Settee@Home

Welcome to Settee@Home, the highly acclaimed screensaver from North London. Everything you need to know about this major on-line project is here.

What is Settee@Home?

The search for extraterrestrial life is long and difficult. Vast volumes of data have been collected by massed arrays of radio telescopes placed at strategic locations around the globe, all pointing skywards and all needing their data processed by great number-crunching machines working in a wide and distributed network.

Yet there are still an awful lot of people who like to look at pictures of sofas. This is what Settee@Home is all about. You, too, can be part of this large-scale experiment to find a degree of order and comfort in a world riddled with random nonsense. Sometimes you just need a good sit down. Or at least look at something which lets you do it.

How can I get it?

Installation is easy:

1. Click on the "Download Now" button on the right.
2. A large image will appear on your screen. This is the Settee@Home screensaver.
3. Use the File menu of your browser to save Settee@Home somewhere on your computer. Remember this location.
4. Go to your screensaver configuration screen.
5. Tell it that you want an image as your screensaver and point it to the saved location of Settee@Home.

That's it! Enjoy your Settee@Home screensaver.

Can I become a partner?

Yes! Both the design and the development groups at Settee@Home have a long roadmap of deliverables and all the support you can provide is welcome. The settee in the image generated by the pixel data needs constant verification. It needs to be sat on often, and cups of tea need to be drunk on it to confirm its thermodynamic properties are maintained. This is all time and resources that need money.

Please staple spare folding money to the back of a postcard and send it to the usual address. If you don't want to send cash by post then give your money to someone else and let them do it. Receipts can be obtained for tax deduction purposes. But not from us.

Why don't you release the source code?

Settee@Home is the result of a complicated interaction of many processes. The original Settee was obtained through a process of "giving" by a charitable body called an "aunt". Once installed in the laboratory it was made to emit tiny balls called "photons" which are at once both particles and waves. The interaction of these "photons", and their particle/wave duality, is a difficult and little-understood field. Suffice it to say that it is the basis of our very existence and requires quantum mechanical knowledge which is only obtained with some of the more expensive Meccano sets. Quantum mechanics tells us that each photon may or may not exist, so you can consider yourself very lucky to have Settee@Home at all. Anyway, these "photons" were captured in a digital camera and arranged in a 640 x 480 rectangular array known as an "image". It is this data array which you see on your screen, the result of that series of highly co-ordinated events.

But in answer to the original question: We couldn't be bothered.