rabid.audio

Documenting my work at the intersection of technology and music.

A little thing

Published: 03 Jan 2014

Note

This is an old post or draft which was migrated from my old blog. It may have broken links, and it definitely has questionable opinions. Consume at your own risk.

I've been out of town for a couple days, so as soon as I got back I was desperate to build something. My wireless charger for my new Nexus 5 happened to be here, so on a whim I looked to see if Tasker was capable of telling if this was the case. Sure enough, Tasker can detect the charger flawlessly. So what to do with it...

I decided opening the desk clock was a little boring. I also noticed Tasker had a whole bunch of image manipulation methods and also an HTTP Get method. So I threw together some Ruby to scrape Flickr for a random image and pushed it to Heroku.

It seems that you can no longer easily export Tasker profiles, or else I would post it here. But it is pretty simple:
  1. Add a new Profile for Event > Power and set it to Wireless (or Any if you prefer)
  2. Create a new Task:
    1. Turn on Night Mode
    2. Set Variable %FLICKRIMG to Download/flickr.img (a static name will replace old images to save space)
    3. HTTP Get
      Server: random-flickr-image.herokuapp.com
      Output File: %FLICKRIMG
    4. Set Wallpaper to %FLICKRIMG
  3. Also create an Exit Task to turn Night Mode back off and set the wallpaper back to normal (or don't, and have a new wallpaper for the day!)
Here's a video of it in action. For a 3 hour project, I'm pretty excited.