Thanksgiving Farmhouse Window

What you can do here

Push a curtain

Touch a curtain and it swings away, back past where it hung, and settles. Drag across one and it goes with your hand. Draft sets how much the room's air keeps them moving, and the candle flames lean in the same draft.

Watch the sky

Clouds cross the window at the speed real ones would: quicker at the top of the glass, slower toward the horizon. Every couple of minutes some thin away and others form. Wind outside speeds them up or slows them down and sends gusts across the field, where the grass leans and shows its paler side.

The kettle

Touch the kettle on the counter, the table, or Kettle, and it ticks as it cools off the boil, with a little steam from the spout that thins out over half a minute.

Stir the air by the candles

Move the mouse quickly close to a candle and its flame leans away from the air you moved, then rights itself.

Use it as your wallpaper

Press F for fullscreen and M to turn the sound off and on; the volume and your sound choice carry over to every wallpaper. The sound keeps playing if you switch to another tab.

Live link

On a computer desktop

Some wallpaper apps can show a web page behind your desktop icons. Give one the live link above and the scene runs there on its own: no page around it, no ads and no sound.

On a TV or a spare screen

Open this page and press F, or use Fullscreen. While it’s in fullscreen we ask the browser to keep the screen from going to sleep.

On a phone or tablet

Save image downloads exactly what’s on the screen as a picture. Set it as your wallpaper from your photos; the phone will crop the sides.

A live wallpaper keeps a page running all day. Through the live link the scene draws at most 30 frames a second and stops while the screen is covered, but on a laptop it still costs some battery.

Why the clouds at the top move faster

Fair-weather clouds float at about one height, maybe a mile up. The ones at the top of this window are roughly five miles away; the ones just above the trees are many times farther. They all drift with the same wind, so the near ones slide across the glass and the far ones barely seem to move. That is what gives a sky its depth, and it is how this one moves: every row of the sky slides at a speed in proportion to its height above the horizon.

About the sounds

Two recordings and one quiet layer: a farmhouse kitchen in the morning, a kettle ticking as it cools, and the air of a quiet room. The kettle waits six seconds before it will tick again.

If you’d rather just watch

• Window Light, a drawn screensaver of sun through a window
• Autumn Leaves, a drawn screensaver of falling leaves