Starfish: Automatically generated abstract imagery

I discovered this program a few days ago. It's really quite cool - you can select a colour palette (or create your own), select the complexity, and hit Go and you have yourself a nice desktop background image. This is the one I'm using right now (click to grab the full-size 1400x1050 image):

A couple of other cool features this little program has:

• Automatically set the newest generated image as the desktop wallpaper
• Saves "image history" for as many images as you like (I have it set to 500)
• Allows you to generate an image of any size, with presets including your current resolution, other standard resolutions and screen fractions
• Option to create an image every x minutes (and set it as your background if you so desire)
• Wide selection of colour presets and you can make your own really easily
• Save as BMP, JPG (high or low quality) or PNG
• Choose from 0x, 2x or 4x anti-aliasing

Download Starfish here, or just grab the latest Windows installer. It's GPL software, so you should be able to find a version for your OS and if not, compile it yourself.

Here's a gallery of some of the cooler images Starfish has generated for me. You can click on the thumbnailed ones to enlarge them.

These ones were the background for some banners I was working on.

Unfounded Google speculation

The other week I posted a fairly comprehensive list of all the features that Google currently offers. There's always speculation on what Google is going to do next, I'm going to write briefly about a couple of things that I would like to see Google get into. (Of course, all of this is completely unfounded and just my thoughts.)

Google Audio
Well, we already have Google Video. It doesn't sound as useful as it really is, in my opinion. First of all, Google now have a pay service similar to what's also being offered in the iTunes Music Store: selling DRM'd downloads of TV shows, etc. through the Google Video Store. There was quite a bit of controversy over their announcement to use their own brand of DRM in the videos.

However, Google Video is a great way to distribute video in a lot of cases. First off, Google hosts the files, which basically means free bandwidth. (BitTorrent limits the amount of bandwidth used by the original "server", but it's still not as good as getting Google to do it for you for free.) Second, their Flash player is mint. It has all the features you should really need for playing web videos, it loads fast and streams the content pretty much without skipping, at least for me. The main reason I use it is to get lower-quality re-encodes of some of the more popular "videocasts" on the internet, like Systm. I can stream those shows straight from Google, without having to download them and delete them when I'm done - and the total file size is significantly smaller (I'm not overly concerned about getting the best quality from most of these vidcasts).

So, what I think we need is Google Audio, and frankly, I'm surprised they didn't either release this before Google Video or integrate it with it, making Google Media or something. First off, it would be a nice way for some people to distribute podcasts (for example, if you like to listen to them on the PC rather than actually loading them onto an iPod or similar, streaming is probably a better way to go). It would also be nice to have an easy way to search for audio, and I don't mean pirated mp3s but things like free sound effects (for amateur games, video editing et cetera), quotes, and such. Finally, it would pretty much mean that there is no longer a reason to use AllTheWeb, though I don't know how significant a competitor they are. (Yes, I am aware of using filetype:mp3 et al, but a separate audio search with 10-second previews and in-browser watching like Google Video would be very nice.)

Google Wallet
I know I'm definitely not the first one to think of this, whereas I haven't really seen much interest in the Google Audio idea, I know there are a lot of people that want something from Google (or indeed, any other company would be nice too) that replaces PayPal.

There are a few reasons for this. First, PayPal sucks. PayPalSucks.com has a whole slew of reasons why, and if that's not enough to convince you, try this article on SomethingAwful on the whole PayPal fuckup they experienced while collecting donations.

Secondly, any competition in the market is good. I still would like to see some sort of functional service dealing in micropayments.

Oh well, here's hoping. Hey, all those people waiting for Google IM were shot down, but then Google brought out Google Talk...

For more unfounded Google-related speculation, check out GoogleRumors. (Here's an article on "Google Wallet".)

BitTorrent Ultra and addict3d.org

I don't know much about addict3d.org, but I'm tempted to recommend that you stay the hell away from it.

They seem to be reviewing absolutely any p2p-related software without even running it, dumping the summary from the author's website and posting a screenshot. They're covered by Google News which means that in my opinion, they're getting a lot more readers than they deserve.

Take for example the Google Alert that I received this morning regarding a new BitTorrent client, BitTorrent Ultra. The name immediately set off alarm bells for me since it implies that this client shits on everything else out there (like BitLord). Of course, this usually means that it's simply a rip of another client with adware installed (like BitLord).

Here's the "review" posted on addict3d.org of BitTorrent Ultra. The "internal rating" - I guess that means what the staff have rated it as - is 4.5/5. Ha.

If you want to download movies super fast and music too then you need to download BitTorrent Ultra.

Another warning that this is probably a shitty rip of another client.

So, I headed off to their website to check out their "ultra" client. Lo and behold, the software is a rip of Bram Cohen's original BitTorrent client (the "mainline" client), as evidenced by this screenshot. Bandwidth stolen from the developers:

I'm going to ignore the point that the developers are clearly incapable of taking a screenshot (that's the highest resolution version available) and point out that not only is this a ripoff of the mainline client, it's an old, old ripoff. BitTorrent hasn't looked like that since before v4.0.0 was released, IIRC, which was in early March 2005. At least BitLord is using a relatively recent version of BitComet's source.

In summary, BitTorrent Ultra is a "new kid on the block" in the world of BitTorrent, featuring all the features of BitTorrent from a year ago, plus a mirror of BitTorrent's documentation with "Ultra" appended to every instance of the word BitTorrent. It also features a new program icon and probably a shitload of malware! Download it now. Or don't, because it's the shittiest client I've seen so far.

(If anybody wants to install this crap to find out exactly how much malware is in it, be my guest, and leave a comment here.)