XScreenSaver(r) XScreenSaver(r) NAME webcollage - decorate the screen with random images from the web SYNOPSIS webcollage [-display host:display.screen] [-root] [-ver- bose] [-delay secs] [-timeout secs] [-background bg] [-filter command] [-filter2 command] [-http-proxy host[:port]] DESCRIPTION The webcollage program pulls random image off of the World Wide Web and scatters them on the root window. One satis- fied customer described it as "a nonstop pop culture brainbath." This program finds its images by doing random web searches, and extracting images from the returned pages. It places the images on the root window by using the giftopnm(m), djpeg(g), and xli(i), xv(v), or xloadim- age(e) tools. webcollage is written in perl(l) and requires Perl 5. OPTIONS webcollage accepts the following options: -root Draw on the root window. This option is mandi- tory: drawing to a window other than the root win- dow is not yet supported. -verbose or -v Print diagnostics to stderr. Multiple -v switches increase the amount of output. -v will print out only the URLs of the images; -vv will print all the commands being run; and -vvv will print more than you care about. -delay seconds How long to sleep between images. Default 1 sec- ond. (Remember that this program probably spends a lot of time waiting for the network.) -background color-or-ppm What to use for the background onto which images are pasted. This may be a color name, a hexadeci- mal RGB specification in the form '#rrggbb', or the name of a PPM file. -timeout seconds How long to wait for a URL to complete before giv- ing up on it and moving on to the next one. Default 30 seconds. -filter command Filter all source images through this command. The command must take a PPM file on stdin, and write a new PPM file to stdout. One good choice for a filter would be: webcollage -root -filter 'vidwhacker -stdin -stdout' -filter2 command Filter the composite image through this command. The -filter option applies to the sub-images; the -filter2 applies to the final, full-screen image. -http-proxy host:port If you must go through a proxy to connect to the web, you can specify it with this option, or with the $http_proxy or $HTTP_PROXY environment vari- ables. ENVIRONMENT DISPLAY to get the default host and display number. XENVIRONMENT to get the name of a resource file that overrides the global resources stored in the RESOURCE_MAN- AGER property. http_proxy or HTTP_PROXY to get the default HTTP proxy host and port. FILES AND URLS /usr/dict/words or /usr/share/lib/dict/words or /usr/share/dict/words To find the random words to feed to search engines. http://random.yahoo.com/bin/ryl, http://image.altavista.com/ To find random web pages. BUGS When drawing on the root window, it always uses the default colormap. This is actually a limitation of xv. But regardless, when using this program with xscreensaver, it must be given the default-n visual specification (see the xscreensaver(r) manual for more details.) Only the GIF and JPEG image formats are supported. Transparent and animating GIFs are not supported. It's slow. Too many of the images that it finds are text, not pic- tures. This is because most of the web is pictures of text. Which is pretty sad. SEE ALSO X(X), xscreensaver(r), xli(i), xv(v), xloadimage(e), ppm- make(e), giftopnm(m), pnmpaste(e), pnmscale(e), djpeg(g), cjpeg(g), xdpyinfo(o), perl(l), vidwhacker(r), dadadodo(o) COPYRIGHT Copyright (C) 1998, 1999 by Jamie Zawinski. Permission to use, copy, modify, distribute, and sell this software and its documentation for any purpose is hereby granted with- out fee, provided that the above copyright notice appear in all copies and that both that copyright notice and this permission notice appear in supporting documentation. No representations are made about the suitability of this software for any purpose. It is provided "as is" without express or implied warranty. AUTHOR Jamie Zawinski <jwz@jwz.org>, 24-May-98. X Version 11 17-Jun-99 XScreenSaver(r)