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Comment by pomian | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me of a Lara Croft desktop(?) Screensaver? She climbed onto the window's edges -that were open on your windows screen, rolled, jumped, etc. Sometimes made a comment about you not having cleaned up your desktop. It was a small executable, than ran with or without sound. It wasn't very random, but it made for an interactive mind distraction on a rough day. She also walked across the bottom of the screen, out to the right (eg), then you would hear her walking, and eventually she would show up on your left of the screen. Fun little thing with no particular purpose.

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There was a few programs like this. The earliest one I recall was Neko https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neko_(software)

But I think there were sheep, dancing babies (ugh!!), something like Bonzi Buddy rings a bell (I once had to clean something named that off a colleague’s workstation when he reported it thinking it was malware).

There was also toys like this on Linux and Unix too. Most famously xeyes.

I miss the playful era when things like this and novelty screensavers were “cool”.

Bonzi Buddy was widely classified as spyware: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BonziBuddy

But if you read the description of its spyware behaviour from a current perspective, it's not that different from the telemetry that’s implemented everywhere and Windows bugging you to use Bing as a search engine.

Was wild reading the talk page for that and seeing Jimbo Wales weighing in. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:BonziBuddy

Yes, Bonzi Buddy was spyware. It's not that what they were doing was OK, but rather that the industry has normalized spyware.

I wish wikipedia would detect when you're accessing from a non-mobile device and automatically redirect you to non-mobile wikipedia

Seconded.-

(Then again, some people like the mobile version better - kind of like a "reader mode" - and link to it because of that ...

The behavior you mention should be an user configurable setting, perhaps ...

Sounds like a simple user script, found one after some searching: https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/401345-force-redirect-mobi...

Ooh I remember eSheep!

There was also this desktop program where you would choose from different weapons, I don't remember for which purpose... anyone knows what I'm talking about?

I know it as "stressr.exe" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6NKouWa_o0

I remember having the computer ground to a halt, basically, with sheep all over. It looked like a rural road crossing :)

On X11 systems there were also things like xsnow, with snow piling up on your window borders and santa flying in the background. xlemmings, walking/falling on your windows and various variations on this. Xeyes is the 'biggest' or most famous one, but in early linux distro's there were various of these things in the 'games' sections.

Xeyes (and Xclock) FTW ...

Was going to say that!

I should still have a screenshot somewhere of lesstif/mwm with xsnow + xeyes (and xclock of course)

xroach - little cockroaches that would hide under your windows. When you closed a window, they would scurry around to hide under other windows.

Small story, friend of mine had a malware package, it needed a backdoor installed; he had a tool to merge the backdoor with any other application, so he used a cute desktop sheep thing. I put it on my parents' computer, then could have the client on my side instruct it to take and send screenshots.

We also set it up at school (IT degree) on the shared computers, but I think a sysadmin found out. We didn't get in trouble, but a classmate was caught and nearly expelled.

We have all done stuff like that :)

Don't forget Tiny Elvis.

https://archive.org/details/win3_TELV150

I ran something called Dogz [1] which was a pretty advanced dog simulator. You could train the dog to perform tricks or punish it if it did something you didn't like. They claimed to use AI and it worked very well although I don't know how much much was placebo. In any case, I remember it as being well ahead of its time.

[1] https://youtu.be/8eqLzcvVpiM

I had both Catz and Dogz but I don’t recall them ever interacting with the desktop.

Fun toy though. Kind of like a tamagotchi.

> tamagotchi

Tamagotchi. Now that's nostalgia for you.-

You could bring them out of the "pen" and then they'd run around on your desktop.

Ooh, Neko was 1989 - I'm not sure when I first saw the Lunar-Lander game on the Amiga that had a similar mechanism, but it would have been around then.

Gravity vs thrust, with left + right controls, the idea was to carefully land on any of the windows on your desktop.

Analogous to breaking the fourth wall, in a way.

I still recall the scrolling message in that game -- Space is big, Space is dark, It's hard to find, a place to park.

> Space is big, Space is dark, It's hard to find, a place to park.

This needs to be on a Tshirt.-

(Sent to Musk. For the reusable rocket team :)

There was also an application that took a screenshot of your current desktop and then gave you a bunch of weapons - bats, guns, bombs - and allowed you to smash it to pieces.

That was nice sometimes.

Desktop Toys

XRoach was a favourite to run on someone who left their machine unlocked (or their XServer display unprotected) - it makes cockroaches that hide underneath windows, so you only see them when you move or close a window. Then they all scuttled around and hid under other ones!

Reminds me of: https://infosec.exchange/@paco/110772422266480371

For the nostalgic... https://github.com/glreno/oneko

packaged for debian :)

The sheep/ram was my favorite. Purple horns

I remember Tiny Elvis from the 90s. He would sit in your tray and pop up once in a while and say something like "whoa...get a load of the size of that pixel" and then he would pinwheel his arms with the classic stance and dance his way back to the tray.

Would love to have an AI character on my desktop that would flip me shit for having clutter and ask if they can ‘clean up around here’ and carry files into folders