Use an Accurate Satellite View of the Earth as your GNOME Background
This site provides an accurate satellite view of the Earth; you can see the current areas that are in sunlight and darkness, as well as being able to see the current weather patterns (updated from actual satellite weather imagery). Here’s a script that will download the latest image and set it as your GNOME background.
Note: You can set this script as a cron job and have the background update automatically, but be courteous. The site hosting this image will not be able to continue to do so if everyone sets their computer to update every 5 minutes. The actual site only updates once every few hours, so I would recommend not setting the update to more often than once every 2/3 hours or so.
Here’s the script: update_earth_background
#!/bin/bash
gconftool-2 --type string --set /desktop/gnome/background/picture_options "none"
gconftool-2 --type string --set /desktop/gnome/background/picture_filename ""
wget http://static.die.net/earth/mercator/1600.jpg -O /home/bcoop/Pictures/Backgrounds/earth.jpg
gconftool-2 --type string --set /desktop/gnome/background/picture_filename "/home/bcoop/Pictures/Backgrounds/earth.jpg"
gconftool-2 --type string --set /desktop/gnome/background/picture_options "scaled"
You’ll need to change the path to be something that is valid for your user and machine, but this should give you all the information you need to make it happen…
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If you like your world projection to show some other part of the world occupying the middle, you can use convert to crop and rejoin the image.
convert 1600.jpg -crop 800×887+0+0 1600-left.jpg
convert 1600.jpg -crop 800×887+800+0 1600-right.jpg
convert +append 1600-right.jpg 1600-left.jpg 1600-swap.jpg
Or you can merge all three commands into a single one-liner:
convert +append <(convert 1600.jpg -crop 800×887+800+0 – ) <(convert 1600.jpg -crop 800×887+0+0 -) 1600-swap.jpg
here a version with a fail over (default) image. Mac and Gnome version.
GNOME:
gconftool-2 –type string –set /desktop/gnome/background/picture_options “none”
wget http://static.die.net/earth/mercator/1600.jpg -O /home/omniwired/Pictures/earth.jpg
if [ $(stat -c %s /home/omniwired/Pictures/earth.jpg) = “0” ];
then
gconftool-2 –type string –set /desktop/gnome/background/picture_filename “/home/omniwired/Pictures/default.jpg”
else
gconftool-2 –type string –set /desktop/gnome/background/picture_filename “/home/omniwired/Pictures/earth.jpg”
fi
gconftool-2 –type string –set /desktop/gnome/background/picture_options “stretched”
MAC
## satellite.sh
#!/bin/bash
curl -G http://static.die.net/earth/mollweide/1600.jpg > /Users/nameghino/tmp/earth.jpg 2> /dev/null
defaults write com.apple.desktop Background ‘{default = {ImageFilePath = “/Users/nameghino/tmp/earth.jpg”; };}’
killall Dock
Your script did not work for me until I replaced the “x” between 800 and 887 with my own. Seems somehow it was changed, and was the wrong character to work properly. Other than that, great idea!
You enjoy the pacific?
Jerad: it looks like whatever software this blog is running prettified the ‘x’ into some other unicode character.
I live in NZ, having it right in the middle makes more sense to me. You can of course use the same idea to split and rejoin at any point on the map
Thank you Daniel! You’re a star – I’ve been wondering how to get this image centred on NZ. Clearly the greatest nation on earth! Europe is OK sometimes too I guess.
Sweet, I have been using the Cosmos slideshow as my desktop background for too long now. This is really similar, but much cooler, cause it is mostly real-time. Can’t wait to give it a whirl, although I work offline a lot so would probably set the refresh time as considerably longer…