@JujuArts shared this pretty timelapse of the Mayon volcano on Reddit and the top comment had a great suggestion: turn it into a dynamic desktop, just like the one in MacOS Mojave, so I thought I’d try it out.
There are several solutions out there, and I went with Dynamic Walls by kush-agra. It asks for your location to calculate the sunrise and sunset in your area, and then updates your desktop periodically with the images in a folder.
There’s a more popular repo that requires Xcode and asks for specific azimuth and elevation at different times—a clever deconstruction of the OS feature which you can also read about there, but overkill for my needs: the images available aren’t about the exact locations of the sun in the sky per season.
Installation is straightforward: download the source, place your wallpaper images in a subfolder, then run the plistGenerator file.
The important part is to have 16 images with following the same filename format, numbered from 001 to 016. Note which numbers correspond to dawn, sunrise, daytime, sunset, and evening here. Since there are only 4 images of the Mayon in the timelapse, I duplicated them to fill the gaps.
Dynamic Walls is also available as an installable application, but I wanted to keep Dark Mode regardless of the current time, which you can do in the source version by editing one setting in the .scpt file before running the command.
That’s it! I could screenshot my desktop, but I don’t keep anything on it + my dock & menu bar auto-hide. ;) It’s a mini-vacation with unobstructed views.
As it happens, this “new” laptop is turning a year old—the first thing I did in my Webconf.asia HK visit last year was to acquire it. (Yes, it took me about 7 years to retire my non-Retina unibody MBP, but it’s still kicking around.)