The webcollage program pulls random image off of the World Wide Web
and scatters them on the root window. One satisfied customer described it
as "a nonstop pop culture brainbath." This program finds its images by
doing random web searches, and extracting images from the returned pages.
It places the images on the root window by using the
giftopnm(1),
djpeg(1),
and
xli(1),
xv(1),
or
xloadimage(1)
tools.
webcollage is written in
perl(1)
and requires Perl 5.
OPTIONS
webcollage
accepts the following options:
-root
Draw on the root window. This option is manditory: drawing to a window
other than the root window is not yet supported.
-verbose or -v
Print diagnostics to stderr. Multiple -v switches increase the
amount of output. -v will print out only the URLs of the
images; -vv will print all the commands being run; and -vvv
will print more than you care about.
-delay seconds
How long to sleep between images. Default 1 second. (Remember that
this program probably spends a lot of time waiting for the network.)
-background color-or-ppm
What to use for the background onto which images are pasted. This may be
a color name, a hexadecimal RGB specification in the form '#rrggbb', or
the name of a PPM file.
-timeout seconds
How long to wait for a URL to complete before giving up on it and
moving on to the next one.
Default 30 seconds.
-filter command
Filter all source images through this command. The command must take
a PPM file on stdin, and write a new PPM file to stdout. One good
choice for a filter would be:
Filter the composite image through this command. The -filter
option applies to the sub-images; the -filter2 applies to the
final, full-screen image.
-http-proxy host:port
If you must go through a proxy to connect to the web, you can specify it
with this option, or with the $http_proxy or $HTTP_PROXY
environment variables.
ENVIRONMENT
DISPLAY
to get the default host and display number.
XENVIRONMENT
to get the name of a resource file that overrides the global resources
stored in the RESOURCE_MANAGER property.
http_proxy or HTTP_PROXY
to get the default HTTP proxy host and port.
FILES AND URLS
/usr/dict/words or /usr/share/lib/dict/words or /usr/share/dict/words
To find the random words to feed to search engines.
When drawing on the root window, it always uses the default colormap.
This is actually a limitation of xv. But regardless, when using this
program with xscreensaver, it must be given the default-n
visual specification (see the
xscreensaver(1)
manual for more details.)
Only the GIF and JPEG image formats are supported.
Transparent and animating GIFs are not supported.
It's slow.
Too many of the images that it finds are text, not pictures. This is
because most of the web is pictures of text. Which is pretty sad.
