[Tfug] Wallpaper criteria

[John Gruenenfelder]

On Mon, Jan 7, 2013 at 11:24 AM, Bexley Hall <bexley401 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> Any other criteria you can think of?  What sort of imagery do
> *you* have staring back at you as you work??
>
> Alternatively, any pointers to resources that have already done
> this sort of thinking??  Searching for "wallpaper" tends to just
> turn up pages of photos...
>
> Thx,
> --don

Don,

Ever since I learned about it, I've been using Xplanet to generate my
background.  Over time, I've attempted to collect the best imagery I
could find for this purpose.  Primarily, this means very high
resolution maps of day and night Earth, as well as the best images I
could find of the other planetary bodies.

Personally, I think many of these images meet most of your
requirements, though your threshold for "details" may be lower than
mine.  In particular, an image of the night side of Earth surrounded
by the blackness of space does not distract the eye much, in my
opinion.  Of course, once the terminator begins creeping across, it
gets brighter, but not so much that it bothers me.

To make this ordeal easier to manage, I created a set of regular
Bourne shell scripts (i.e. no bash extras) to handle all of the
downloading, processing, and handling of program options.  They are
limited in some ways as they really only address use cases that I have
dealt with personally.  For example, the scripts support one or two
screens, and can display a different object on each screen, or,
optionally, one object can be replaced by a 'triple' which displays
three objects instead of one.  They make some assumptions, however,
like assuming that the user will always want the Earth to be one of
the objects and therefore the scripts always attempt to download the
most recent (every 12 hours) cloud map.  I've also never dealt with a
situation where I wanted a different image on each desktop/pane so the
scripts don't handle that.

If you are at all interested, I made a web page for the scripts with
all the imagery, scripts, and explanations:
  http://bach.as.arizona.edu/~johng/xplanet.php

And if you *are* interested and would like to see some of the
shortcomings removed, just let me know.  I don't have a download
counter on the files so I'm unsure if anybody else is actually using
any of this.

Oh, and if you'd like to see what my wallpaper looks like right about
now, you can see it at:
  http://bach.as.arizona.edu/~johng/files/xplanet-wallpaper.jpg

This is my standard single screen view.  The lat/long is approximately
over Massachusetts, the stars are from the BSC (Bright Star Catalog),
and you can also see Venus and Mercury (which is just about to be
obscured).  Though you can't tell from this still image, the wallpaper
is updated every five minutes and all of the background objects slowly
move to the right.  The brightness on the left is the Sun just about
to appear and it will take just over an hour and a half to move across
the screen entirely.  The fact that any of these objects is present is
just a matter of timing and angles.  For most of the year, the viewing
angle I have configured never matches up with the Sun or inner
planets.

You can also see red trails around the Earth.  These represent the
orbits of either satellites or permanent space fixtures.  My default
set includes the ISS, Hubble, COBE, and the current GPS constellation.
 Fortunately, if these bug you, my scripts make it very easy to change
satellites or turn them off entirely.


--John Gruenenfelder    Systems Manager, MKS Imaging Technology, LLC.
Try Weasel Reader for Palm OS  --  http://weaselreader.org
"This is the most fun I've had without being drenched in the blood
of my enemies!"
        --Sam of Sam & Max