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Create an auto-updating desktop image
Authored by: FourtySeven on Jul 14, '03 01:28:20PM

I am new to Unix so there is probably a better way to do this but, using this script I've been able to creat moving weather maps on my desktop. First you need to find your favorite weather site (I use www.weather.com). Navigate to a moving animation of your local map. Now you need to find the names of the images of the animation (it's usually only about 5 frames). Tell the curl script to download all 5 images and put them into the weather folder. Remember to specify a different name for each one.

Now to make it look animated you need to go into ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.desktop.plist Change the number between the <real> tags to 1. That should update it fast enough to have a realistic animation.
<key>ChangeTime</key>
<real>someNumber</real>

Here's a copy of my script (which could probably be optimized/simplified a lot more).


#!/usr/bin/perl
while(1){
# download radar image (this command works for any URL)
# NOTE: Enter the next three lines as ONE line -- do not
# add any spaces when combining the lines (ie no
# spaces after the slashes!).
system ("curl http://image.weather.com/looper/archive/us_dca_closeradar_large_usen/1L.jpg?1058195945122 >~/Weather/latest1.jpg");
system ("curl http://image.weather.com/looper/archive/us_dca_closeradar_large_usen/2L.jpg?1058195945122 >~/Weather/latest2.jpg");
system ("curl http://image.weather.com/looper/archive/us_dca_closeradar_large_usen/3L.jpg?1058195945122 >~/Weather/latest3.jpg");
system ("curl http://image.weather.com/looper/archive/us_dca_closeradar_large_usen/4L.jpg?1058195945122 >~/Weather/latest4.jpg");
system ("curl http://image.weather.com/looper/archive/us_dca_closeradar_large_usen/5L.jpg?1058195945122 >~/Weather/latest5.jpg");
sleep(1800);
}



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Create an auto-updating desktop image
Authored by: MacMuse26 on Jul 24, '03 06:29:51PM

Can anyone else get the faster animation to work as described above? Just seems to ignore a value of '1'. I'm at 10.2.6



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