need to turn off the Xinerama and RANDR extensions to make this work, I'm not sure.)

• When xscreensaver launches, the savers should always be the size of the monitor (you shouldn't be seeing a zoomed-in portion of the saver, you should be seeing the whole thing.)
• Lock the screen. While the screen is locked, zoom in and out. The xscreensaver window should stay the size of the visible portion of the screen.
• With the screen locked, bump the mouse against the edge of the screen. The screen should remain covered.

Please let me know how that goes...

Update: There's a new patch with a few fixes. Please try that instead!

Hey, want to help out with some xscreensaver hacking?

Recent-ish Linux systems have made it so that when you add or remove monitors (e.g., docking a laptop) the system is actually aware that this has happened (shocking, I know) and dynamically changes the size, position, and number of screens.

Based on the email complaints I'm getting, it would appear that xscreensaver handles this... poorly.

However, I don't have access to any Linux machines capaple of doing this new Xrandr junk, so I can't really debug it.

I would like someone who does have access to such a machine to A) figure out what cases don't work, and B) send me a patch. You'll need one (preferably two) external monitors to experiment with. Probably better if the machine is a laptop.

Is this person you?

I find this message hilarious^* in several ways.

(Did you know usenet still existed? Wacky. I'm tempted to tag this with "retrocomputing" on that basis alone.)

From: Moshe Goldfarb <brick.n.st...@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.advocacy
Subject: Re: Gnome-screensaver ... nice touch
Date: Wed, 6 Feb 2008 14:38:14 -0500

On Wed, 06 Feb 2008 04:31:51 +0000, [H]omer wrote:

> Usually I just stick with xscreensaver,

Yawwn.......
Is this what Linux advocacy has sunk to?
Don't you guys have anything more interesting to talk about than patents and screen savers?

--
Moshe Goldfarb
Collector of soaps from around the globe.
Please visit The Hall of Linux Idiots:
http://linuxidiots.blogspot.com/

* Where by "hilarious" I mean "mildly amusing".

Hey kids, here's something fun to try!

Remember those Magic Eye "random dot stereogram" things, where if you crossed your eyes just right, you could see 3D pictures?

So. Run the rd-bomb screen saver. Increase the grid size until the seed points are about two inches apart. I like -width 250 -height 220 (it looks better when the width and height are slightly different.)

Now sit about a foot away from the monitor, and cross your eyes slightly so that two of the boxes merge into one, just like you'd do with a random dot stereogram. Now it looks like your monitor is a window and the seething pattern is about ten feet away.

Ooooooh, trippy.

Keep this up for a couple hours and it'll be time for lunch!

This is awesome:

SurveillanceSaver is an OS X screen saver that shows about 400 live security camera videos from public accessible Axis network cameras. It shows surprising scenes from underwater pool cameras, cows in milking machines, to shopping malls and street cameras.

Incidentally, this week I have reached another milestone. I have two computers at home: one is a (headless) mail server, and the other is my iMac desktop. The server was a Linux box until a few days ago when either its power supply or mobo died.

I meditated on this, and came to the conclusion that it was worth several hundred dollars to me to not have to fuck around with the PC hardware dance again, so I replaced it with a Mac Mini. This means there are now no Linux machines in my house*, and even at work, I no longer have any Linux machines that have video cards in them**, which is as it should be.

So, if this release doesn't work on Linux... uh, that's why.

*  except Tivo, which doesn't count.
** except the kiosks, which almost don't count. (Ha.)

Dali Clock 2.24 out now for MacOS 10.4, PalmOS, and X11. This release includes a MacOS screen saver version of the clock, and there are a few minor display-glitch fixes to the PalmOS version. Also the PalmOS version has a color application icon now, ooooooh.

So, I tried to add a preference to the Mac version to let you hide the dock icon, but ( I couldn't make that work... )

XScreenSaver 5.02 out now.

From: Jim <JimHudock@comcast.net>
Date: December 26, 2006 3:27:26 PM PST
To: jwz@jwz.org
Subject: I mneed your help

I do not quite know what I am doing when I get to your site. I want to download the 200 screen savers. I'm running fedora core 4 on and hp computer. What ever I click it doesn't give me the option to install, can you give me a little help please?

From: Jamie Zawinski <jwz@jwz.org>
Date: December 26, 2006 9:53:40 PM PST
To: JimHudock@comcast.net
Subject: Re: I mneed your help

Fedora packages a version of xscreensaver for you. Just install the Fedora "xscreensaver-base", "xscreensaver-extras", and "xscreensaver-gl-extras" packages instead of downloading the source code.

From: "Jim" <JimHudock@comcast.net>
Date: December 28, 2006 10:04:16 PM PST
To: "'Jamie Zawinski'" <jwz@jwz.org>
Subject: RE: I need your help

Why don't you just tell me how to get them from your site, because it takes too long to reinstall the software?

From: Jamie Zawinski <jwz@jwz.org>
Date: December 29, 2006 2:50:42 AM PST
To: Jim <JimHudock@comcast.net>
Subject: Re: I need your help

Because if you didn't understand the instructions on the download page, that means it will be far, far simpler for you to figure out how to install Fedora's binaries than compile it from source. It's not easy.

From: Jim <JimHudock@comcast.net>
Date: December 29, 2006 12:14:59 PM PST
To: Jamie Zawinski <jwz@jwz.org>
Subject: Re: I need your help
Reply-To: JimHudock@comcast.net

Then you should remove yourself from the download site, if you don't have the patience to tell me.
Since it took you so long to answer me, I had time to figure it out for myself.
I do not need your help anymore.

I finally ported the webcollage screen saver to OSX. This will be included with the next release of xscreensaver, but here's a zip of just the one. Let me know if it works...

I had some trouble getting the sub-processes to die properly when the saver deactivated or when you changed option settings. I think it works, but be paranoid about that.