Realtime Sunlight Wallpaper Sets Your Wallpaper To An Image Of Earth's Sunlight/Darkness

Realtime Sunlight Wallpaper is an application which sets your wallpaper to an image of the Earth's sunglight/darkness - updated every 30 minutes. The wallpaper also displays clouds which are updated every 3 hours with the current weather satellite imagery.

A few days ago, version 0.3 was released which adds options to change the wallpaper style and background color. I wanted to write about Realtime Sunlight Wallpaper back when version 0.3 was released, but the application failed to start for some users (including myself). Luckily, a new version (0.3.1) has been released today which fixes this.

Here are some of the available (almost)-real-time wallpapers included in the Realtime Sunlight Wallpaper application:

(World sunlight map)

(Moon phase)

(Dawn to dusk)

To install Realtime Sunlight Wallpaper in Ubuntu (10.04 Lucid and 10.10 Maverick only!), use the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:realtime.sunlight.wallpaper/rsw
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install gtk-sunlight

Update: the Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx dependency bug has been fixed so now Realtime Sunlight Wallpaper should install in Lucid too!

Once installed, launch it from Applications > Accessories > Real-time Sunlight Wallpaper.

From the application's options you'll be able to select the World Sunlight map projection, use the Moon phases instead, make the wallpaper start at login and so on.

Google Real-Time Search Is Now Live

Today, Google not only announced it's real-time search going live, but also a partnership with Facebook and MySpace to pull in data in real-time.

Google real-time search will update as things happen / are posted around the web such as tweets, news articles and so on.

Please note that this new feature is not available for everyone yet, and should be available to all in a few days. To get an idea on what Google real-time search looks like, take a look at this video:

For more info, see the official Google announcement.

Google To Integrate Twitter Search Too

Just a few hours after Twitter announced it would be integrated into Microsoft Bing search, Google also announced it will include Twitter status updates into it's search engine.

At Google, our goal is to create the most comprehensive, relevant and fast search in the world. In the past few years, an entirely new type of data has emerged — real-time updates like those on Twitter have appeared not only as a way for people to communicate their thoughts and feelings, but also as an interesting source of data about what is happening right now in regard to a particular topic.

Given this new type of information and its value to search, we are very excited to announce that we have reached an agreement with Twitter to include their updates in our search results. We believe that our search results and user experience will greatly benefit from the inclusion of this up-to-the-minute data, and we look forward to having a product that showcases how tweets can make search better in the coming months. That way, the next time you search for something that can be aided by a real-time observation, say, snow conditions at your favorite ski resort, you'll find tweets from other users who are there and sharing the latest and greatest information.

said Marissa Mayer, Vice President of Search Products and User Experience in a blog post.

So Bing won the real-time battle with Google for just a few hours, although Bing's Twitter search is already live, while Google will integrate Twitter's data in its search results in the next few months.

Absent from Google's announcement, however, is Facebook (Microsoft announced deals with both Twitter and Facebook at yesterday's Web 2.0 Summit). That said, the vast majority of status updates on Facebook are not public, so how much of an advantage that will be to Bing is dependent largely on how Facebook is able to change user behavior.

Real Time Globe Wallpaper For Windows

A lot of people loved the real-time Earth (Globe) wallpaper for Linux and probably some might have wanted to use that on Windows too. Well, there is an application for Windows which does just that. Read on!

Desktop Earth is a free, high-resolution wallpaper generator of accurate representation of the Earth. The image is based on NASA's Blue Marble Next and Earth's City Lights.

Day and night is accurately represented depending on the Sun's overhead position (which depends on both the time of day and the day of the year) and both the snow cover and the foliage changes with the seasons. Although the cloud cover only renews itself every 3 hours, you might be able to find a server faster than those built into the Desktop Earth and apply this for quicker generation. The illuminated surface of the Earth updates every minute though, so it's great for finding out where the Sun is concentrated at any given moment.

Desktop Earth features:

-2 display options: active desktop item for a single monitor in a multi-monitor system and a regular wallpaper.
- the image can be centered based on your computer's current time zone.
- enable disable the clouds overlay and also you are able to set the cloud thickness
- day image can be selected based on current date or any other date
- specify the update interval

Setting the application to update the wallpaper every 5 minutes only uses about ~3 mb of RAM so it should work on almost every computer.

Download Desktop Earth for Windows (Free)

[Almost] Real-Time Google Search With An URL Hack

When you expand the options on a Google search result page, you can restrict the results to things like the past week, the past 24 hours, or “Recent results”. But with a little tweaking to the URL, you can change that to "past X minutes" or even "past X seconds". This can be done by changing the a parameter called QDR - perhaps standing for Query Date Range, in the URL.

By default when you click on "search options" and limit a search to the last day, the qdr appears as "d." Change that to "n" and you'll be limited to results from the last minute, to "n5" and you'll see results discovered in the last 5 minutes - or "s30" to see results from the last 30 seconds.

Here is an example with this in action:

-this search query will display search results for the term "web" in the last 5 minutes:

google.com/search?q=web&output=search&tbs=qdr:n5&tbo=1

-the following search query will display results for the term "internet" for the past 30 seconds:

google.com/search?q=internet&output=search&tbs=qdr:s30&tbo=1

[via blogoscoped]