This is a simple Electron-based application that displays images from the hottest posts of the day in the ProgrammerHumor subreddit in a slideshow format. The images are downloaded daily in the morning and displayed in full screen, cycling to a new image every 5 minutes (by default). You can also click on the screen to view the next image without waiting.
Because we all need a little humor in our lives, especially when it comes to programming. The programmer humor subreddit usually doesn't disappoint either 😂
I personally use this application to display the images on a spare monitor in my office at work. I also have it on a Raspberry Pi with a top-mounted 3.5" screen at home. It's a fun thing to glance at every once in a while while working and it's a great conversation starter with coworkers and visitors. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do!
Before running the application, make sure you have the following software installed:
- Node.js (v18.0.0 or higher) with npm (v9.0.0 or higher, should be included with Node.js installer)
-
Clone this repository to your local machine:
git clone https://github.com/EthyMoney/Daily-Programmer-Memes-Slideshow.git -
Navigate to the project directory:
cd Daily-Programmer-Memes-Slideshow -
Install the project dependencies:
npm install -
(Optional) Customize the options:
You can configure how many images download each day and how often they cycle by setting that in the
config.jsonfile. By default, it's set to 36 images, and a cycle time of 5 minutes. You can also choose whether to have logging to file enabled or not (it is enabled by default).
To run the application, simply use the following command:
npm start
The application will then start to display the top images of the day downloaded from the ProgrammerHumor subreddit on an attached screen, cycling every 5 minutes. You can click on the screen to view the next image without waiting. You can leave it running forever and the images will automatically update daily without any intervention.
You may want to consider automating the startup of this app upon boot up of your device if you are using this on a dedicated device or display. This can be done by adding a startup command or shortcut/setting to your operating system. For example, on a Raspberry Pi with a desktop environment, you can add the run command to the settings for startup applications.
This process will vary depending on your operating system and desktop environment used, but a quick Google search should help you find the steps for your specific setup. An example startup shell script begin.sh and and Gnome app file memes-app.desktop is included in this repo for your reference, just edit the paths in them for your use. Whatever you do though, make sure you make those files, or whatever other ones you make, executable. This is done using chmod +x <file>.
The application automatically runs the download-todays-memes.js script every day at 8 AM to download new images from the subreddit. Old images are retained as well and every day gets its own folder in the memes-archive directory. The application will only display images from the current day, but you can manually view images from previous days by navigating to the memes-archive directory and opening the folder for the day you wish to view.
All Electron (main, renderer, loader, etc) and image updater (scheduler, downloader) console.log statements are written to a file named electron-log.txt located in the root of the project for later review. This is useful for debugging purposes if you need it. You can disable this in the config.json configuration file, but this logging is enabled by default.
This project is licensed under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for details.
Contributions are welcome and encouraged! Please feel free to open issues for problems you encounter or feature requests and ideas you come up with. If you would like to contribute code, please open a pull request and describe your changes and reasoning for them. This app is my very first time working with Electron, so you will likely find some dumb things I did that could be improved or built upon. Thank you in advance for your help!