wallpaper-learn

Let your wallpaper become your teacher!

With wallpaper-learn, you can effortlessly learn new phrases, countries and capitals, or really anything you want... straight from your wallpaper!

Curated phrases and educational material are available for a wide range of subjects and languages, and all you have to do is create a new folder and type one command before being able to have a cycling, ever-changing computer wallpaper to learn from.

Topics

This is a list of all of the topics, subtopics, and levels available to set as your wallpaper. If you see something missing here, just add your own, contributing takes only a few minutes!

This also serves as a place to view possible commands without having to explore the file tree, which is why the names may sound a bit weird. However, their purpose is detailed in italic to the right.

languages

• chinese
  • HSK-1 (words required for HSK-1 level, in pinyin and hanyu characters, with a translation and category)
• spanish
  • top100 (top 100 most used spanish words, their translation, and part of speech)
• arabic
  • numbers (ten Arabic numbers)
  • top90 (top 90 most common Arabic words, with a translation and their category)

geography

• countries (all countries and territories of the world with capitals)
• states (all 50 states of the USA with capitals and location)

... and many more to come! It's very simple to contribute by opening a PR with your files, and a few minutes of finding and parsing the right URL could help more people than you may expect.

Usage

wallpaper-learn can be run straight from the terminal, assuming that you have navigated to the root directory that holds set_wallpaper.py. From there, it takes a few simple arguments in order to find out which topic + subtopic + level you are interested in, and then creates an images folder which houses all of the images.

wallpaper-learn also supports having multiple arguments (see bottom of this section for details).

You can run this by running the command python3 set_wallpaper.py and any commands you'd like from the terminal. Arguments passed in are case-insensitive. The following commands are available:

• -t or --topic: this is the main 'topic' of your Desktop background (i.e. the general subject; a directory in the root directory such as languages, history, or geography)
• -s or --subtopic: this is the secondary, more specific topic for your wallpaper (i.e. a subcategory of the directory you chose above, such as chinese). It must be a child of the correct topic directory.
• -l or --level: this is an optional argument, as not all subtopics go down to this level of detail. It corresponds to a subdirectory of the subtopic, such as HSK-1 for chinese, and you can view all of them by exploring the file tree for this program or consulting the list.

Likewise, you can also view possible arguments by running python3 set_wallpaper.py --help which will give you a detailed breakdown of how to use this program or by referring back to this guide.

Once the command has finished running, all that you have to do is navigate to your settings/System Preferences and set up a cycling wallpaper background, which takes all of 30 seconds.

Simple Example: python3 set_wallpaper.py -t languages -s chinese -l HSK-1

Advanced Example (multiple arguments):

python3 set_wallpaper.py -t languages -s chinese -l HSK-1 \
-t languages -s spanish -l top100 \
-t geography -s countries

In essence, for the advanced examples all you have to do is list each of the paths to the 'content' you want to go to individually. For example, these paths are languages -> chinese -> HSK-1, languages -> spanish -> top 100 and geography -> states. Note how for the geography there is not a --level argument; that is because there is no level below states and there is a CSV file in geography -> states.

You can also run it all as a one-line argument, but to keep it clear for yourself the multi-line one above is recommended. python3 set_wallpaper.py -t languages -s chinese -l HSK-1 -t languages -s spanish -l top100 -t geography -s countries.

Requirements

This program requires the Pillow library for image manipulation... and that's it! Everything else is built in.

You can install this requirement, available on PyPI, with pip3 install Pillow or pip3 install -r requirements.txt.

Contribution

Please, if you would like to contribute, know that you are more than welcome to. I do not have the knowledge or the time to create dozens .csv files for various topics, but the more we have, the better for the community and users of this package.

Contributing to this repository is simple. All you have to do is create a CSV file with the appropriate columns in the appropriate format, and open a pull request, open an issue if you're having trouble with making one, or shoot me an email if you are really having trouble.

You can also contribute by finding a background image for various topics. These images should be named default.jpg or default.png and have dimensions of roughly 1920 x 1280 pixels. Likewise, you can help by adding custom fonts, more instructions are available at the README.md for that folder here.

CSV Formatting

If you would like to add a list of words/information and their definitions/values, you need to submit a csv file.

This is the format for the CSV files, which are 4, 3 or 2 columns by n rows wide:

• first row: left empty, or optional title
• second row: titles for each of the columns in the following order:
  • 1st column required: the type of the main text that will be displayed (you can think of it as the question on the flashcard), such as Chinese character, Medieval Event, Country, and so on.
  • 2nd column optional: a second value for the first column (applicable for some topics). Mostly used in Asian languages, would be for example Pinyin in Chinese as both Pinyin and Chinese Character would be displayed as a 'flashcard question'.
  • 3rd column required: the 'definitions' for each of the cards will be here. You can put something generic like Definition or more specific things such as English translation, Event, Country Flag, etc. as fits the CSV file.
    note: if you didn't put a second column, this will be your second colum
  • 4th colum optional: in this optional column you can put in categories for each of the key + value pairs you put in the 1st + 3rd columns. In most cases, the title for this will be something general like Category or Type.
• third row and beyond: this is when you start filling up your CSV file with the actual content. Below each of your columns, create a row with values that correspond to what is below the column name.

Once you have made your CSV file, you need to drop it in the appropriate folders. For example, if you chose to make a CSV file for the vocab for NP-1 in Japanese, you would:

1. Navigate to the root directory and then go into the content directory, this is where all content is stored for making the images
2. Go to the languages directory (if you were doing something completely new like music, you'd create a new folder here as it is a new topic)
3. Create a japanese directory in the languages directory if there is not already one (this represents the subtopic). Here, you could make the csv file (naming it the same way as the subdirectory, i.e. japanese.csv, but since NP-1 is a specific part of the japanese course, I'd recommend making a level and dropping it there)
4. Create a directory (optional, see above) named NP-1 which represents the level. Drop the csv file there and name it np-1.csv (must be lowercase and same name as directory it is in)

That's it! Users can now choose to add your csv key - value pairs to learn from as their wallpaper.

Examples

Complete examples can be found by looking at CSV files in the repository or you can see a quick, partial example below.

4-row example

Ancient Events
Event	Ruler	Date	Category
The Persian Wars	Darius the Great	492-442 BC	Wars
Paper in Egypt	Ptolemy V Epiphanes	200 BC	Invention

3-row example

Ancient Events
Event	Date	Category
The Persian Wars	492-442 BC	Wars
Paper in Egypt	200 BC	Invention

2-row example

Ancient Events
Event	Date
The Persian Wars	492-442 BC
Paper in Egypt	200 BC

Setting Cycling Wallpaper

Once you have your images set up, all you need to do is set them to cycle as your wallpaper in your settings. Below are some images demonstrating how you can do so in various operating systems.

Mac

Navigate to your System Preferences -> Desktop & Screen Saver -> Desktop and click the + button at the bottom left to add an images folder (your images folder in the root directory of this program). Set change picture to True, adjust your cycling time, and choose whether or not to enable random order.

Please note: it may take a few minutes after the images have finished being downloaded for them all to show up on your wallpaper as it takes time for the Mac system to read them.

Windows

Similar procedure to Mac.