This could be you!
I love space, and, more specifically I love space wallpapers as my wallpaper. During exam time (like now) I usually set some motivational wallpaper like “Get the hell off Facebook and do some work” or “Mind like water” from the Minimal Wallpaper collection.
But when I’m not in study mode I like to have space pictures, and what better than a live, updating image of the Earth that changes every day?
Thankfully die.net generates an image of the Earth as to what it would look like from space each day, taking into account the sun, time of day, cloud cover and weather etc.To set it as our wallpaper and have it change daily, we need to schedule a task. Install Gnome scheduler to make it easy:
sudo apt-get install gnome-schedule
Hit up Applications > System Tools > Schedule Tasks and create a new task. Enter a name in the Description field and in the command field, we want to grab the new image each day:
wget -r -N http://static.die.net/earth/mercator/1600.jpg
We then want to suppress the output, so choose that in the Default Behaviour dropdown box and underneath that, set the task to run daily. The image on the site actually gets updated every three hours, so if you want to primo extremo you could set it to download that often by using the advanced field.
By default your image will be downloaded daily and stored in /home/username/static.die.net/earth/mercator/1600.jpg.
Now it’s just a matter of changing your background to that image, which will get overwritten every time the task runs with the new one it downloads using wget.
The final product:
Big props to simplehelp.net for the original article and James Fritz for letting us know!