Workstation background changer with the flexibility of a web page.
This might seem like a re-invention of Conky because it is. I tried Conky for about a year and never really got it to work exactly like I wanted. Being a novice to Lua scripting didn't help, so I went about using technology I'm more familiar with to accomplish something similar. Hopefully others find the idea useful!
The idea is simple: Use a dynamic webpage your desktop background instead of a static image.
Obviously most desktop UI managers allow for static image backgrounds and not URLs, so I set my manager to point to a specific image which is dynamically over-written every 'x' seconds by a snapshot of my status webpage. I run this process as a service when my system boots to make my background a dynamic HUD (heads up display) of my system and whatever else I want to monitor.
To start, you'll need to install the 'imgkit' library in your Python environment...as well as have a Python environment. It's a nifty wrapper for wkhtmltopdf which I installed using Pip.
pip3 install imgkit
Next, install the wkhtmtopdf package (I'm in Debian, so APT is my package manager. Your nix may vary)
apt-get install wkhtmltopdf
After my install, I ran into issues with my image conversions which required 'xvfb' to resolve.
apt-get install xvfb
These all worked very well in Ubuntu 18. Your milage my vary depending on your version and repos.
To make my background a little more dynamic, I use something like the following to change the data every 15 seconds. Cron or Bash alias could work as well or even a systemctl service (I made mine a service), but you can test with the following to help with debugging.
while true; do ~/bgtool/bg.sh; sleep 15; done