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A few days ago I stumbled upon\u00a0the fantastic Seize The Day 24 Hour Palette Art Gallery<\/a> by Mark Ferrari and converted to HTML5 by Joseph Huckaby. As we all know 8-bit art is awesome: as soon as I saw the impressive collection of landscapes I decided I had to place them somewhere close to my eyes so that I could gorge on them continuously. Each landscape\u00a0matches a different month of the year and all of them feature a fancy palette cycling that animates the scene in a loop and also shows different illumination according to the time of the day. I thought this would make a perfect animated live wallpaper. Kind of like\u00a0f.lux but with a retro, pixelated heart.<\/p>\n This all started as a Sunday afternoon project, but it turned out to take a bit longer mostly because I dig using Linux. One of my goals was to reach some degree of compatibility across\u00a0different OSs and sure enough, the HTML5\u00a0visualizations can be placed as a Desktop wallpaper very easily on Windows and macOS. Just install one of the dedicated applications that let you use a web page as a wallpaper, point it to the address and it’s done.<\/p>\n Some of the scenes can palette-cycle through different weather condition, so I added a function that checks the location of the client and matches the scene with the current weather, when available. I also sacrificed a bit the refresh rate of the visualization for the sake of reaching a CPU usage that I could accept. Currently this live wallpaper is costing me between 4\u00a0and 8% load of one CPU of my quad core laptop. If you too are interested in sacrificing a few CPU cycles for some top notch 8-bit art, follow the Howto below.<\/p>\n macOS Howto<\/strong><\/p>\n Install Desktopr<\/a>. Open it, feel free to remove the placeholder URLs and add a new one: http:\/\/www.jamez.it\/8bit-wallpaper\/<\/a> and you’re done.<\/p>\n Windows Howto<\/strong><\/p>\n Install Wallpaper Engine<\/a>. Open it, select Open From URL, paste\u00a0http:\/\/www.jamez.it\/8bit-wallpaper\/<\/a> and you’re done.<\/p>\n Linux Howto<\/strong><\/p>\n There’s a plethora of Window Managers, each with their quirks and strangeness. In order to place a browser window on my Desktop background, I ended up using WebScreensaver<\/a>, a python script that uses WebKit to create an\u00a0interfaceless browser window, and\u00a0XWinWrap<\/a>, a utility that shows its wrinkles, but still manages to display said window on your desktop under certain conditions.<\/p>\n What are those conditions? You must use MATE window manager <\/a>which luckily is one of my favorite\u00a0WM, or accept to face all sort of glitches. I am a Desktop-with-icons kinda guy (I know, GUIs are for wimps anyways) and XWinWrap with Gnome Classic, Gnome3, Xfce and KDE couldn’t deal with the right z-axis (thus hiding my icon layer) or downright refused to remain sticky. The only issue I couldn’t fix yet using MATE is that any icon ending behind the visualization remains hidden there. Luckily I tend to keep my icons close to the edges, forming a canvas of sorts, so this was never a problem. You can wrap everything together with a script that fires on Startup.<\/p>\n Bonus points<\/strong><\/p>\n You can pass some parameters to the address for extra goodies.<\/p>\n http:\/\/www.jamez.it\/8bit-wallpaper\/?view=september<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n forces to load a specific view. Views for December and March are a bit weak because half the canvas was designed to accommodate for Seize The Day<\/a> calendar utility, a truly marvelous program from 1994 – way ahead of its time, and timeless still.\u00a0<\/em>If you want to skip to a specific month just specify the name, for istance “view=september”. If you don’t want to limit your choice to time-synchronized views, try “view=random”. With that option on, every three hours a new\u00a0view will be loaded from a special pool of non-time-synchronized views.<\/p>\n http:\/\/www.jamez.it\/8bit-wallpaper\/?zoom=true<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Normally the canvas loaded uses the native resolution of 640×480. Force stretch view to full available space with this parameter.<\/p>\n http:\/\/www.jamez.it\/8bit-wallpaper\/?place=Miami,Florida<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Forces a specific client location to load current Weather report from. Useful when geolocation fails.<\/p>\n Obviously the parameters can be concatenated:<\/p>\n\r\n#!\/bin\/bash\r\n#give the script some sleeping time, otherwise the Desktop won't be initialized and the wallpaper will fail to launch\r\nsleep 4; xwinwrap -d "x-caja-desktop" -ov -g 650x530+600+250 -- \/usr\/lib\/xscreensaver\/webscreensaver -url "http:\/\/www.jamez.it\/8bit-wallpaper\/" -window-id WID\r\n<\/pre>\n