WeatherDesk
Version: Git Web: http://bit.ly/WeatherDesk
We’ve already seen several attempts to make desktop backgrounds dynamic or even animated. The usefulness of such a feature isn’t that obvious, but it looks good. We recall that almost eight years ago Fedora was the first Linux distro that shipped with an animated background. That was just a picture that slowly changed its colour based on the time of day. WeatherDesk is a fresh recent project that’s a little bit more advanced in a way that it triggers the change based on weather at your location.
WeatherDesk is a relatively simple Python 3 script, which monitors elements outside your house by means of a geo-IP service and Yahoo Weather API and triggers the wallpaper change according to the real-time weather results. WeatherDesk supports nearly all Linux desktop environment with the exception of KDE, where changing the wallpaper is, apparently, programmatically impossible.
In order for things to work, you have to prepare a pack of wallpapers and name them according to weather conditions they relate to. The WeatherDesk page at GitHub generously offers a default ready-to-go pack taken from the popular indie game, Firewatch, which depicts a Wyoming firewatch tower in six weather conditions: normal, thunder, wind, rain, snow and cloudy. Of course, you can customise the set and promote your own images, just place them in the ~./weatherdesk_wall directory.
Using WeatherDesk is as simple as launching the $ python3 WeatherDesk. py command. You can add & to the end to make it run in the background. By default, WeatherDesk determines your location using the http://ipinfo.io service, but you can always set your place explicitly this way: $ python3 WeatherDesk.py -c London
Apart from a weather service, WeatherDesk can change wallpapers depending on the time of the day. Discover how to do that with
$ python3 WeatherDesk.py --help and don’t forget to add filenames to your image set. You’ll need ones that start with morning-, day-, evening- and night-.
“It monitors elements outside your house via a geo-IP service.”