A program called Oxidizer (Mac) lets you edit those animations and create your own – or render single frames as high-resolution artwork. (You could also use Apophysis for Windows, or Qosmic for Linux). To get started, browse the current flock of sheep. Click on one you like, download its “genome”, load it up in Oxidizer and start playing around with its genes (here’s a nice tutorial). You can even cross-breed multiple sheep to create a hybrid. When you come up with something you like, you can render it as an animation or still frame. There are infinite variations to be made, so have at it!  Oh, and did I mention that all of this software is free?

Update: Scott Draves just pointed me to a preview of the next version of Electric Sheep, featuring even higher quality animations.  Thanks, Spot!

What’s a Wiki? It’s the same kind of software that runs Wikipedia – it’s easy for anyone to view and edit pages, whether or not you already know how to make web pages. But you can have your very own wiki, and you can keep others from being able to view or change it. Then a Wiki becomes a useful tool to organize your information, and have it accessible from wherever you are.

The software that runs Wikipedia is called MediaWiki. It’s free, but it’s tricky to set up and probably overkill for you. I’m using a simple wiki called W2 by Steven Frank, which is optimized to look good on standard web browsers as well as on iPhone. If you have a web hosting provider (and who doesn’t these days, right?), you just upload the files to your site (it’s written in PHP), optionally password protect it using an .htaccess file, optionally set up a Quick Search in Firefox (so you can just type “w” instead of “http://yoursite.com/index.php/”), and you’re good to go. It saves files as plain text, no databases to muck around with.

I use it every day.