July 02, 2006

What's on your desktop? You've seen this before on Fark (and probably other sites as well); it's nothing new. However, I thought it would be interesting if we shared the virtual environments that many of us work and play in every day. That said, show us your desktop, monkeys! Give us a glance into your private world.

NOTE: Please do not embed your image in the thread, but instead link to it. (All hail Monkeybashi!) Here's mine, to get the ball rolling.

  • This is one of them, I use a virtual desktop manager so I've four screens. The desktop picture is of one of the biggest meteor impact craters on earth, Manicouagan in Québec.
  • Oh! Yours is so organized that I feel like the noob I really am, in spite of having been on the nets since 1996. My wallpaper is a gorgeous autumn scene which lightens my heart, but it's overlaid by every icon that came with every intrusive program that ever showed up on my computer. And, I'm hesitant to get rid of all the extraneous stuff just in case I might use it sometime. The wallpaper is, I think, one of the pictures that came with the original installation, and I have no idea how to upload it So, here I am, naked, and it's not a pretty sight.
  • 1600x1200, 77.2KB. w00t, a post your desktop thread! :D I created the wallpaper in The GIMP. Hooray for the "flame" fractal generator! :D
  • Here's mine.
  • mare: that impact crater is teh friggin' awesome. I heartily approve. path: I promise not to look at you in all yer nekkidness. Is that a tattoo? *wink* notnamed: that's really neat! I love how it looks like cloth. Good color choices, BTW.
  • nunia: Thanks. :) The cloth effect is the "canvas" filter. The GIMP is an amazing little/humongously complicated program once you get to know it. :)
  • Dang, drivingmenuts, that's a slick looking pad you got there. Nuclear power, people. And analog clocks.
  • here's mine (139K). i hid my buddy list (didn't feel like fuzzing out all the names to protect the innocent). the image is one i took of a leaf of my bird of paradise plant.
  • I'm almost embarrassed to say, but let's just say it rhymes with Sorlando Vroom.
  • And mine: www.flickr.com. Nothing fancy, just a different photo on each screen.
  • That's an impressive camera you have there, es el Q. Those birds of paradise have the most interesting flowers (they look like they're searching the skies for aliens). Not Yanni Blepp, TUM? sfred, that looks like a scene out of CSI: Furniture City. I hope they catch the killer.
  • Mine! What, you say you can't see the pic because my desktop is too damn cluttered (much like my desk irl)? Ok, here it is. It's my feet at the end of the neighborhood dock where my parents live.
  • Mandy has sexy feet in retro sneaks.
  • I used to have The Triumph of Death as my wallpaper, but after wasting many hours just sitting and making up backstories for all the victims and skeletons, I decided to switch to something a little less distracting.
  • This is mine. Warning: Cuteness.
  • *wipes the uber-squee of vertex's desktop off his monitor*
  • Xenon , my default computer for miscellaneous tasks. Argon, the studio computer, pretty much dedicated to music only (though a couple newer games which Xenon doesn't have the specs for get played on Argon).
  • Mine is from a project I had last semester. We had to choose a favorite artist or photographer and create something in a similar style. I chose Michael Whelan, since he had a large impact on my style when I discovered his work in the 70s. Once I get over the glow of accomplishment and start noticing the flaws excessively, it will likely change to something else. Give it a couple more weeks.
  • Ummmm, can anyone give me a dumbshit guide on how to do this?
  • layne, skin is overrated, and those skeletons know it. Vertex: my dentist loves you. Told me so hisself. Honey, I like this and this better. You and your blasted spectroscopy! But I love you anyway! And wow, did you paint that, Christophine?
  • grover, here's some hints: ● Hit the Print Screen button on your computer when you have your desktop looking like you want it to ● Open your favorite image editor (Photoshop, Gimp, whatevar) ● Paste and save the image as a *.jpg ● Upload the pic to your image server ● Present your image here as a link for all to see This assumes that you 1) have a program that will save the image as a *.jpg, and 2) have someplace to store your file online.
  • See and be dulled I like the eclipse picture, the rest I do't really use, they are just there because I haven't gotten rid of them yet. And everyone should have a Does It Suck? folder to keep your downloads in. Just sayin'.
  • What a coincidence! I used to have a download folder called "Does It Swallow?" *snags Balthazar's eclipse for personal use*
  • My current background, nicked off deviant art, on good old Gnome
  • This is long overdue for replacement - the two girls (see bottom left) are about a foot taller now. Upload the pic to your image server I suspect that if you had one of those, you wouldn't be asking the question. You could sign up for a Flickr account, if you haven't already got one, and put the picture up there as some others have already done.
  • nunia: Yes, I did indeed digitally paint that over the course of several stress-filled, oh-my-god-this-will-never-be-finished-in-time days. I used the book cover Michael Whelan did for Anne McCaffrey's The White Dragon for inspiration and help with recreating Whelan's very detailed style, which is very obvious if you take a look. Had the book sitting right next to me the whole time so I could study each little bit. Well, okay, I will admit that I did cheat a little when I was running out of time on the last night before the deadline. The eye of the dragon is a scan of the original work, not my own.
  • Mine.
  • My laptop screen was stolen from homestarrunner. My screen at work was stolen from a local genius. Though Chyren's earlier post almost has me ready to switch to something more squeee.
  • layne, lady layne, what program are you running in the top right corner? Plegmund, that's a really neat picture, who is it by?
  • oooooo here's mine. I hate having files on there, and in fact stuff on my desk. I also find colours distracting and stick to black and white images always.
  • duende, that's Rainlendar; it's a pretty handy little program (Or would be if I used it for more than just telling me which month it is). And Plegmund's wonderful wallpaper is Brueghel the Elder's Tower of Babel, slightly tweaked for awesomeness :).
  • home desktop Chy will know who that is :)
  • My desktop. Oh, wait -- you mean my desktop! I took the cloud pic myself. I always give my hard drives funky names and icons. The File is the stuff I'm working on at the moment (flash, pic collections, etc).. I also cooked up a V desktop awhile back.
  • I am not Homer.
  • I can't be bothered to figure out how to take a snap shot of the actual desktop, but here's the picture. It's of the KSK Buddhist Center in Santa Fe, NM. I spent a lot of time there as a kid.
  • markr's is teh awesome. Here be mine. I like a clean desktop, me.
  • Nunia, yeah that describes the aesthetic better than anything I'd thought of. I use that photo to scare my desk chair into conformity with my spine. For a while there I took a lot of 'dead object in the urban wasteland' photos. That and aging signs over long-closed stores.
  • markr lives in the Umpteenth Dimension. sfred, I always approve of intimidating inanimate objects. *glares menacingly at toaster*
  • Just the bare necessities on mine.
  • I'll show you mine It's just one of the ones that comes with XP, but its a cool pic
  • I always thought I was weird to keep nothing on my desktop, but I see I am not the only clutter-hater here :)
  • Here. The image is cropped and color-inverted from a print I think I got off the US National Fisheries image archive; it was a print of three drawings of giant squids and I cropped it down to the middle one. (Threads like this always make me clean up my desktop...which is still a bloody mess, but at least it's not full of install.exe files now.)
  • Threads like this always make me clean up my desktop Yeah, I expected a bunch of you guys to clean up your stuff before posting, but I love the ones where the desktop is messy and the owner says, "You wanna make something of it?" My desktop is always organized because it helps to control the chaos in my brain.
  • You guys have great desktops! Always an elegant black background, with tasteful picture. Pictures rotate via AWC--automatic wallpaper changer so I can have a choice of the multitudes in my collection. Mine, I try to keep the mess down, but if I don't put the todos folders on top, they're lost.
  • gorgeous picture BlueHorse, can you tell us a bit about it?
  • Mine was pretty boring, until I installed that lovely AWC thing BlueHorse linked (thankyou!). I installed it, pointed it at my directory of backgrounds, and went to take a screenshot. And THIS is what it chose. Appropriate, really :)
  • Wow, GramMa, that is a beaut of a picture! I think it's from a Russian fairy tale, perhaps? This is mine at work. I can't show my home desktop because it changes every fifteen minutes (or more often if I'm in a fickle mood).
  • Main messktop. I've used all kinds of beautiful pics as background but always found them distracting. So now it's basic muted, subtle textures; that one is a phonecam pic (unobscured in the middle).
  • I think it might have been Persian. I don't think it was from a fairy tale--although I have this one from the Hunchbacked Horse. Anyroad, it's my favorite. Thank you *bows
  • The current desktop. I can't remember where I found that background, but I've kept it there for a record three weeks. Definitley one of my favorites.
  • dantsea: You probably got it here. It was linked on MoFi a while back.
  • at home i have the windows xp "stonehenge" picture and the default ubuntu background. the stonehenge image is mostly there to allow me to say "stone'endge" in a fake english accent every few days. this cracks me up every time. in work i have a portrait of my son along with 110 files and directories. i've just come to the end of a busy period in work, so i'll trim that down to 40 or so this week. also a fedora/red hat desktop on the linux machine with mostly shortcuts to applications.
  • /is kinda jealous of all the mac users.
  • Current desktop on my tower (that's Seras from Hellsing). My laptop has a RK Milholland comic of a kid, dressed up as a monster with underwear hanging off its tenticles, proclaiming, "Mommy, look.. I'm hentai!"
  • The desktop is a good metaphor for the way my actual desk looks.
  • Layne is right about the Brueghel, of course - the only really successful attempt at a picture of the tower of Babel that I've seen. There are some good also-rans here, if you're interested. vis Laputan Logic.
  • Mine. With thanks to fish tick.
  • Here's my work desktop. Still an oblique Morlando Shroom connection. I hardly ever save files to the desktop; my brain just isn't wired that way.
  • This is on my newest computer (some place in China I believe), my next computer has a pic of the pyramids on Mars (you didn't know about those???) and my work computer has a rotate courtesy of Digital Blasphemy.
  • At work, my desktop is a picture of my daughter.
  • OOOoooo hot babe in swimsuit shot!
  • Mickey: Your daughter is not nearly cute enough. Please try again. ;)
  • NO! Promise me you won't do "it" with THAT MAN ever again!
  • Oh...coming to the show late again.... Dual desktop monitors...none of the widgets and desktop tools showup on a screen capture... Work Desktop
  • I bung all the nice photos I've taken into a folder called 'screensaver' and then point the desktop at that and it rotates around every 30 mins or so. Bit of a derail at work when having a chat with a colleague when they break off and say: 'where's that' So far also managing to synchronise the folder across 2 home macs and a work one ... That reminds me, better upload Sydney to the work folder ...
  • I also have a desktop folder called 'Ulysses' which contains all the documents I haven't read, but probably should have, but almost certainly never will ...
  • Zaphod's is much cuteness. Poor misunderstood smiley.
  • My Powerboook desktop, here. I tend to get everything on my ddesktoop and shove it into a folder marked "desktop" for a sorting-out that never comes. The picture is new - Gene Serene at "Do Dirt", a club night a friend put on last Thursday.
  • see, what if you never look at your desktop? Usually, my desktop looks like this or like this - because I always have stuff open. I only close when I reboot, every three days or so (hibernating inbetween). But the actual desktop is like this - the desktop is my dump place, but it's not actually as bad as my physical desk (where I don't even sit these days - I have to work at the table - I really need to change that this summer). The picture is a view towards Cambridge, from the highest hill around - I think it may even be as much as 70m above sea level! (That's very exciting for Cambridgeshire). You can't see AddenBrookes, the hospital, because there are documents there. But you can see the University library (the blocky tower) and King's College Chapel.
  • jb, I don't know if it's any help or not, but you can turn off the feature that automatically left justifies everything on your desktop. It jmakes it much easier to organize the folders and programs and games and stuff into groups.
  • Ok, jb's done her's so I have to do mine: Laptop Desktop As you can see, I like to use sticky desktop notes for random ideas and reminders. Sometimes I don't deal with them as quickly as I should.
  • Sorry I'm late
  • Isn't it true that turkeys can drown themselves by looking upward in a rainstorm?
  • *applause*
  • That has GOT to be the worst desktop I've EVER seen. That's got more clutter than my meatspace desktop.
  • Heh, heh, he said MEAT, heh, heh.
  • That's LADY BlueHorse to you, Berek.
  • *clears himself from GranMa Blast Area*
  • jb, I don't know if it's any help or not, but you can turn off the feature that automatically left justifies everything on your desktop. It jmakes it much easier to organize the folders and programs and games and stuff into groups. posted by Berek at 06:29AM UTC on July 04, 2006 No, I purposely left justify everything. It makes it neater. I occasionally go through sorting them by file type or name. Looking through, it seems most are other people's academic work, along with things saved from the web. My own important things are organised off the desktop, in my academic file. That's the only organised folder on my computer. But frankly, blag is winning for messiest desktop.
  • Hrumph! *tosses head and flounces away I refuse to associate with anyone who does not recognize a laydee when they hear one whinny.
  • Liam's Pictures From Old Books offers scans of engravings, etchings, watercolours, sketches used to illustrate some of the handsome old books he collects. Liam is kind enough to offer these in various handy sizes. And he's also interested in socks. Another bibiliophile who also posts rare and unusual illustrations runs Giornale Nuovo which Pleggewrs mentioned in connection to the Tower of Babel; it's always worth a visit to discover what new and often unheard of (by me, anyway) work he's posted recently.
  • =Pleggers
  • Bees, those links are front page-worthy. Thanks!
  • Don't know about Giorno Novale, mct, but I know Liam's has been the subject of one thread. Know I've referenced or referred to both, they're two o' my favorites.
  • Won't go to the trouble of firing up Trogdor (my laptop) just to take a sceenshot, but here's my current laptop background - a photo I took in Texas. You can see the Mothership (home computer) desktop here in a nice screen cap. Photo is one I shot while snorkeling in Jamaica. (If you have the means, a waterproof case for your digital is a really good investment for fun photos.)
  • My desktop: with open applications, and without.
  • Mine was this since I saw it on Inter-Station 3D (like dantsea). Now it's the seagull shot caution live frogs posted. jb, you make me miss England. More so than normally, that is.
  • The funny thing Weezel is that I was trying to take a picture of a shore bird - I snuck up on it and then just as I snapped my mother in law threw bread in the air, because she thought I was going after the gulls. So, the sandpiper flew off and I gave up and shot photos of gulls. I like that image because it's a nice clean shot, not too busy.
  • clean and simple. my thoughts exactly. also, Jonathan Livingston Seagull is one of my favorite books
  • WOW, so you're the one person still alive who likes that book.
  • If anyone here remembers Windows 9*, the cd drives at the time that OS was popular, were quite notorious rubbish. A paper clip of any colour might have been quite useful then, a house in shitsVile less so. - Frasemo: Growing up in knoxville wasn't easy, no one claimed it would be. Even in that simple minded place eating dog skin in bed was a no-no. I survived and you will also. Try KFC.. very similar by all reports.
  • Laggard but eventual; a view of one computer D-t having thereon a likeness of the absolute monarch of one's household. The Beak Top
  • aha! fantastic. I've been waiting to see the little blighter.
  • *charmed* Thank you, jereboam - well worth the wait!
  • An update I was too tickled with to not share!
  • Oh, that's damn good. I've actually wanted individual prints of the tinies to frame and put around my office. Especially Neville. He's my favorite.
  • So our hard drive crashed in a massive storm a few days ago (hbs's parents' house crashed too, but let's focus on what's important here), and after about four days worth of work installing the new drive, reinstalling software, recovering what data we could, setting up a new external HD backup, and tweaking the shit out of everything, I am now here, and while it don't look like much, what's under the hood is nothing short of awesome, and so I now demand you all send me cash. You have no idea how much time it took me to get here. Ballmer? Fuck you.
  • hbs's parents' house crashed?
  • 30-foot pine tree decided it wanted to hang out in their living room. But we're talking about my hard drive right now. Try to stay focused.
  • *iz befuddled* ...Hard drive. Right. Ooh! Hopkin Green Frog!
  • White or red pine?
  • Hard drive died four days ago. Hours later, my digital life is nothing short of purified Sooooo..... no more jokes about hard wood?
  • We had bad storms, and most of the trees in their yard were knocked over, fairly old-growth stuff. Only an oak is left standing. The pine in the front yard chop-sockyed the hell out of the roof, tore down some guttering and maybe ruined a window. There's some minor water damage but nothing structural that we can see so far, power's back on and they're okay. More storms coming tonight, more reason for farmers to want to swallow rat poison. WE GET IT, JESUS, YOU HATE US. YOU CAN STOP PEEING ON US NOW.
  • She had no saying dark enough For the dark pine that kept Forever trying the window latch Of the room where they slept. The tireless but ineffectual hands That with every futile pass Made the great tree seem as a little bird Before the mystery of glass! It never had been inside the room, And only one of the two Was afraid in an oft-repeated dream Of what the tree might do. --Robert Frost
  • UGH I'm sorry to hear that, MCT. I bought a new computer a month ago, and it took me 48 hours to get to this. I totally feel your pain. Maybe we should start a thread on "Life with Vista." I've certainly accumulated a vast mental store of tricks and workarounds in the last month.
  • (That was 48 hours of work, over the course of 9 days. I counted. I was that bitter.)
  • mechagrue, I salute your choice of wallpaper. Please give my regards to David Bowie.
  • I'm rather tickled with my new desktop.
  • TUM, are you moonlighting for LavaLife?
  • Needs a Dave Brubeck sountrack.