Competitors of Flickr like Instagram and Picasa spring to mind, but also NASA’s picture of the day, or press agencies like Reuters are good sources of pictures that could serve as wallpaper. There are of course many other sources one could use to fetch interesting pictures from. ], a photo sharing website that I use to share my personal pictures with family and friends.

An obvious choice to look for interesting pictures is Flickr [ If possible, the wallpaper should be decorated with a small calendar, and some information about what the picture is about and where it comes from. Basically, what I wanted was something that could change the wallpaper on my laptop once in a while. Let’s start by sketching out the requirements for our little program. ] that I wrote to rotate the wallpaper on my Ubuntu laptop because I didn’t feel other wallpaper rotation tools did what I wanted them to do. In this article, I’ll explain a little program [ ] contains another example: a script to back up my computer files just the way I want it. One reason for doing that was that I wanted to learn more about the technology involved, but I also felt that the podcatching programs that I had tried out didn’t really do what I wanted them to do. I once wrote a podcatcher that downloads and manipulates podcasts so that I can listen to them in the right order. One of the benefits of being a programmer is that you can set up your computer to do things just the way you want, even if there’s no program for it.

Filip van Laenen walks us through a simple example. Repetitive tasks are ideal candidates for scripting.

How rotate screen ubuntu