Introducing MP3.PC-pad!

We’re happy to introduce a new feature on PC-pad: The MP3 section. Basically, we now offer a small on-demand music streaming service at http://mp3.pc-pad.com. We’re filling up the playlist with our favorite electronic songs, including trance, house, techno, hardstyle, and industrial. You simply select what you want to hear and it plays, or just sit back and let the player shuffle the playlist for you. It’s all Creative Commons, so while you won’t hear Basement Jaxx, we think you’ll like our selections. If you feel something’s missing though, there’s a link on the page where you can recommend us your personal favorites. Before you inundate us with Daft Punk’s “Alive 2007” (and rightfully so, it was an excellent album), remember the songs must have a Creative Commons or similarly permissive license. We’re not trying to profit from free music (there will be no ads or similar capitalist ventures), we simply don’t have the funds to pay the RIAA’s protection money.

Give it a spin now and be sure to send us some feedback.   😉

Electric Sheep gives your PC a wooly zap!

Sheep frolic in the electric fields

Screensavers today are in a sad state—either you’re stuck with the mindbogglingly dull defaults that came with your operating system, or you walk through a minefield of spyware and gaudiness.  There hasn’t been an After Dark release in over a decade.  Our thirst for satisfying imagery for our idle computers will leave us dehydrated.

Or will it?  Enter Electric Sheep, the open-source lovechild of Scott Draves and thousands of computers worldwide.  On the most basic level, it’s a distributed computing project like Folding@Home, but instead of curing diseases, Electric sheep renders animated fractal light shows.  With an Internet connection, you can swap these animations (called “sheep”) so that the show never gets old.

Video of some sheep (transitions are more fluid in screensaver, this is just a demo):



No video? Get the DivX Web Player for Windows or Mac

For PCs that are Internet-impaired, you can download premade sheep from elsewhere and simply throw them into the right folder.  The amount of premade sheep available is staggering—ArmoredCavalry casually told me that he had downloaded eight gigabytes of the critters.  Just be sure to set your cache to the amount you download. If your cache is smaller, it will automatically delete the excess. For music lovers, electric sheep can be used as a Windows Media Player visualization with a free plugin.

One cool little feature is that the sheep can “evolve.”  By pressing up or down on your keyboard when a sheep is running, you say that you like it or dislike it, respectively.  The most popular sheep will “mate” and develop new sheep that have characteristics of both their parents.  If you aren’t scarred by the suggestion that love is a popularity contest, you can be treated to some pretty cool images.