Thinkpads Forum

Well; this is what I got after too much work rendering, staring at PyMol, MATLAB, and IDL; not to mention listening to too much Talking Heads, Tangerine Dream, Pink Floyd, and Eurythmics amongst other bands....I decided to fiddle around (and yes, that is exactly how it started, let's be realistic) to come up with some new wallpapers for my Thinkpad; I had gone to look for some Wallpapers and got a good collection of them, then I thought I would go ahead and make my own because it was difficult to find exactly what I wanted. I decided on some abstract 3D fractals, not easy to come up with but I gave it a shot...These are all in 4:3 format and their native resolution is 1600x1200, I can come up with widescreen 16:9 formats if anybody wants as well. See the link below. I will be updating them from time to time as I think of better and better things to add.

https://webfiles.berkeley.edu:443/chris ... allpapers/

By the way, we don't have a single, unified thread that deals with Wallpaper and desktop enhancements that have been made or discovered and the link resource shared for others on here....Would anybody want that kind of thing as a sticky or such?

That would be cool. CrystalShard is dope

good work- i like AsymptoteFieldBlue. would look better on my 570 were it not for the red pixels

dsigma6 wrote:good work- i like AsymptoteFieldBlue. would look better on my 570 were it not for the red pixels

Hmmm, that could be doable. Where are these red, and I am assuming dead or really hard-stuck, pixels? It should be possible to come up with a fractal that covers it with a white or otherwise light color so as to render it effectively gone.

ipark: Glad you liked that one, took about an hour and a half for it to finish rendering on my T43.

im not goint to waste your time with dead pixel locations! one is red, the other gets brighter as i move a white window closer to it...doh!

i just use the ibm wallpaper with red leaves on it, and it semi-hides the red pixel.

I uploaded some new Wallpapers as well to the same directory; 16:9 and 16:10 Widescreen versions (just about all resolutions up to and including WUXGA 1920x1200 (16:10 in this case) and 1600x1200 UXGA) of most are available upon request.

The new additions are SpiralAccelerator.jpg and BleedingBlue.jpg

Here is the link provided just in case the original zonked out for whatever reason; See, https://webfiles.berkeley.edu:443/chris ... allpapers/

Enjoy.

btw- my life has become one long pink floyd song.

dsigma6 wrote:btw- my life has become one long pink floyd song.

Yeah...Yeah, I think I know what that feels like.

Chris, really nice work, i'm going to try the apophysis-060621-63 for a while, it looks really nice on my t60

dsigma6 wrote:btw- my life has become one long pink floyd song.

There's someone on your ThinkPad, and its not you?

Cheers,

Bill

bill bolton wrote:

dsigma6 wrote:btw- my life has become one long pink floyd song.

There's someone on your ThinkPad, and its not you?

Cheers,

Bill

Well...Actually, I am pretty much comfortably numb.

School's not quite out for summer, though.

After I got done with one go through all my Pink Floyd albums, I then delved into my Talking Heads collection (the band, that is; the human heads on my shelf that keep jabbering at me may or may not have influenced this work ).


Kyocera; glad you enjoy it. That one took 45 minutes originally, then 15 more for some tweaking and rendering. I will make and upload new ones as time and imagination permit. I guess I can see what other ideas I get for wallpapers after awhile.

Update to the Wallpapers; I have also worked on some desktop enhancements as well.

Here is a screenshot; See

https://webfiles.berkeley.edu:443/chris ... enshot.PNG

and

https://webfiles.berkeley.edu:443/chris ... enshot.PNG

The bar at the top is Rocket Dock, a pretty slim (as far as animated docks go anyway) application. Some of the icons in there I made and some I just "borrowed" from other sources.

I got the idea from the icon on the far left, which is one that Daba sent to me. I made the rest including the HDD, which is actually the latest IBM/Hitachi 2.5" HDD using Gen2 Perpendicular Recording technlolgy. I also had to come up with the musical notes + the T43 for the "My Music" icon and the X41 Tablet for the "My Pictures" icon. They are supported and implemented as transparent PNG files; in the process of making them, I had to come up with a way to get other image formats to go to PNG smoothly without any of the artifacts of conversion that usually appear when you try a JPEG->PNG or GIF->PNG conversion.

So I can now do that for most images. I had to make the HDD by hand as I couldn't really find any other image file suitable or that. It took about half an hour to get a result looking that good once I had finally gotten the process with Photoshop, Irfranview, and PNGcrush down with some practice. It came out looking far better than I had hoped.

I am also sure this Icon pack will work with ObjectDock as well as any other dock that supports PNGs (same goes for the skin). I will try to make more Thinkpad based PNGs and ICOs that have no dangling artifacts and will render perfectly.

I can also convert those PNGs into clean ICOs, with no artifacts, of any resolution. It takes quite a bit of fiddling with the palette, color depth, and format to get rid of those tiny little artifacts that sometimes pop up; it isn't uncommon to wind up going in and "surgically" removing them.


Currently, I am working on a few other tablet icons, an X20, an X40, an R50, a T42, and some more T43s. I also have some pictures of the new T60s, X60s, and Z60s in various positions ready for work.


Let's see what I can come up with; requests are welcomed.

always up to something chris! i really like rocket dock, but forgot to install it after replacing my hd. youre doing some good work with the icons. i started to....start to think about making some, but then i came to the conclusion that it wasnt necessary- but seeing what you can do with it, i may be able to achieve at least 9% of your quality.

for the hell of it (and if youre bored out on the west coast), how about a cadillac logo for the dock? i like the simplicity the dock adds to a clean desktop. i think its time to reinstall.

edit: i changed my mind...how about a dark side of the moon prism?

Sure, just the Prism or the entire classic cover art including the circle and album title text?

The Caddy logo is pretty easy.

Also, I forgot to ask, but do you want it with or without the black background? Or do you just want the Prism on a transparent slice?

hmm..prism with no background.

on second thought, why not a '91 chevy prizm?

hehe.

i guess it would be weird/hard to try and get the refracting light coming through the prism..do with it what you want!

I already have a version of the Caddy logo done; the Dark Side of the Moon Prism is requiring quite a bit of work but it is getting there.

I will try out a fully synthetic version of it later along with the caddy logo as they actually might turn out better to one's liking than the originals.

Here is the Caddy logo;

https://webfiles.berkeley.edu:443/chris ... /Caddy.png

Geeeez; call me the pixel pusher from now on. What a job that was even with a reduced color depth. Pixel per pixel operation by hand on a 700 x 422 image. Pixel by pixel to get rid of the background and some of the anti-aliasing introduced via the differing formats. I did, however, get it as well as putting some extra touches on it. Dodged and hand trimmed the inbound light ray to look more like it was taken directly from the cover and digitized instead of a specualr highlighting that gets overlayed on it when a photograph of the actual physical cover is taken. I also re-optimized the coloring of the rainbow after the light beam is split so that it would come through better when the PNG is further resized and resampled by the dock application

For the PNG, see; https://webfiles.berkeley.edu:443/chris ... eMoon5.png

For a screenshot of it in action with Rocket Dock, see; https://webfiles.berkeley.edu:443/chris ... nshot2.PNG (located in the upper-right hand area near the HDD image.)

That is the first upload; I will tinker with it and upload others later.

good work! it looks funny seeing that dsotm prism up there, not usually something youd find on the computer. so i guess i would need to keep a black background to make that look right- but maybe a different bg would give it a different flare.

the caddy emblem is good, im going to dl rocketdock and see how it looks on my end.

im not one to complain when someone is volunteering their time...but dont you think the prism got a bit stretched out vertically?

dsigma6 wrote: im not one to complain when someone is volunteering their time...but dont you think the prism got a bit stretched out vertically?

Valid observations aren't necessarily complaints.

It did, actually. The image had a 700/422 (1.7) ratio and what gets used and scaled by RocketDock or ObjectDock is a 256x256 (1) image. I am trying various ways to compensate for that, but it seems that, somehow, RD simply re-scales and *then* applies the transformations on it. I already tried pre-stretched versions to compensate for it.

And, indeed, if one isn't used to that Prism there, and it is nearly transparent, you could lose it easily and therefore take more time fiddling with the controls to get it to do what you want in a given period of time; thereby making it a non-optimal GUI object in accordance with Fitt's law (see; http://www.xvsxp.com/interface/fittslaw.php ). So I guess a background could be applied to it.

Update to this thread.

I recently posted a core icon pack that can be used with Rocket Dock, Object Dock, and Star Dock or anything else that uses PNGs with transparencies. Here is the link to the core icon package;

https://webfiles.berkeley.edu:443/chris ... ckV0_1.rar

Here are some screenshots of the icons, they all scale perfectly and have very little to no artifacts, even single stray pixels. Each and every icon was painstakingly handcrafted even down to the level of single pixels. I kid thee not when I say this.

https://webfiles.berkeley.edu:443/chris ... hotOne.PNG

https://webfiles.berkeley.edu:443/chris ... hotTwo.PNG

https://webfiles.berkeley.edu:443/chris ... tThree.PNG

There are two fan types in there as well, the regular black fan and the slient blade form black fan. Here is a screenshot of the regular fan. Also note that both fans are not "solid squares" and have been crafted such that they have transparencies to the background as they would in real life);

https://webfiles.berkeley.edu:443/chris ... ckFan1.PNG

I came up with these two fans as hi-res, as compared to the default TP FCU icon, images for TP FCU on the dock. Useful for a quick check on the temps of the system on all 9 temerpature sensors.

See an icon on there you want? Post here with a request and I will post the PNG in the same directory as the Icon Package. It is also being updated a la a WIP, so I will update the package discretely and post back to notify of the upgrade; and, no, this isn't a nasty "Persistent Beta" project where I explain away bugs and varying degrees of usefulness by yelling "It's still beta, you ungrateful user!" and never taking it out of beta for a long, long time (too many people and "hot" companies do "Persistent Beta" now despite the obvious stupidity of "Persistent Beta." ). The next release may or may not include a Thinkpad themed skin for dockets that accept PNG skins, but it most likely will have many new icons including user requests. It is provided and maintained under the BSD license.

Enjoy

These are absolutely amazing!

Absolutely. I'm in love with them & on honeymoon right now.

Haha, since when did you take interest in docking, Christopher?

In that case, Mr. Pixel Pusher, can you make a better LaTeX icon rather than something that looks like it came out of Reading Rainbow?

daba wrote:Haha, since when did you take interest in docking, Christopher?

Since I stopped staring at the Mass Weapons of Fugly that come as the default or that [crossout]some[/crossout] most people make and fruit up theme sites with a la "Kaahhhhuuute" bloated fat blobs of pastel that are supposed to pass as icons. Sometimes, if you are lucky, you get them making a shiny plastic ball out of *all* the icons as well...Not that I am bitter or anything.

daba wrote:In that case, Mr. Pixel Pusher, can you make a better LaTeX icon rather than something that looks like it came out of Reading Rainbow?

Yeah, tell the LaTeX people to come up with a better mascot, then I'll do it. Else that is what we have for now until I can think up of a better one.

Or, you could always use the LaTeX typeset image

Update; the latest Icon Package release is V0.2 and can be obtained at the following link; see

https://webfiles.berkeley.edu:443/chris ... ckV0_2.rar


Additions:

Battery icon, based on the T4X Thinkpad Series 9-cell batteries, for access to the Power Manager and/or linking to registry keys to quickly change to a mobile or adaptive battery power saving scheme from the dock.


Screenshot; see

https://webfiles.berkeley.edu:443/chris ... otFour.PNG


Also, here is a link to the lovely Flying Toasters screensaver as well as the excellent Flurry for Windows screensaver

As always, enjoy

Well, OK...I did some playing around and I found out some amazing things.

You know the PF usage that is usually pretty high on Windows with the Explorer shell? Well, I replaced it with BBLean and it *cut it in half*...completely. As for my memory usage? Well, how does around 100MB with Opera, RocketDock, Winamp, Miranda, and all of the ThinkVantage software suite up sound? Yeah, it was 157MB or higher with Exporer without RocketDock.

BBLean is a Windows port of BlackBox for BSD and Linux...and it is a pretty [censored] good port from what I am seeing. Nothing failed at startup when it went to the new shell, memory usage has essentially been cut a little more than 1/2, it supports transparency, and it is far faster than the default Windows shell. The shell itself only uses *10MB*. Works perfectly with RocketDock and the Flurry screensaver.

Also, and this is important, it does not impede the FPR, CSS, or Logon authentication shells whatsoever; they work as they did before just fine.

I will get some screenshots up soon; those of you who use BlackBox or FluxBox on a Linux, BSD, or other *nix distro aready know exactly what I am talking about...it is just available on Windows now. Which, I think, is a good thing.

Meanwhile, while I get some skins for it and some screenshots up, take a look at them

http://bb4win.sourceforge.net/bblean/

Here is a screenshot;

https://webfiles.berkeley.edu:443/chris ... ackBox.PNG

and another

https://webfiles.berkeley.edu:443/chris ... ckBox2.PNG

Christopher,

I am really impressed by your setup etc. and I have found this thread to be excellent. One question, which miranda skin are you using to go with your other themes shown in the screenshots.

Thanks in advance for easing my curiousity.

MadManMund wrote:Christopher,

I am really impressed by your setup etc. and I have found this thread to be excellent. One question, which miranda skin are you using to go with your other themes shown in the screenshots.

Thanks in advance for easing my curiousity.

Welcome to the Thinkpad Forums

Thanks; here is the skin/theme for the contact list

http://addons.miranda-im.org/details.ph ... le&id=2424

For the entire day, even with that skin, Miranda doesn't use more than 13MB-15MB max; it usually hums quite nicely around 3MB-8MB and stays there.

Very cool. I am basically not a wallpaper fan. But the wallpapers made by Chris is very cool.

Actually I suggest Mod Chris write a guide on how to install BlackBox. I just installed and it hangs.

My machine is XP on X41.

bigtiger wrote:Very cool. I am basically not a wallpaper fan. But the wallpapers made by Chris is very cool.

Actually I suggest Mod Chris write a guide on how to install BlackBox. I just installed and it hangs.

My machine is XP on X41.

You have to click the blackbox.exe file, then right click the desktop, then select "Blackbox," then click and select "Install"

Reboot after that.

That should work.

Wow, i had seen the wallpapers and i am very ompressed with chris\'s job... Well done and

Chris:
Do you mind if i can burn all the wallpapers in my CD and keep it for myself??? Out of courtesy, i am asking you for permission to do so as this wallpaper is under your copyright... chris registered trademark 2006 from thinkpads.com...