Using Conduit to Change Your Wallpaper
October 6, 2010
While Conduit is designed as a two-way synchronization application, certain other modes of use are also supported. This post will show you how you can use Conduit to randomly change your desktop wallpaper from Flickr, saving you from installing other software for this task.
In this example, a randomly selected photo from a popular Flickr RSS photoset will be applied as the desktop wallpaper.
Step One: Create a RSS to Wallpaper Synchronization Group
- Add a RSS Feed Data Provider to Conduit by dragging it from the Miscellaneous category into the main window pane.
- Add a Wallpaper Data Provider, also from the Miscellaneous category, by dragging and dropping it beside the RSS Feed dataprovider you just created.
- The Conduit main window should now resemble the following
Step Two: Configure the RSS Feed
- Right click on the RSS Feed and enter the following settings into the configuration window.
- Enter the following feed address (or substitute for your own);
http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photoset.gne?set=72157601461306539&nsid=44124362632@N01&lang=en-us - The settings tell Conduit to randomly choose one image from the RSS feed, and set that as the desktop wallpaper. If you uncheck the “Randomise enclosures” box then the photo most recently added to the stream will be set as the wallpaper.
Conduit Rises Again?
September 23, 2010
The recent earthquake, and subsequent closing of university for 10 days gave me the opportunity to finish off some of the work I had started on Conduit, but never found the motivation nor time to finish. In bullet point form, this work included
- Removal of HAL
All hardware discovery is now done using udev (and the Python gudev bindings) - Removal of last traces of gnomevfs
All file access now uses GIO. and GIO exclusively. Volume and mount detection is now handled by gio.VolumeMonitor - Much cleanup and removal of old code
gtkmozembed support was dropped, configure.ac now checks for all dependencies, fixes and tidy ups of DBus interface - Shotwell support
Support for this wonderful photo manager was contributed by Nathaniel Harward
Changes are in git. The main reason for all these changes is that now I have an iPhone. I have merged the iPhone module, and have varying degrees of success synchronizing Photos, Notes and Calendar items to/from Evolution and the device. Much credit for this work goes to Martin Szulecki and the rest of the libimobiledevice team.
Some work is already committed in the git iphone branch, more shall be committed when I finish it.
