{"id":227,"date":"2014-10-31T15:17:35","date_gmt":"2014-10-31T15:17:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/davidlowe\/?p=227"},"modified":"2014-10-31T15:24:50","modified_gmt":"2014-10-31T15:24:50","slug":"how-to-produce-a-screensaver-on-a-shoestring","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/davidlowe\/2014\/10\/31\/how-to-produce-a-screensaver-on-a-shoestring\/","title":{"rendered":"How to produce a screensaver on a shoestring*"},"content":{"rendered":"

(*or How to get from A to B via X,Y and Z!)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Ever wondered how it might be possible to produce a nice 3-D screensaver “very quickly” with no programming knowledge and just a tiny bit of effort? Well, recently I set up a pair of dedicated catalogue PCs<\/a> in\u00a0the Language Resource Centre. Using Active Directory Group Policy I locked them down pretty reasonably well, and set the\u00a0display to never switch off. In order to prevent too much screen burn (and without using lotion!), I decided to enforce a customised screensaver through Group Policy\u00a0via User Configuration \/ Policies \/ Administrative Templates \/ Control Panel \/ Personalization \/ Enable\u00a0 screen saver<\/em>\u00a0<\/span> and User Configuration \/ Policies \/ Administrative Templates \/ Control Panel \/ Personalization \/ Force specific screensaver<\/span> <\/em>with a Screen saver timeout<\/span> <\/em>set in the policy to 300 seconds.<\/p>\n

I used Xara3D 6 to create a project of an animated, rotating 3D textured text which displayed the following information over a couple of lines: “LRC CATALOGUE: TOUCH SCREEN to access” (Note: we purchased a copy of this software quite a while ago – but now I believe it is available as freeware (see Tom’s Guide<\/a><\/em>). There was an option within Xara 3D to\u00a0export the\u00a0project as a screensaver. (.scr) file. Done!\u00a0 Or so I thought. Nothing is ever quite\u00a0so easy! I could not get this screen saver to work. So I went back into the project and exported it as a Flash animation (swf file). I then downloaded and installed InstantStorm<\/a>, quite a nifty little freeware Flash screensaver creator. Using this software I was able to rapidly convert my swf file into a standalone scr file. With a little bit of fiddling to get the size right for the screens in question.<\/p>\n

Due to possible\u00a0incompatibility issues with 64-bit Windows (documented\u00a0in the software), I had to install this screensaver from a different location than the normal %SystemRoot%\\system32 (or SysWoW64) location. Again via Group Policy under User Configuration \/ Policies \/ Administrative Templates \/ Control Panel \/ Personalization \/ Force specific screensaver \/ Screen saver executable name.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Bit of a faff-on, but a relatively cheap and quite non-technical way to produce a screensaver! Definitely going from A to B via X,Y and Z. But then hey, it got the job done!<\/p>\n

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(*or How to get from A to B via X,Y and Z!) Ever wondered how it might be possible to produce a nice 3-D screensaver “very quickly” with no programming knowledge and just a tiny bit of effort? Well, recently … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3854,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-227","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-developer-tools"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/davidlowe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/davidlowe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/davidlowe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/davidlowe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3854"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/davidlowe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=227"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/davidlowe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":231,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/davidlowe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227\/revisions\/231"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/davidlowe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=227"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/davidlowe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=227"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/davidlowe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=227"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}