Eyecandy is somehow nicer when it serves some purpose aside from just looking pretty, wouldn't you say? Then it has the same kind of effect as a great car or fine architecture. "Wow, it's great. And it looks awesome." Otherwise the appearance on its own seems a bit shallow and pointless. Now for the demo, here's my newest wallpaper (click to see the fullsize hosted on deviantart):
If you've ever thought that having one particular image on your desktop gets a bit dull, then this may be something for you. xplanet generates images of the Earth at set intervals (for example every 10 minutes) that shows the Earth roughly at this point in time. In addition, what I have here is cloud cover updated every 3 hours, so it's like a weather map. xplanet is phenomenally flexible, it can render multiple bodies at the same time (for example the Earth and the moon), it renders stars, it renders all the planets in the Solar System (yes, Pluto too) and many more bodies. What I have is a pretty standard configuration. So where to pick up the goodies? First, install xplanet
(it's in portage :) ). Then if you run KDE, right click on the desktop and go into the config. On the Background
tab, click Advanced Options
and xplanet
should appear in the list there.
When you click Modify...
xplanet will most likely have filled in the blanks for you, but otherwise something like this will do:
The Preview cmd
isn't really important, but for Command
you could use:
xplanet -config ~/.xplanet.rc -radius 60 -latitude 52 -longitude 5 --geometry %xx%y --num_times 1 --output %f.jpg && mv %f.jpg %f
This will center the view on Utrecht more or less, but you can pick your own coordinates. Since we've supplied a configuration file, we have to create one.
$ echo -e "[earth]\ncloud_map=/tmp/.xplanet/clouds_2048.jpg" > ~/.xplanet.rc
Now we want to rig up a system that will download updates of the cloud map when they are available. We've already declared that they should be written to /tmp/.xplanet/clouds_2048.jpg
, so let's create that path now.
$ mkdir -p /tmp/.xplanet
We'll use Michal Pasternak's python script for this. First save the file in /usr/local/bin
, make it executable, then open it and edit this line:
defaultOutputFile = "/tmp/.xplanet/clouds_2048.jpg"
And finally we're going to use our friend cron
to execute the script every hour:
$ crontab -e
And add this line:
0 * * * * python /usr/local/bin/download_clouds.py &>/dev/null
And that's it. Now you have a totally kickass wallpaper. :cool:
References
- Tomasz Karbownicki's original entry which explains how to do this in Gnome [pl]
- Kamil Baćkowski's follow-up entry on using xplanet in KDE [pl]
- xplanet website with tons of info and hacks