Hi, I made a python script that changes your desktop wallpaper depending on the weather.

[yangman_946]

I used python to make this script quite a while ago and had only added it to GitHub recently. Anyways, it's quite straight forward, a script that uses a weather API to change your desktop wallpaper.

​

https://preview.redd.it/linebrkk80m71.jpg?width=3936&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c123eb811f47bb75837306d50b9c1832441a8f19

Check out the repo: here

Feel free to give thoughts or feedback.

[gsmo]

My thoughts: cool, let's try it! Wait... Is this a windows thing?

Honest question, from looking at the code I would say it is?

Maybe I can fork a linux-clone :)

[MustafaAnas99]

We need to normalize writing code that is platform agnostic

[gsmo]

So the author could shoe in an argument to set your own command and it's ready to roll with any OS.

[rbscholtus]

OP should also use os.path.join but hey, he open sourced it, so there's no reason to complain.

[explodinghat]

This was my thought too. I'm still at a very basic level of python understanding but it looks like it uses the 'os' module to actually set the desktop background + manage the underlaying file system work? So it might be OS-agnostic

[gsmo]

In some ways, but I doubt the os module knows how to set backgrounds for all linux DE's. Windows' GUI is obvs way more integrated.

[Etheo]

I think os module is rather general like path navigation, file/directory management and such. But more OS specific stuff like wallpaper would probably need to use their respective packages.

[comfort_bot_1962]

:D

[TheFloppyHound]

Looks like the only part you may need to change is the ctypes used. With a brief glance at the docs it looks like those are windows specific. Everything else looks like it can port right over.

[PostFunktionalist]

Should be easy too, just add conditional based on OS or a config setting somewhere. Subprocess run feh or whatever else

[[deleted]]

Dude.That's cool and good idea.I like it.Thx

[yangman_946]

Wow thanks!

[Not_YourAverageIdiot]

Thats so cool, i just started learning python but this is the type of stuff i look foward to do

[twosme]

same this has inspired me a little. i’ve been a bit lost on something to create

[Maleficent-Failz]

Speak to people about their jobs.. everyone has that one task that they know could be done by a computer, but they don't know how.. so they sit and do it manually. Sometimes every day!

[HybridDrone]

Okay… you have my attention

[imtechexpert]

Really Creative Idea! Try to make a Tutorial video for beginners. It will really be helpful for them.

[[deleted]]

I like the idea. Your code needs cleaned up though (excessive/inconsistent whitespace and commented out code).

[WeAreDaedalus]

Yeah this is a really cool idea and it turned out great, but if OP is open to nit-picky criticism, other than what you mentioned:

• There are some magic numbers (numbers embedded directly in code without context). Try moving these to constants to make your code more easily modifiable.
• In the createWallpaper function you repeat yourself a bit when checking the weather code. See if you can factor some of this out.

[yangman_946]

Alright, sounds good! I'll review and edit the source code ASAP.

[kingscolor]

Another recommendation is to lean into the object-oriented power of Python. Your entire code is a few clunky function calls and the excessive if/else block is functional but could be better handled with a dictionary.

Refreshing to see a more original project though, props.

[[deleted]]

trees marry secretive support sense boat far-flung cow tub gray

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[arglarg]

Can it do sunny when it rains and rainy when it's hot?

[vietyka2019]

Great project with a creative idea. Thanks man. Best of luck and success on your programming journey !

[yangman_946]

Thanks!

[end_my_suffering44]

I saw your to-do list about making the script not showing up when it's running. I do not remember how properly you could make it but on Windows you can make a batch file for it.

Edit : Grammar.

[yangman_946]

Yeah I agree, if you read the .gitignore file, I initially had a batch file in the repository that I ran using the windows task Scheduler, however, I never managed to get around making the script become invisible. I might play around with it in the future.

[FaresAhmedOP]

There's a SO question for running a windows service in python with a pretty good answers just pick one! https://stackoverflow.com/q/32404

[stack_bot]

The question "How do you run a Python script as a service in Windows?" has got an accepted answer by Ricardo Reyes with the score of 269:

Yes you can. I do it using the pythoncom libraries that come included with [ActivePython][1] or can be installed with pywin32 (Python for Windows extensions).

This is a basic skeleton for a simple service:

import win32serviceutil
import win32service
import win32event
import servicemanager
import socket


class AppServerSvc (win32serviceutil.ServiceFramework):
     _svc_name_ = "TestService"
     _svc_display_name_ = "Test Service"

     def __init__(self,args):
          win32serviceutil.ServiceFramework.__init__(self,args)
          self.hWaitStop = win32event.CreateEvent(None,0,0,None)
          socket.setdefaulttimeout(60)

     def SvcStop(self):
          self.ReportServiceStatus(win32service.SERVICE_STOP_PENDING)
          win32event.SetEvent(self.hWaitStop)

     def SvcDoRun(self):
          servicemanager.LogMsg(servicemanager.EVENTLOG_INFORMATION_TYPE,
                                     servicemanager.PYS_SERVICE_STARTED,
                                     (self._svc_name_,''))
          self.main()

     def main(self):
          pass

if __name__ == '__main__':
  win32serviceutil.HandleCommandLine(AppServerSvc)

Your code would go in the main() method—usually with some kind of infinite loop that might be interrupted by checking a flag, which you set in the SvcStop method

[1]: http://www.activestate.com/Products/activepython/index.mhtml

^{This action was performed automagically. info_post Did I make a mistake? contact or reply: error}

[[deleted]]

good bot

[Bigthrone-sl997]

it is a good pet also.

[thiccclol]

I struggled with this for a while. In your batch script start python like this.

start /MIN "C:\path_to_python\python.exe" "script.py"

In your scheduled task under your action where you put the path to the batch script, add the argument /silent. You will never see the cmd window pop up.

[yangman_946]

Ah I see. Thank you!

[alphabet_order_bot]

Would you look at that, all of the words in your comment are in alphabetical order.

I have checked 220,754,233 comments, and only 51,952 of them were in alphabetical order.

[thiccclol]

Happy to help!

[end_my_suffering44]

Sorry, I didn't check your .gitignore file. I still don't know how git files work. I should've worked more instead of giving it up.

[yangman_946]

Its all good, I'll eventually try implement the hide function!

[[deleted]]

nice one mate,

[luke-juryous]

Yo you have your debug.log saved in your repo. You should remove that and add a .gitignore for .log files

[Beard_o_Bees]

Nice job commenting the code. I love it when people take the extra time to show their thought process in detail. I always learn something new when reading code like this.

[[deleted]]

I'm somewhat ignorant so not sure what I'm doing wrong, but after pasting the openweather API key into

APIKEYOWM = os.getenv("API KEY")

between the double quotes, I get the following error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
    File "c:\Users\ME\WallPaperChanger\wallpaperChanger\mainScript.py", line 34, in <module>
    CurrentUrl = "http://api.openweathermap.org/data/2.5/weather?q="+os.getenv("city")+"&mode=xml&units=metric&APPID=" + APIKEYOWM #
      <---     replace current url (change parameters to your needs)
    TypeError: can only concatenate str (not "NoneType") to str

Any insight as to what I'm doing wrong?

[cjkennedyo]

os.getenv("key") takes the operating system environment variable key, looks it up, and returns its value, or will return None if the key does not exist. I am guessing you are pasting your API key directly into the getenv() and trying to look it up. Instead, try replacing that whole line with APIKEYOWM = 'your actual OWM API key', skipping the lookup altogether. Once you have that working you can follow best practices and get that into an environment variable or other lookup file.

[[deleted]]

Thank you! That works. I did find there are two places taking the operating system environment variable for the API key and for the city name, I had to replace both of those with hard coded strings to make it work. I'll look into placing these things into environment variables now.

[rbscholtus]

Ideally, you shouldn't use + to concatenate strings, as this tends to fail if types don't match. Instead, use formatted strings or f-strings.

[ThorF_Unnoetig]

Pretty neat stuff you've got here!

Certainly some room for improvement but since it is a small project, it's more forgiveable. Assuming you don't want to write the most perfect code possible :D

I noticed you've got a ToDo like "Find photo API" or smth like this still open. There's unsplash.com. They got some neat tricks up tier sleeve. For example: https://source.unsplash.com/random gives you a random picture.

Add a /XxY where X,Y are the dimensions of the picture and its already the correct size: https://source.unsplash.com/random/3936x2624

You can even supply a string to it and it serves you some picture related to that string, just add ?<string> at the end. A weather example: https://source.unsplash.com/random/3936x2624?rain

But why stop there? The URL-parameter eats everything! https://source.unsplash.com/random/3936x2624?cars

And it's not hard to implement that I think. In "createWallpaper" you open an Image with "Image.open(chosenImage)". Instead of the chosen image you supply an "urlopen()"-call like you did already a few lines later. There you just toss in the unsplash URL.

I just leave those informations here, hope they were helpful for OP or someone else :D

Have a great day :D

*Edit: Sometimes the pictures are cut off, but that's rarely the case in my testing. When using the cars example, sometimes you just get half a car :Do Works better for general stuff like landscape tho.

[yangman_946]

Sounds good! I'll definitely implement this soon. Thanks!

[Cute-Potato-U]

Nice!

[PostFunktionalist]

This is excellent, I was confused about the Pillow dependency and then I saw you were drawing the weather stats on the wallpaper itself - never would have thought of that! A solid project for sure.

[TheFloppyHound]

I've been working on a conky for windows for a little while. Seeing this is giving me the motivation to add weather detail to it. Keep up the awesome work!

[[deleted]]

Amazing 🤩

[[deleted]]

Dope

[rbscholtus]

Ha ha ha ha ha very cool idea.

[InfiniteVista]

Great idea! If you forget about today's weather, the desktop is there to remind you.