NASA has a website (https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html) where publishs every day an astronomy picture plus a brief description
I have this url in my bookmark and usually I use the picture to change my Desktop background (they have a lot of great pictures) so I decided to have a cron to change it automatically but after a while I realized that most of the time I didn't know what I was watching so I included the explanation in the picture and now this is how my desktop looks
Script
I use a little groovy script to download the json where the url and the explanation are and after downloaded the image I "inject" the explation into it in several lines (as the explanation can be large I take only a few hundreds of chars and split them)
as you can see the script perform this actions:
- parse the current JSON directly from NASA's website
- check if the picture is a valid extension (from time to time it's a video)
- download the image into a
Graphics - split the 300 first chars of the explanation into 3
String - paint every string at the top of the picture
- save the picture as $HOME/Pictures/nasa.jpg
Cron
I use crontab to run this script every hour:
crontab -e
0 * * * * JAVA_HOME=$HOME/.sdkman/candidates/java/current $HOME/.sdkman/candidates/groovy/current/bin/groovy $HOME/nasa.groovy
but you can use others approach, for example as an startup program
Desktop settings
Now it only remains to change my Desktop background as $HOME/Pictures/nasa.jpg and when the NASA update the picture of the day I'll have my desktop updated
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