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Calvin and Hobbes + NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day

ihaveideas on reddit had an excellent idea.

I have been playing with ImageMagick recently so I figured implementing this would be good practice.

I think it works so far :-) . Here are some results:

Pretty sweet, huh?

Code is available here. It’s kinda hacky right now, but it seems to work.
The bash script takes one argument, the URL of the APOD post. If no argument is given it defaults to the most recent post.

Possible future improvements: Write a program that runs this daily and sets it as your desktop background. That can wait until at least tomorrow.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 6th, 2010 at 12:53 am and is filed under Programming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

9 Responses to “Calvin and Hobbes + NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day”

  1. philkav Says:
    September 6th, 2010 at 1:54 am

    Pictures look amazing,

    Looking forward to seeing how this works out for me :)

    Thanks!

  2. JoseBrox Says:
    September 6th, 2010 at 8:46 am

    Please, if you do the program for the desktop, or even a screensaver with this great idea, contact me!

    Thank you very much!

    Regards,
    Jose Brox

  3. Andrew Chen Says:
    September 6th, 2010 at 1:16 pm

    Looks like your implementation downloads the preview picture (today the res on that is 900×700).
    The picture itself is a link to a larger one (1400×1271)

    I address this because the results are slightly fuzzy with the smaller image.

    I made the changes to increase res, as well as changes which optimize use as a cron job.
    [http://pastebin.com/ddK7jDqx](http://pastebin.com/ddK7jDqx)

  4. BobCox Says:
    September 7th, 2010 at 10:13 pm

    Making the same thing but with a Spaceman Spiff crash-landing the red saucer-ship Background

  5. danieloop Says:
    September 8th, 2010 at 10:29 am

    It didn’t work for me with feh, so y changed it and now it works for me (only for gnome):
    http://pastebin.com/nhmJ2F3E

  6. ghostDancer Says:
    September 13th, 2010 at 1:59 pm

    I can only say thanks. It’s wonderful.

  7. Add Set APOD (Astronomy Pic of the Day) to your desktop Background Automatically. | theguido.net projects Says:
    November 17th, 2010 at 11:38 am

    [...] and here: http://blog.marquiswang.com/2010/09/06/calvin-and-hobbes-nasa-astronomy-picture-of-the-day/ [...]

  8. Nona Mills Says:
    December 22nd, 2010 at 10:22 am

    Making the same thing but with a Spaceman Spiff crash-landing the red saucer-ship Background

  9. Ruthie Copeland Says:
    December 23rd, 2010 at 3:47 pm

    Looks like your implementation downloads the preview picture (today the res on that is 900×700). The picture itself is a link to a larger one (1400×1271) I address this because the results are slightly fuzzy with the smaller image. I made the changes to increase res, as well as changes which optimize use as a cron job. [http://pastebin.com/ddK7jDqx](http://pastebin.com/ddK7jDqx)

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