The other day I came across http://die.net/earth, which I thought was one of the coolest ideas I’d seen in a long time. However, there are two problems with it: 1: I don’t feel right downloading his images once every hour, mainly because I wanted it more live than that! (yes, I know there is no point, but I still want it); and 2: I wanted to use different images in different resolutions to fit my screen.
This image is generated using the Earth’s City Lights image from NASA as the night image, and one of the twelve Blue Marble Next Generation Monthlies, also from NASA. The script will detect your month, and pick an appropriate image for that month. This gives cool changes it snow and foliage and such. It doesn’t make a huge difference of course, but it’s cool :) It also uses topographical information to allow xplanet to cast some subtle shadows, which I think really brings it all to life!
Want it ? You can find it here. But, for the lazy I shall regurgitate the instructions. You’ll need git, wget, imagemagick, xplanet, and perl. Assuming you’re on a system with apt installed, run the following command:
- sudo apt-get install git-core wget imagemagick xplanet perl libwww-perl
Assuming you’re in a suitable directory, do the following:
- git clone git://github.com/kennethjor/visualearth.git
- cd visualearth
- ./initialize.sh
This will download the code from the git repository, and initialize.sh will download all the images you need. It will also download the script necessary for fetching cloud data. After this is done, simply run:
- ./generate.sh
After this, you can find your newly generated image at “render/earth.jpg”.
Now all that remains is to set this image as your background image and automate the whole thing. An example on the latter is in the README file.