# Perl Background Rotation

PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS IS AN OLDER DUPLICATE OF THIS PAGE. I'm tired to maintaining two copies of this data in two completely different wiki markups so this set of pages will receive infrequent updates.

## About

This page describes a set of perl scripts Charles Mauch wrote to rotate his desktop wallpapers. Eventually these scripts evolved to incorporate other (non-standard) wallpaper switcher features, so this page was setup to document the mess that ensued. If you wish to make a comment on this script, email [Charles] or discuss it in this thread on the bbs.

If you come up with a use for any of these scripts, feel free to add your experiences/screenshots here.

## Table of Contents

1. Introduction : What this does.
2. Installation : Getting the basics handled.
3. Using Extensions : Optional feature setup.
4. Script Extras : Related Software
5. Tips and Tricks : Fun for the whole family!
6. Hacking : How to create your own extensions
7. Code : Code walkthrough and some design notes
8. FAQ : Frequently Asked Questions
9. Screenshot Gallery : If you use these scripts, show off!
10. Resources : A comprehensive wallpaper list.

## Basic Features

A brief overview.

1. This script picks different categories of backgrounds depending on the time of the day. For example, during the morning I (Charles) like my backgrounds to be bright and cheerful, and as the day progresses I like the mood to become more technical/geeky and most importantly ... unobtrusive while I work. After work ends, the backgrounds start to include "racier" or distracting photos. But by early morning it's back to landscapes and anime. This is by far my favorite feature.
2. When this script picks an new background image to display, it checks the selected photo's for a match to any of the previous 5 backgrounds which were displayed. It repeats this process for each display. In addition, the randomization function favors new files over old files. This seems to work really well at keeping older photos in circulation without repeating them so often you get burned out. The list of 5 previously displayed backgrounds is maintained to keep newer photos (which appear more often) from "flip-flopping" or showing up within a few hours of each other.
3. If the perfect background appears and you want to keep it displayed for a few hours, you can freeze the randomization process with a simple keybinding in your windowmanager. You can also easily process a new wallpaper from nautilus using a (provided) script.
4. Tiled backgrounds are fully supported and look great. See http://tr1tium.com/propaganda/Propaganda/ for great tiles.

## Optional Features

1. This script can make an attempt at reading the mean "color" of a selected background image and then creates a new color scheme based on that base color. If a photo is too white or dark to return a visible palate, the script will pick a color from a pre-defined list of generic colors. Please note that this particular piece of code is being constantly updated as I learn more about color selection.
2. This script can easily slurp up a variety of configuration files, and spit out new color configurations. In the event that a particular photo looks horrible with the the automatically chosen color (or cropping pattern), you can override those functions by adding some metadata into the wallpaper's filename. Out of the box, the following software is themable with this script: Conky Configuration Files, Openbox Styles, and yes - Gtk2 Themes (gtkrc files).
3. A border area around the screen can be created for transparent panels and conky's display area. The sizes of both this top and right frame is configurable.
4. This script can create a preview "photo collage" of the next photo to be displayed as your wallpaper. It's a neat effect, which I created for no other reason than my conky stats did not extend all the way down the screen and I had a hole to fill.
5. This script can create an additional photo for urxvt (or Eterm) backgrounds based on either the modified or original image. This photo gives the appearance of transparency but with a blurred and shaded background. This can drastically improve the readability of so called transparent terminals. A similar effect can be achieved in Beryl or other compositing Window managers. But the same effect can be achieved without the benefit of XGL or buggy X extensions and beta video drivers.

## A few thoughts before plunging in

I think that most people simply throw their wallpapers into a directory somewhere to rot. Or maybe they do not even go that far and they simply use firefox to set their background. There is nothing wrong with this approach, but for years I've been collecting wallpapers and sorting through them, occasionally trading them - much as a 10 year old kid might do with baseball cards. I *love* finding that perfect new wallpaper, maybe cleaning it up a little - and storing it away in it's proper place in my filesystem hierarchy. Hey, different strokes and all that.

If you are a member of the background dumpground group mentioned above, this script probably wont excite you much. I have enough wallpapers now that I like to rotate them out every 20 minutes or so.

If you think that such an approach in non-productive or jarring; you are (1) probably right, and (2) you might want to stop here. I can pretty much guarantee that if you find a radical change in colors and appearance on your desktop annoying, this script will get old REAL fast. :)

### On Wallpaper organization

Like I mentioned, I have a hierarchy and categorization scheme I use with my own collection. This script assumes an easier system than what I use, but it will still require some explanation to the conventions I (and possibly this script) expect as a result.

You will need to establish a directory structure of Wallpaper "categories" for this script to be even remotely useful. The only rules of thumb here are that each "category" should contain at least several images. The script will recurse though ALL subdirectories per category, so keep that in mind before starting. The script default assumes a directory of ~/.backgrounds. Of course this can be overridden to whatever you like.

The default layout should look something like this (this is not set in stone, you can easily override this in the configuration).

    ~/.backgrounds/Early           - for prime hacking hours - 0:00 until 05:00am
    ~/.backgrounds/Food/Breakfast  - it's time to eat! display food!
    ~/.backgrounds/Morning         - Sunrises and coffee mugs
    ~/.backgrounds/Work/Arriving   - Corporate logos
    ~/.backgrounds/Work/Hacking    - Minimalistic themes
    ~/.backgrounds/Food/Lunch      - Photos of gourmet luncheon!
    ~/.backgrounds/Afternoon       - More minimalistic hacking themes
    ~/.backgrounds/Evening         - NSFW!

Again, this is only a suggested layout. You can drill down to an hourly category scheme if you need that level of control.

### On photo naming conventions

With wallpapers, it seems like the more like a piece of obscured source code the filename appears to be, the better web-admins and gallery providers like it. I insist on descriptive names though. I tend to separate words with periods (the unix way). If you have spaces in your filenames, odd things can and probably will happen. I tend to do a lot of space-stripping, so I suggest you at least remove spaces if you can. Other than that, this script should be able to handle whatever filenames you throw at it.

I do have some naming conventions that this script can make use of though:

1. A filename prefixed by Tile_, this indicates the photo is a tile and should never be resized or cropped. If the file is not large enough to to fill the screen, it is tiled across it. Propaganda photos are perfect examples of this kind of image.
2. A filename prefixed by Right_, Left_, or Center_ indicates a cropping preference. In order ensure photos fit correctly on the resized photo area that this script optionally creates, some hefty cropping and chopping of the original image can happen. If you find that your wallpaper is getting massacred by this process, try using one of these prefixes to reduce the carnage.
3. If you find that a particular photo's color scheme looks odd, you can manually specify a "base color" upon which to generate a new color scheme. Simply add _#XXXXXX_ into the filename. Note the underscore before and after the hexadecmial color. This chosen color will then be read and applied to the theme - completely overriding the autodetection mechanism. On some images, this can REALLY make things look sharp, or conversely ... horrible. Experiment.

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