One Electric Sheep of Millions by Chris Ursitti   Seeing the constellations in a new light.

Good Karma

We all have had the experience (I hope), you do something nice for someone and you feel good inside.  Good Karma.  That is what makes this article special, it’s full of good karma.  I have two software toys that I want to give you as gifts, and here’s some even better karma, they are free.  With names like Electric Sheep and Stellarium TechLife readers are in for a treat.  

More after the jump…

One Electric Sheep of Millions by Chris Ursitti
Electric Sheep

Imagine creating beautiful, rich animations that thousands of people all over the world get to enjoy.  Electric Sheep is an easy to an enjoy screen saver that works on Windows, Mac and Linux operating systems. While your machine is resting it creates unique and complex animations with users from around the world all working together.

One Electric Sheep of Millions by Chris Ursitti   One Electric Sheep of Millions by Don Casteel

These designs are referred to as sheep, in reference to Philip K. Dick’s novel, “Do Android’s Dream of Electric Sheep”.  (Philip K. Dick is best known as the writer of Blade Runner.)  Scott Draves created Electric Sheep as an open source project, with a large team.  He recently blogged reminding users Electric Sheep is interactive and users could vote with a simple up or down arrow key on their keyboard.   Let TechLife know your thoughts by posting a comment.  

Saturn up close and personal.

Stellarium

Glancing up at the sky you note the position of the stars and steer yourself home.  Ok, more like it is you punch in “Preset 1” in your GPS and listen to a voice that guides you home.  “Old School” GPS is our solar system.  Mariners have used star navigation for centuries.  Today’s astronomer is often the hobbyist or avid enthusiast.  Itching to buy a telescope?  Love the looking at the night sky?  Then check out Stellarium, another piece of open source software for your PC, Mac, or Linux machine.

Stellarium is celebrating its 5th Anniversary this year.  The programming team recently released version 0.8.0 which contains a wide variety of unique tools.  First off is the amazing  catalog of stars, documenting  more than 12,000 stars.  This allows viewing of your sky in real-time anywhere on the planet.  It includes 100’s of options yet is simple to use. I had it up and running in a few minutes, and turned on constellation names, lines and art, which was a really cool feature.

Seeing the constellations in a new light.

So from giving your computer good dreams to enjoying the night sky, we hope you enjoy the good karma from your global neighbors who have spent time and energy putting together some really unique software.  Do you know of an open source project for TechLife to take a look at, post a comment on our blog.  Remember helping out others another form of good karma.

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