Gemstone Feature Request - Backgrounds change by month, etc

[wayner]

This is really just a nice to have:

It would be great if the backgrounds in Gemstone could be changed on some sort of an algorithm depending on Month, day or other criteria.

For example, in October you could have Halloween themes. During December Christmas themes, when it is someone's birthday it could be a photo of them, etc.

If I am reading things correctly the backgrounds can change with the weather so it looks like there is some sort of dynamic background changing currently.

[pjpjpjpj]

+1.

[jorton]

How about you guys come up with the detailed logic and if we (I really mean jusjoken ) will look into it, no promises... The weather logic is pretty straight forward as its looking up a current condition image from a matching folder randomly. The other part is that someone is going to have to build up a set (or sets) or images to match your logic for months, holidays, birthdays, etc. I'm having a had enough time deciding on what to do with creating a set of generic genre images that will make everyone happy .

Like I said, no promises.

[mkanet]

I'm actually surprised that the background doesnt just change based on the current time of day and weather of the zipcode the user provides. That's what I thought the background addon was for. It doesnt make much sense to randomly show backgrounds; such as a sunny day when its night and snowing outside.

[Dargason]

I'm actually surprised that the background doesnt just change based on the current time of day and weather of the zipcode the user provides. That's what I thought the background addon was for. It doesnt make much sense to randomly show backgrounds; such as a sunny day when its night and snowing outside.

I think it does, doesn't it? It seems like I see cloudy pictures when it's cloudy outside, and sunny when it is sunny.

[jorton]

its looking up a current condition image from a matching folder randomly.

This means that whatever the current condition (Sunny) is it goes to a corresponding folder for that specific (sunny) condition and then randomly picks one of the many "sunny" images to display and rotate through.

You should not be seeing random conditions.

[wayner]

Originally Posted by jorton

How about you guys come up with the detailed logic and if we (I really mean jusjoken ) will look into it, no promises...

A starting point would to have a folder for each month with backgrounds and Gemstone would randomly display one of these.

Or couldn't you pretty much lever off of the syntax of how crontab files work.

[pjpjpjpj]

I figure you have a folder for each month and a folder for each weather condition. Let the user go out and scour the web and find their own images. I have a ton that I've found that I use with the default STV and ADM; I occasionally go in and change the backgrounds manually, based on season, holidays, etc. My home screen is "Recordings" and I try to keep that appropriate to the season/holiday, and I have a main-menu item "Upcoming" that I keep as an image of what season/holiday is "next".

For example, right now I have a late-summer image as my home and a Fall image - multi-colored leaves - as my "upcoming" image. One of these days I will change the main image to "Fall" and make "upcoming" be something with Halloween. Then for a few days around Halloween, I'll make that the main image and make "upcoming" be something for Thanksgiving/November. And so on....

I could live without the "upcoming" thing, but if the main image could be something related to the current month/holiday, that would be cool.

Going way out on a tangent, maybe within each month there could be weather subfolders. So you could have stormy summer, sunny summer, overcast summer, stormy Fall, sunny Fall, etc.... I know, I'm getting ahead of myself....

[Dargason]

You need to have subfolders for 'day' and 'night' as well.

[PiX64]

Originally Posted by mkanet

I'm actually surprised that the background doesnt just change based on the current time of day and weather of the zipcode the user provides. That's what I thought the background addon was for. It doesnt make much sense to randomly show backgrounds; such as a sunny day when its night and snowing outside.

Phoenix ui does

[jorton]

Gemstone does

Sorry couldn't resist... MKANET didn't realize Gemstone actually does it when he posted that.

[Polypro]

It does Night Time? I checked a bunch of the folders, but didn't see night images. Night image switching would be icing on the cake. Seasons too.

P

[jorton]

There are I think 47 (???) conditions that are used for weather conditions and some of those are day/night specific.

The package of background images we use is from XBMC so depending on how much care the author took with finding day and night versions of each condition you may or may not see a difference.

Not all conditions have a day and night version either. Here is a listing of the conditions by number (used for accessing the correct folder for BG images),

N/A - Not Available
0 – Thunderstorms
1 - Windy Rain
2 - Windy Rain
3 – Thunderstorms
4 – T-Storms
5 – Rain Snow
6 – Rain Sleet
7 - Snow/Rain Icy Mix
8 – Freezing Drizzle
9 – Drizzle
10 – Freezing Rain
11 – T-Showers / Showers / Light Rain
12 - Heavy Rain
13 - Snow Flurries
14 – Light Snow
15 – Snowflakes
16 - Heavy Snow
17 – Thunderstorms
18 – Hail
19 – Dust
20 – Fog
21 – Haze
22 – Smoke
23 – Windy
24 – Windy
25 – Frigid
26 – Cloudy
27 - Mostly Cloudy Night
28 - Mostly Cloudy
29 - Partly Cloudy Night
30 - Partly Cloudy
31 – Clear Night
32 – Sunny
33 – Fair / Mostly Clear Night
34 – Fair / Mostly Sunny
35 – Thunderstorms
36 – Hot
37 – Isolated Thunder
38 – Scattered T-Storms
39 - Scattered Rain
40 - Heavy Rain
41 - Scattered Snow
42 - Heavy Snow
43 - Windy/Snowy
44 - Partly Cloudy Day
45 – Scattered Showers Night
46 - Snowy Night
47 – Scattered T-Storms Night

These are the images for 27 - Mostly Cloudy Night,



These are the images for 28 - Mostly Cloudy (Day),

[reggie14]

It's 11:30PM, on a clear night, with a temperature of 28F. I'm definitely getting the images in the "sunny" folder (#32). Any idea what's going on?

Update:
By the way, now its partly cloudy (at 12:30AM), and I'm still seeing backgrounds from the daytime folder. Do you have to do something weird to get the night/day configuration to work? I tried to set it so daytime is 6AM-7PM (BTW, I changed this setting after I already noticed it wasn't working).

[reggie14]

Also, is it possible that there's some major resource hogging bug in the weather backgrounds? After a while my sagetv service starts eating up 100% of one core and its constantly sending 500-1000Kbytes/sec of traffic to each extender.

I'll run some more tests, but so far it seems like having weather backgrounds on is what kills it.

[jusjoken]

Originally Posted by reggie14

Also, is it possible that there's some major resource hogging bug in the weather backgrounds? After a while my sagetv service starts eating up 100% of one core and its constantly sending 500-1000Kbytes/sec of traffic to each extender.

I'll run some more tests, but so far it seems like having weather backgrounds on is what kills it.

I run this all the time without issue. But try just setting the delay on the weather backgrounds to 0 and see if that changes what you are seeing.

k

[reggie14]

Originally Posted by jusjoken

I run this all the time without issue. But try just setting the delay on the weather backgrounds to 0 and see if that changes what you are seeing.

Will do.

By the way, do you get different images at night? I haven't gotten any night images, no matter what time it is.

[BobbyDing]

I just enabled this and am also showing sunny days here at midnight. I'll try rebooting the server. Maybe a fresh start will kick it in.
.
.

[reggie14]

Originally Posted by BobbyDing

I just enabled this and am also showing sunny days here at midnight. I'll try rebooting the server. Maybe a fresh start will kick it in.

(sort of) glad to hear its not just me.

Keep an eye on your network traffic going to your extenders. Today mine suddenly got a lot slower, and I'm seeing constant traffic to them, even if they're idling (with backgrounds turned off).

I thought the background was the problem, but maybe not. Next I guess I'll try uninstalling the weather backgrounds. That's really the last thing I did on my server (though even that was several days ago).

[jorton]

BobbyDing and Reggie14, what weather source/provider are you using?

Just curious.

Thanks, J