ifttt & box drive my desktop backgrounds … with a little cron happiness

I love that {{OS X}} lets me change my background on a schedule (I use every 30 minutes now).

But I don’t like having to find pictures to populate my desktop menagerie with.

Enter completely SFW backgrounds via RSS feeds!

Using IFTTT, I watch for new items from a variety of daily photo feeds, and upload the new items to a folder in my Box account. I have that folder set to be the source for my desktop backgrounds, and bingo bango we have automated new images coming to enjoy!

The recipe I’m using is available for you to grab here. (I have several running, but you can use any RSS feed you’d like.)

Also, to ensure I don’t end up with duplicate images (eg from the Bing images feed), I have the following running as a cron job (thanks to Unix.SE for helping me figure it out):

md5 -r * | sort | awk 'BEGIN{lasthash = ""} $1 == lasthash {print $2} {lasthash = $1}' | xargs rm

That script removes any files with duplicate MD5 sums from the folder I keep the images in (note – you should put the actual path to your folder in your cron job).