OS X Daily: “Get 200+ Free Retro Screen Savers with XScreenSaver for Mac OS X” plus 1 more

Get 200+ Free Retro Screen Savers with XScreenSaver for Mac OS X

Posted: 14 Apr 2012 12:27 PM PDT

XScreenSaver for Mac OS X

Tired of all the OS X default screen savers? Breathe a ton of new retro life into your screen saver collection with the XScreenSaver pack for Mac. The free bundle includes over 200 old school screen saver classics, including an Apple II emulator, Flying Toasters, The Matrix, Blue Screen of Death, Missile Command, Phosphor BBS emulator, Rubiks cube, bouncing cow, and tons of other once-upon-a-time-was-fancy and hilarious screen savers from computing days of yesteryear.

Download XScreenSavers from JWZ (free)

Individual screen savers can be manually installed by double clicking the .saver file, or you can install the entire pack of 201 by doing the following:

Hit Command+Shift+G, enter “~/Library/Screen Savers/” as the path and hit return
Copy all of the .saver files into that directory
Open System Preferences and click on “Desktop & Screen Saver” to find them under the “Other” category

Being a retro Apple geek, my personal favorite is the Apple II simulator, which does a great job of emulating a terribly noisy TV screen and even lets you specify a terminal command to display continuously as the screensaver. Here is Apple II showing the output of “top” in it’s wonderfully distorted glory:

Apple II Screen Saver

If you come from a unix background, many in the XScreenSaver collection will be familiar to you. The first version adorned X11 in 1992 and has been gradually adding more screen savers to the collection ever since.

Flashback Trojan Removal Tool Released by Apple

Posted: 14 Apr 2012 10:26 AM PDT

Flashback removal tool

Apple has released a standalone removal tool that targets Flashback malware infections. The separate utility is recommended for Mac users who do not have Java installed on their OS X Lion machine, but it’s functionality is identical to that performed by the most recent Java update to remove Flashback.

If your Mac does not have Java or you did not install the most recent Java for OS X updates, running this tool is a good idea. Here is what to do:

Download the tool directly from Apple
Mount the DMG file and launch FlashbackMalwareRemover.pkg
Click Continue, click “Install” and enter the administrative password

Everything beyond that is automated, if the Mac is infected it will be automatically repaired.

Users should always keep system software up to date as part of a general maintenance routine. Despite the recent media overhyping of Flashback, Mac OS X remains a very secure platform. If you are concerned about potential attacks, our recent guide on securing Mac OS X from potential trojans and malware may be helpful to you.