This one is Mac OS X only. (Funny how I know a lot more astronomers with Macs than any other group of people). I was tinkering about earlier and created this automator script, which changes my desktop image to be today’s APOD (Astronomy Picture of the Day).
To do this yourself, or to expand upon and modify this script, download the workflow file here.
To set this up to run everyday, open it up in Automator. Click ‘Run’ to test that the script works (warning: it could take a minute or two to process, but this ok). You might also want to to change the folder into which the picture files will be saved. Then chose File -> Save As and change the type to iCal Alarm.
When you save the file in this way, Leopard will open up iCal and let you change the usual event options. You can select the time the script should run and the repeat cycle (I’ve set mine to repeat each day at 9 a.m.).
Alternatively, you can save this as an application and run it when you like in the normal fashion. In fact you can do quite a few things with it, I’d be interested to know what people come up with.
September 13th, 2008 at 3:30 pm
But how I can obtain the APOD? And can it be achieved in linux?
September 14th, 2008 at 5:03 pm
This is a Mac only concept since it utilises Automator, which is part of Mac OS X. There may well be a Linux implementation somewhere out there though - keep looking.
November 2nd, 2008 at 4:24 am
I just can’t get this to work on my machine (10.5). I tried it by hand and by download, I keep getting the same errors. On the “getting image url” portion, I get a NSURLErrorDomain -999. And from there everything fails because it is passing the wrong arguments on to the next step. Do you know why this is giving my the error? You seem to know much more than I do on this subject.
Thanks,
Jason