Comments on: Semi-Realtime Satellite Desktop Backgrounds

By: Raj

Raj — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 19:20:27 +0000

I think this site was on this concept dating to at least 2006 and hence a bt before you Russ: http://www.die.net/earth/

By: Chris Jones

Chris Jones — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 20:03:12 +0000

Maybe the auto-refreshing is a new feature, I’m running Lucid already.

By: The MODIS Rapid Response System provides… « Paul M. Watson

The MODIS Rapid Response System provides… « Paul M. Watson — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 14:15:58 +0000

[...] The MODIS Rapid Response System provides publicly available daily satellite images of Earth which Russ Garrett has neatly used in a script for your desktop wallpaper. Daily satellite images bring up a slew of other ideas. Someday the “Google Earth lets [...]

By: Russ

Russ — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 15:08:19 +0000

Curious, auto-refreshing doesn’t work on my Ubuntu install at home.

It’s worth noting that those JPEG images on the server are actually generated on-demand by their site when you want to view them, so this isn’t an ideal realtime system.

By: Chris Jones

Chris Jones — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 10:12:51 +0000

Oh right, I use NoScript so I didn’t see the javascript ;)
In the meantime I hacked up a bash script to run on a server somewhere to do the processing so my laptop can just download a correctly sized image whenever it’s ready, but it’s functionally identical to yours.

FWIW, the gconf thing isn’t strictly necessary, in that you can just overwrite the current desktop file and nautilus will notice and reload it, but if you want history then gconf is the way to go.

By: James Darling

James Darling — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 09:56:05 +0000

A very quick mod to get it working on OSX. Set it to MBP resolution too, but don’t think I’ve got the positioning right – can’t tell as it’s too cloudy…

http://gist.github.com/274116

Again, just requires imagemagick – use homebrew.

By: Russ

Russ — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 09:01:53 +0000

Heh, sorry guys. I embedded the code in my post using Github's Gist embedding feature, but that's obviously not working for some people (it requires Javascript), so I linked it too.

By: Arvid Jakobsson

Arvid Jakobsson — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 22:00:42 +0000

Here is what I wrote:
http://pastebin.com/f74ecf3a

imagemagick is needed. Don’t know if it works yet ;)

By: Chris Jones

Chris Jones — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 19:22:57 +0000

Do you fancy posting the script? :)