Code is Love

I’ve been reading about the estarling, a digital photo frame that will sit on a wireless network and grab photos from an RSS feed, on say, Flickr, or Picasaweb. What a fantastic idea this is — and really it’s the product I’ve been waiting to come to market for a long time if its features work as promised. Imagine: stick it in the home of your grandparents, parents, etc. - and _you_ can send the photos to their frame - keeping them up to date with all the latest photos from the lives of their family and friends.

To go along with this, I wanted a simple screen saver for my new install of Ubuntu Feisty-Fawn that did the same thing — grabbed latest images from an RSS feed on the web and then serve them when the screen was locked, or the system idle for more than a few minutes. It seemed like every Mac in my office has been taunting me with a feature like this, but maybe all those photo slideshows I’ve been seeing are from local images.

So, this is nothing short of a hack, but if you want this functionality on your desktop, maybe you’ll think it’s worth it like I did. The end result is Gnome Pictures Screen Saver with a modified version of bashpodder that grabs the latest photos from any feed(s) I specify to become the content for my screensaver.

The script takes a config file which consists of the URL to the feed you want to subscribe to and the xsl file which pulls out the URLs to the photos themselves from the feed. Currently RSS feeds/xsl transformations from Gallery, Picasaweb, and Flickr have been tested. When it runs, it checks the feed against files previously downloaded and only downloads the new stuff. It could be run from cron or perhaps when you log in. I suggest running it by hand the first time to make sure it is doing what you expect.

Package available in this thread:

Prerequisite pkg: libwww-perl (I used GET instead of wget - long story)

To install:

$tar -xzvf rss_photos.tar.gz

Edit rss_photos.sh and change the values of CONF_FILE and LOG_FILE to a permanent location. Create the CONF_FILE you just specified.

# Lines in CONF_FILE should be of the pipe-delimited format:
# |
# e.g.
# http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public .gne?id=YOURIDHERE&lang=en-us&format=atom|parse_flickr_enclosure.xsl


Obviously, you will need to enable the “Pictures Folder” screen saver in Gnome for this to work - the script simply grabs photos for the screen saver.