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Useful scripts to add randomness to xscreensaver or anything else that needs to display interesting text or images.

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davenport651/desktop-randomness

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Desktop Randomness

This repo contains a set of useful scripts for use with something that accepts text and file inputs (like xscreensaver or anything else that needs access to a single file to do something interesting).

returnText script will pull 200 lines of text starting at a randomly selected line from a randomly selected file in the directory. By default, the dir variable is pointed at /home/$USER/Downloads/ClassicBooks/ (where I keep a collection of txt files downloaded from http://www.gutenberg.org/). Change it to whatever folder you have that holds a lot of raw text files.

To enable returnText, open the Xscreensaver Preferences window, click Advanced tab, then click "Program" radio button under "Text Manipulation", then enter the path to returnText.sh.

xscreensaver settings

cyclePictures will pick a new planet texture from the '$HOME/Pictures/Planets' directory and a desktop wallpaper from '$HOME/Pictures/ultrawide/' and execute the refresh command. To use with GLPlanet on xscreensaver, point the day and night planet texture in the GLPlanet Settings to the '$HOME/Pictures/glPlanet' file as generated by cyclePictures.sh

randomMusic will randomly pull an mp3 from $dir and play it with either gnome-mplayer or VLC. Fill the directory with random jingles and set to run on login for mild amusement.

Pirate Cinema contains a snippet that can be pasted into your local .xscreensaver file to add a VLC screen hack inspired by the Pirate Cinema art project.

Example of text in xscreensaver

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Useful scripts to add randomness to xscreensaver or anything else that needs to display interesting text or images.

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