Xplanet Configuration
I’ve started using Xplanet as my root window image. I do a lot of work with people who are geographically disperse. I’m always wondering what time it is there and such. This seems like a pretty good way to keep up with that. Note that xplanet doesn’t actually show times, just locations. It’s cool though cause it shows the earth from my location, shows daylight/night, night lights, and cloud cover. I put markers for all the various stuff on it.
Xplanet uses ~/.xplanet for it’s config directory. I also have images and markers sub-directories. I’m attaching below all the relevant files. I use two cron jobs: one to update my cloud cover images and one to update the marker locations for the Emacs:EmacsUserLocations. My crontab entries look like this:
24 13,16,19,22 * * * /home/dalcorn/bin/get-emacsusers 24 13,16,19,22 * * * /home/dalcorn/bin/get-clouds
A note for people copying this file: The first number represents the minutes. You better change it to some other random minute of the hour so that the cloud-image server is not getting all requests on the same minute. The second comma-separated list represents the hours. Usually a cloud-image server will only update the image every three hours, so don’t fetch the image more often than that.
I have several different marker files. I’m not attaching my consuting file cause it’s probably not cool to publish the locations of my clients and such without their permission.
Here’s what I have in my ~/.Xclients file to start Xplanet:
xplanet -latitude 39.16 -longitude -55 -target earth \
-config dalcorn -transparency -wait 600 &
I was making the origin my own lat/long. I know quite a few people who live in Europe from the Emacs:EmacsUserLocations. With Xplanet centered over Cincinnati Europe was just a smudge over the horizon. So, I adjusted the longitude East slightly until I thought it looked right. In other words, there’s nothing special about 39.16 N 55 W. Note that the political boundary files I downloaded straight from the Xplanet home page.
