The best screen saver ever: BOINC
The BOINC screen saver in action: searching for a Zika virus medicine (World Community Grid OpenZika)
Screen savers are history and rightfully so. They belong in a past where the computer monitor needed to be manually turned off when you left the computer. This meant that often the user left the screen on, burning a permanent image on the monitor. Screen savers were invented to prevent that.
Example of screen burn-in on an old CRT monitor.
Nowadays your computer will tell your screen to go to stand by when it's not needed, saving energy and money. So there is no need to have moving images in order to prevent burning a permanent image on your screen.
Power settings in Windows 10
But what sets this screen saver apart from others is the fact that it contributes to science. You can choose which areas you want to contribute to: medicine, genetics, mathematics and astronomy among others. And there is another benefit: you can earn some money from it. You can earn Gridcoin, DCC (AKA SPARC) and Byteballs by running BOINC.
Earning the cryptocurrencies is optional. You can run BOINC without having any wallet and just contribute to science. In fact, I used to do this way back when, before Bitcoin was invented (BOINC is 7 years older than bitcoin, being released in 2002).
To be frank, even this screen saver is better left off. BOINC can run fine without it - it's just something extra. It's better to set your monitor to go to stand by when there is no-one to see the graphics. I also keep the BOINC screensaver off most of the time.
That's why I wanted to capture and share some of the BOINC screen saver graphics. The screenshots are below. They are mostly from the excellent World Community Grid BOINC project. All are taken with 1920x1080 resolution.
OpenZika
Microbiome immunity project
FightAIDS@Home Phase 2
Mapping Cancer Markers
Outsmart Ebola Together
Main view of the BOINC screen saver
Main view, showing details of another project: Asteroids@Home
If this was not enough BOINC screenshots for you, here's some screenshots of the SETI@home screensaver.
If you are a newbie to BOINC and cryptocurrencies, I recommend starting out as a pool miner on grcpool.com. They also have some great tutorial videos on Youtube.
UPDATE 2018-07-28: Added Microbiome immunity project, some minor tweaks
Fun fact: these "screensavers" would still lead to burn-in on an old CRT monitor since almost all elements are static (I assume).
That's true - the WCG screensavers are quite static. At least the screens are changed every now and then :D
The generic BOINC screensaver changes placements of elements to some extent. But these WCG screensavers are much more nice to look at. It's fun seeing the protein your computer is working on.
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