NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day Background
2 years, 2 months ago — 1509 Comments — Permalink
Update: An improved version of this script now lives on Github Gist at https://gist.github.com/1144996
NASA have this really neat Astronomy Picture of the Day webpage with some incredible pictures. I thought it’d be neat to set these as my desktop background picture so wrote the following script to accomplish this. It basically downloads the most recent picture to whatever folder you put it in and will wipe the folder whenever run. Adding this to a daily cron and then setting your desktop background to image.jpg should give you a changing picture.
#!/bin/sh dst=`dirname $0` base="http://apod.nasa.gov" rm -rf $dst/*.jpg wget -qO- http://apod.nasa.gov/apod.rss | grep "link" | head -n 1 | sed "s/.*<link>\(.*\)<\/link>.*/wget -qO- \1/" | bash - | grep "href=\"image" | head -n 1 | sed "s;.*\"\(.*\)\".*;wget -O $dst/image.jpg $base/\1;" | bash -
The accompanying crontab entry will be something along the lines of:
0 0 * * * ~/Pictures/Wallpapers/apod/getpic.sh