September 14, 2023 • 775 words

Customize Wallpapers for Gnome

Why?

So the default gnome Ubuntu 22.04 desktop wallpaper is a Jellyfish.

Classic is the best, but I kind of get tired of jellyfish after nearly a year, so I decided to try something on my own.

Variety

So variety is an app in gnome software which can change your background. The pictures are good, and you can adjust how long the desktop will change. But it lacks customization, and sometimes I cannot get the images I want.

Places I wanted to visit

Recently my interests of visiting places shifted exclusively to the higher latitudes. I kind of think that the scenery in the lower latitudes are mediocre. I grew fond of snow and ice, so I listed some places: "iceland" "saint petersburg" "lofoten" "norway", "finland" "siberia" "switzerland".

Getting an API on pixabay

So I decided to scrap pixabay for images. When used wget to try to scrap it returned 403 forbidden, so I changed the userAgent, but it still returned 403, and I figured it was cloudflare protecting the site.

So I went to the official API page. I searched on github "https://pixabay.com/api/?key=" and searched code, getting 2k results. There are many tokens I found that worked. People left their tokens in their code, not in env file, which I think is bad practice and very insecure.

But anyways this is just for fun and not serious.

Preparations

Set the variables, I decide to keep at most 20 images. When there is internet I will download the images. The service is in systemctl and it starts every 5 mins, so like every 5 mins the wallpaper will change, but only when there is internet connection will the 20 wallpaper images change.

I used bash script because it looks cool. Python kind of works the same.

# Variable Definitions
API_KEY=560162-704dd2880c027f22c62ab7941
SEARCH_TERMS=(iceland saint petersburg lofoten norway finland siberia switzerland)
USER_AGENT=Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:89.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/89.0
IMAGE_DIR=/home/$USER/Pictures/Wallpapers
MAX_IMAGES=20
INDEX_FILE=$IMAGE_DIR/current_index.txt
current_image_count=$(ls -1 $IMAGE_DIR/*.jpg 2>/dev/null | wc -l)

First part: delete the leftover wallpapers

Search for the oldest image and delete them (delete until there are less than 20 images)

# If there are more than MAX_IMAGES, delete images until we reach MAX_IMAGES
while [ $current_image_count -gt $MAX_IMAGES ]; do
    oldest_image=$(ls $IMAGE_DIR/*.jpg | sort | head -n 1)
    echo Deleting oldest image: $oldest_image
    rm $oldest_image
    current_image_count=$(ls -1 $IMAGE_DIR/*.jpg 2>/dev/null | wc -l)
done

Second part: set the wallpaper

Keep the count in an index file, so I can increase it every time the thing runs.

# Set the Wallpaper
if [ ! -f $INDEX_FILE ]; then
    echo 1 >$INDEX_FILE
fi
current_index=$(cat $INDEX_FILE)
sorted_images=($(ls $IMAGE_DIR/*.jpg | sort))

Then after getting the count then sorting the images we get the corresponding index. After that set the gnome dektop background, then increase the current_index to make it different next time, and store the current_index in the index file.

if [ ${#sorted_images[@]} -gt 0 ]; then
    image_index=$((current_index % ${#sorted_images[@]}))
    next_image=${sorted_images[$image_index]}

    DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS=unix:path=/run/user/$(id -u $USER)/bus
    # Set the image as wallpaper using gsettings and set it to 'zoomed' mode
    gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.background picture-uri file://$next_image
    gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.background picture-options 'zoom'

    current_index=$((current_index + 17))
    echo $current_index >$INDEX_FILE
else
    echo No images found in $IMAGE_DIR
fi

Third part: Download the Wallpaper

Create folder and then choose a random search term. Add %20 to the search term to replace the blank space(or it won't work in the pixabay API)

mkdir -p $IMAGE_DIR
exec &>>$IMAGE_DIR/wallpaper_downloader.log

# Choose a random search term
SEARCH_TERM=${SEARCH_TERMS[$RANDOM % ${#SEARCH_TERMS[@]}]}
ENCODED_SEARCH_TERM=$(printf '%s' $SEARCH_TERM | sed 's/ /%20/g')

Check if there's Internet, if there is no internet, then don't do anything.

# Check for internet connectivity
wget -q --spider --user-agent=$USER_AGENT https://google.com

Then if there is internet, we go to pixabay, and fetch the fullhdurl, then download the image, naming it using timestamps.

You need to specify each entry of the api

if [[ $? -eq 0 ]]; then
    API_INFO_URL=https://pixabay.com/api/?key=$API_KEY&q=$ENCODED_SEARCH_TERM&image_type=photo
    totalHits=$(curl -s $API_INFO_URL -H User-Agent: $USER_AGENT | jq '.totalHits')
    numPages=$((totalHits / 20 + 1))
    if [[ $totalHits -eq 0 ]]; then
        echo No images found for $SEARCH_TERM.
        exit 1
    fi

    page_number=$((1 + RANDOM % numPages))
    API_URL=$API_INFO_URL&page=$page_number
    image_urls=($(curl -s $API_URL -H User-Agent: $USER_AGENT | jq -r '.hits[].fullHDURL'))
    random_image_url=${image_urls[$RANDOM % ${#image_urls[@]}]}

    if [[ -z $random_image_url ]]; then
        echo No image URL found.
    else
        new_file_name=$IMAGE_DIR/$(date +%s).jpg
        wget $random_image_url -O $new_file_name --user-agent=$USER_AGENT
        echo Saved image to $new_file_name
    fi
fi

Conclusion

Recently I felt kind of frustrated with almost everything, and northern Europe seems appealing to me. I don't know what is the meaning of life, and I cannot figure out so many things. Everything just became more and more complex.

Anyways, downloading and changing wallpapers is very fun, but I believe I will soon change back to the classic JellyFish.

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