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Desktop Earth - Gorgeous Wallpaper Generator
codefromthe70s.org — Desktop Earth generates very high-resolution wallpapers based on NASA's Blue Marble Next imagery. Both online and downloadable versions are available.
martona- 1823 diggs
- digg it
- sierranovember, on 11/14/2007, -0/+1very cool! +digg
- aljitech, on 11/14/2007, -3/+0Sweet! More pictures to rotate from now.
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http://www.aljitech.com/ Digg's Arcade - fudged71, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0cool
- beelz, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0http://codefromthe70s.org/files/DesktopEarthSetup.msi
- jessecrouch, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0any idea if theres something similar to the earthquake mapping thing that xearth has that could be applied to this? that woul be really cool.
- 0Troy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0When I try to digg this it says I already dugg it. And it doesn't show up in my profile...?
- M4v3rIC, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Not many advantages to using it,
+Digg - l7productions, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Same here. Can't digg the link.
- StepJoe, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0can't digg but i would
- Amplix, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Would love an OS X version but I will install this on my PC for sure :)
- tuckerman11, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I just installed it , wicked sick
- cbdgr, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0its like a lava lamp hehe
- martona, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Amplix, I got the idea from an OS X desktop thingy I had on my iBook maybe a couple of years ago. That was shareware though, and had a big ugly notice on the desktop: "Pay up to remove this" or something like that.
I know very little about programming for the Mac, so I made this for Windows. But if anyone here has the expretise I can throw some code at him... - Bartman818, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Ha ha,
Legal & Disclaimer: This is free software. You may use it in any way you like, but redistribution is not permitted. There are no warranties of any kind. If the software does not work: too bad. If you lose data: too bad. If your computer blows up: again, too bad. I am in no way responsible. - Sandwiches_Time, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I installed it, but the image on my desktop is tiny... I've got a 1680x1050 resolution monitor, anyone know whats up?
- martona, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0sandwitches, mouse over the small image, you should get a small title bar... click the 3rd button from the right to maximize it.
- 0Troy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Not sure why, but I can digg it now...
- Sandwiches_Time, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0martona: perfect! i'm an idiot. thanks.
- wilf_brim, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Right now dugg to death. I'll try again later, this looks just too kewl.
- martona, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Dugg to death is pretty accurate... My server was dishing out traffic at 80 megabits (up from about 1 megabit before the story hit the homepage) when I switched the download link to the Coral Cache. Cpu is at 100% due to the online version, with 40+ wallpapers being generated simultanously. (Lucky I have the wallpaper generator running at a very low priority so the rest of the site stays up.)
Digg has amazing powers. - crizpiz, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Dugg, bandwidth hungrey but damn cool. 8-)
- MrAction408, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0THANKS,
i've been looking for something like this for years - musicmeister, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Awesome, I have also been looking for something like this for soo long! Jeez I can't wait for the download to finish
- AverageJoe, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0haha, i already had the basic daylight pic as my BG (dled from that NASA 10 gb torrent photo post a month or so back), this will be fun to upload, and see the same BG slowly change lightness and darkness.... thanks!
- Teh_Shiz, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0i'm going to enjoy stareing at this for 24 hours straight, just to watch it change!
- AutoSciz, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Very neat.
I've run into a little problem though. Once I enabled Active Desktop, all my icons disappeared. I did everything I could find to get them back or disable Active Desktop, but I'm not having very much luck.
1. I made show the "Show Desktop Icons" was checked.
2. When into Folder Options > View and didn't find what I was looking for.
3. Went into Customize Desktop, and no luck there.
How can I get my icons back and disable Active Desktop? - AutoSciz, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Well scratch that. I restarted and that seemed to fix that.
How do I go about enabling Active Desktop now to use this program without having my icons disappear? - martona, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Autosciz, what OS are you running? Are you on Win9x or ME?
There's an article here about a very similar issue on Win98:
http://www.duxcw.com/faq/win/icons.htm - rodbibeau, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0This was cool yeah, but it needs to be able to easily span multiple monitors. it looks like it has the correct aspect for 2-3 monitors but it will not because the image is boxed in with letter boxes and active desktop is really quite weak for custom settings.
i was really hoping this was all it was cracked up to be from reading the comments here. it needs some revision. still hella cool though. - Deathfrogg, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1So far, it is non functional. Active desktop is required, but seems to not be working at all anyway. Default installation is to C: amd it wont install to any other drive I tried to select and this makes it unusable. I uninstalled it almost immediatly after spending 30 mins trying to make it work without success. No Digg.
- mabba18, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Just a little waring to everyone. This program downloads 7megs of images when it updates.
Still neat, but I wouldn't have it updating every minute. - ikonoclasm, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I can't get it to work. I installed it, then clicked Yes to activate Active Desktop. Nothing. Every time I click the taskbar icon, I get the same activation dialogue. XP SP2. Not sure what's up.
- martona, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0ikonoclasm & deathfrogg:
Start->Run "gpedit.msc" and open "User Configuration", "Administrative Templates", "Desktop" then "Active Desktop". Select "Enable Active Desktop" on the right, and set it to Enabled, then OK the dialog.
This should fix Active Deskop.
mabba18: There are no downloads at update time... It reads about 7 megs worth of files from disk (at idle priority). Are you looking at the Task Manager IO Read counter? That includes disk IO.. The poor thing has no network code compiled into it whatsoever.
rodbibeau:
Adding an "Span all monitors" entry to the resolution dropdown should be a no-brainer. I might get around to it in the near future. - Sababaaa, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Cool but the program Earthview is way better... basically the same thing, except with more options. You can set it to stay at a certain place, or along a path of your choosing (I have it on a tour of the world, but you can make it just travel through Europe for example), and you can configure whether or not you want cloud cover (which can be real time), cities to have lights, the angle at which the camera is, and other cool options. It can also be set as your screen saver. Its not free though (or is it ;), haha. Check it out:
http://www.desksoft.com/EarthView.htm - Sentience, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1The program EarthDesk adds realtime cloud cover and multiple projections to the mix, not to mention Mac OS X compatibility!
http://www.xericdesign.com/ - SoundScape, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I'm not game to try the desktop version just yet.
What kind of RAM requirements does it have? I'm only using a Pentium M 1.7 with 512MB, and I'm already using 450MB or thereabouts. - martona, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Damn! Had I known about these I'd have bought one of them.
I wouldn't have sunk 30 hours into this project, and could have had my Earth desktop a week ago.
On the flip side, this digg story wouldn't exist. Nor would the free download. - martona, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0soundscape - Desktop Earth needs about 3-4 megs when it's idle and about 15 when it's updating. The latter happens every 5 minutes by default (can be set anywhere between a minute to an hour) and takes about .5 to 2 seconds, depending on the computer.
- name, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I didn't test it, but it just looks like another GUI enhancement for xplanet
http://xplanet.sourceforge.net/ - chrishill, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0if they're accurate pictures whay is the UK bigger than italy? it should be tiny!
- INHUMANITY, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0How is it with CPU usage?
- flamingmonkey, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0This is sweeet. I've got the planet spanning my two screens. To high to see down ladies tops though :(
- Septimus, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Prefer EarthDesk but digg anyway.
- djchester, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0hmm.. so it never updates any images from the net after the donwload? So how old are the actual images?
- Otto, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Very nifty. Dugg, and installed.
- jfrago, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Tried out the online version. It was supposed to download a png file, but it downloaded an .exe file. It was very difficult to delete from my desktop in windows xp. Had to reboot to safemode with command prompt and deleted it from there.
- basselope, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0High-orbit only?
nodig - sandb, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0If you right-click and save as, your browser will suggest .exe as filename. This is because the image is generated by a CGI exe-script which you can see from the name of the link.
The file is actually a JPG file so you should rename .exe to .jpg.
And that guy should configure his webserver properly to prevent this. - jwkite, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0This is a beautiful desktop. Thanks for taking the time to write it and share!
Does anyone know what I'm doing wrong? I'm using XP and I thought it was possible to make the textboxes under the icons transparent. Right now I've got ugly white boxes all over my gorgeous desktop. - ylon, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0This is nothing compared to OSXPlanet!!!!!
http://gabrielotte.com/osxplanet.html
You can customize it to display basically the same as what this fellow has, but there are many, MANY more possibilities. You can even "watch" other planets. What I like is that I'm able to watch the earth and all of the various earthquakes, cloud cover and weather patterns as well as volcanos. Incredible piece of software. -
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