Random Wallpaper through Scheduled Tasks
With my new laptop I got a screen with a 1920x1200
resolution, so I went out looking for wallpapers for the
resolution, because my existing ones degraded in quality
with that size.
My search led to
Deaddreamer
from which I have my current wallpaper as well.
But nowadays he got so many good ones, so I
picked up 5 1600x1200 wallpapers. And now I want a random
wallpaper each time I logon.
Having some spare
time (very rare) I created something small myself, I'm sure
there are tools out there to do all that.
Originally I wanted to use PHP to get a random
number and set the wallpaper, and then call the php script
with a bat file and set it as a scheduled task. But that
kept popping up a dos prompt each time it set it, and my
wallpaper disappeared after boot (some bad registry
settings).
So I used
KiXtart
to set the wallpaper and then link it with a shortcut which
would run minimized.
That worked for one paper,
but when I tried the RAND function in KiXtart, it didn't go
well.. But I had the php script and bat still there so I let
that make a random number and then kill the KiX script with
that number as argument.
Result:
Shortcut
to wall.bat, which calls wall.php, which makes a random
number and calls wallpaper.kix with the number, after which
my wallpaper is set, and saved in registry.
I
have to shortcut Run as minimized and on logon and every
hour, and now I got a nice random wallpaper implementation.
Overly complicated? Maybe, If you have php
installed, it's a small solution, otherwise you need a 1.3Mb
dll and 24k php.exe in the same dir, which isn't really
something bad.
I have zipped everything and
written the steps to install it out in a Readme.txt for
everyone wanting it as well. I also included the php.exe and
dll.
Download it here:
RandomWall.zip
(706Kb).
And now I have sweeeet super-detailed
wallpapers auto-changing without any special timer programs
running, but just the Scheduled Tasks :)
Here
are my wallpapers:
ddr_0075_vertical_theory_pure.jpg
ddr_0075_vertical_theory_decay.jpg
ddr_0088_v1r2a_1600x1200.jpg
ddr_0091_bioforge_1600x1200.jpg
ddr_0086_21st_century_kaos_1600x1200.jpg
(convert them to .bmp first, not sure if it's
required, but whatever, bmp is nicer, no need for desktop to
go in Web mode)
