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CognithamusDraw your own →

Free · no account · nothing to install from us

Run it live on your desktop.

These three addresses are pages on this site. Each one draws a real codebase — measured, not illustrated — and animates. Point a wallpaper app at one and your desktop becomes it.

Brain · What if the codebase were a brain?

https://cognithamus.com/wallpapers/live?render=brain

Globition · Where does it sit on the map?

https://cognithamus.com/wallpapers/live?render=globition

Cascade · What if the code rained?

https://cognithamus.com/wallpapers/live?render=cascade

Open any of them in a browser first if you would rather see what it is before installing anything. They are ordinary web pages.

macOS

Use Plash, a free open-source app on the Mac App Store that makes any website your wallpaper. It is not ours and we get nothing from it.

  1. 1Install Plash from the Mac App Store.
  2. 2Open it. It lives in the menu bar, not the Dock — there is no window, so launching it looks like nothing happened. Look for the small screen icon at the top right.
  3. 3Click the icon, choose Add website, and paste one of the addresses above.
  4. 4In Plash’s settings, turn on Deactivate on battery. These scenes animate continuously; on a laptop this is the setting that matters most.

Add all three and Plash will let you switch between them from the menu bar. Around 70–80% opacity keeps the picture as atmosphere rather than something competing with your windows. Toggling Plash’s browsing mode on lets you drag to rotate, or hover a column of Cascade to read the file it is spelling; toggle it off and clicks pass through to your desktop again.

Windows

Same idea, two options. Lively Wallpaper is free and open source. Wallpaper Engine is paid, on Steam — use its Web wallpaper type. Both take a URL exactly as above.

Phones

A moving wallpaper is desktop-only, and that is the operating system’s limit rather than ours: neither iOS nor Android accepts a web page as a wallpaper. On a phone the answer is a still image — pick a render on the wallpaper page, choose the phone size, and download the PNG.

What these pages do

They draw. Every shape is a measurement of a real repository: area is bytes, position is which files change together, height is how many commits touched a file. Where a file could not be measured the picture leaves a gap and counts it rather than drawing something plausible. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is stored, and there is no account — these are static pages that render in your browser.

Want one of your own codebase instead of ours? Draw your own →