Comments on: Desktop Backgrounds w/ Flickr

By: Never Tell… Richard Eibrand » Blog Archive » links for 2007-07-20

Fri, 20 Jul 2007 14:18:54 +0000

[...] Donâ€™t Forget to Plant It! Â» Blog Archive Â» Desktop Backgrounds w/ Flickr “…using Flickr for my backgrounds was such a good idea (and a good excuse to play with ruby), that I thought Iâ€™d give it a shot.” (tags: flickr screensaver ubuntu) [...]

By: tecosystems » It’s the Network, Not the Application: Online Desktops

tecosystems » It’s the Network, Not the Application: Online Desktops — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 05:30:16 +0000

[...] be my wallpaper backend? Calvin seemed to think that was a good idea, so he went ahead and hacked it up, and someone’s apparently had the same idea over on OS [...]

By: tecosystems » Remember When I Asked for Flickr as a Back End to GNOME?

tecosystems » Remember When I Asked for Flickr as a Back End to GNOME? — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 08:47:51 +0000

[...] Well, the excellent Calvin Yu went ahead and built it. Sure, it’s just a quick Ruby script rather than something built into the Desktop Background Preferences applet, but it’s refreshing to be able to just trigger a script that will drop in a new Flickr shot automagically. I’m a fan, and with it being built in Ruby I can play around now that I understand the Flickr API / rflickr gem bit better. My sincere thanks to Calvin for this. [...]

By: Calvin Yu

Calvin Yu — Wed, 29 Nov 2006 11:56:34 +0000

Nope, the cron setup worked for me without a hitch.

By: Brad Wilson

Brad Wilson — Wed, 29 Nov 2006 04:36:28 +0000

Oh that’s nice man. I’ll check it out later on tonight.

Did you have any trouble using cron to call the reload desktop command? I seem to remember when I was playing with my python script that I couldn’t get cron to work. I guessed that was because it wasn’t running on the xhost or something but never got it fixed. Any ideas?

By: Neil

Neil — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 19:11:49 +0000

Thanks for the great script. Works perfectly.

By: Calvin Yu

Calvin Yu — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 20:53:33 +0000

Weird – at least you’re getting closer

All you have to do is change the word ‘remove’ to ‘delete’ to get it to work a second time (it’s strange that remove works for me).

I just updated the script again, adding that remove change as well as some other optimizations (if it works it should cycle through more images and find new images a little faster).

By: stephen o'grady

stephen o'grady — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 19:21:49 +0000

excellent – that worked initially. only problem was that on second run, i get this:

ruby chg-background2.rb
chg-background2.rb:72: undefined method `remove’ for File:Class (NoMethodError)

By: Calvin Yu

Calvin Yu — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 19:04:30 +0000

No, I didn’t check that part. I’ve uploaded an updated script. Get that, and the first time you run it you should be shown a URL that you click to authorize the app to connect to Flickr.

I also made a change to the script to not store the auth cache file in the temp directory – this way you won’t have to re-auth when the /tmp directory is cleared out.

By: stephen o'grady

stephen o'grady — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 18:47:13 +0000

ok, that solved part of it, but it didn’t seem to provide me with the auth URI:

ruby chg-background.rb
You must visit #{url} to authorize this application. Press enter when you have done so. This is the only time you will have to do this.

ERR: Invalid frob (108)
/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/xmlrpc/client.rb:414:in `call’: Invalid frob (XMLRPC::FaultException)
from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/rflickr-2006.02.01/lib/flickr/base.rb:153:in `call_unauth_method’
from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/rflickr-2006.02.01/lib/flickr/auth.rb:52:in `getToken’
from chg-background.rb:32

am i missing something obvious?