Daylight wallpaper (Linux script)

I discovered a website with a beautiful world map that updates throughout the day to show sunlight and nighttime right now:

I thought it would make an excellent desktop wallpaper and wrote a script to pull the image every half hour and set it as the background image. That worked really well so I thought I’d share it, which led me to create a sweet little installer for it:

• Download this file,
• make it executable,
• and run it.

This will create a script that pulls the image from the Internet and sets your wallpaper. It will also add the script to your crontab so it automatically runs once every half hour. Re-running the installer will replace the update script but it will not put another cron job in your crontab. I find that rather elegant!

It’s very simple for skilled people, but I consider myself fairly novice in Linux so I am proud enough of it to post this! I also took the opportunity to post my code publicly on Github because I’ve heard it’s the thing to do. In the words of Karl Broman:

Github is like facebook for programmers. Everyone’s on there. You can look at what they’re working on and easily peruse their code and make suggestions or changes.

It’s really open source. “Open source” is not so open if you can’t easily study it. With github, all of the code is easily inspected, as is its entire history.

This was fun!