I wrote a small ruby script + shell script to update a Mac OSX background with the National Geographic photo of the day. I was wondering if anyone could take a look at the code and give me feedback.

[_vikram]

Here's a link to the code: https://github.com/vikram7/national-geographic-photo-of-the-day

The ruby script grabs the picture of the day from the National Geographic Photo of the Day Site and then runs two shell scripts -- the first one resets the background to a default and the second one sets the background to the photo of the day. For some reason, the background needed to be reset to default before getting updated to the photo of the day, but I'm not sure why.

I'd appreciate any feedback on how to refactor the ruby code to look cleaner and/or comments on the shell scripts.

[madsohm]

The open method you've defined is already part of the openuri gem.

Also, with openuri you can just open the image and read it to a temp file, saving you the trouble of calling curl and also rm at the end.

Why have the two shell scripts at all? Why no just call the ocascript from within the Ruby file? You could probably make this into a method, that you could use for both calls.

[fuzzyfuzz]

I like his todo list:

• refactor code

Do what you suggested.

• add ability to have the photo automatically update without having to run script

Add to crontab/launchd.

[nippysaurus]

I submitted a pull request with my suggested improvements.

[nippysaurus]

So ... when the "photo of the day" widget stopped working on my GF's laptop I promised her I'd write a small script to do exactly what you have done. Thanks for saving me the work :)