How I made my desktop wallpaper a bit more productive

I am a minimalist when it comes to my PC desktop. I set a simple wallpaper, keep nothing but the things I work on at the moment and move things periodically to make the desktop clutter free. This keeps me focused when I am sitting in front of my PC.

Lately I have been pondering about having the list of tasks I am currently working on as a part of wallpaper. This will keep me reminded. So I put together a small script that will do that.

The ideas is to

  1. Have a base image to be used as background
  2. Figure out where the texts to be added
  3. Have a list of tasks stored in a file
  4. Open the file, parse the tasks, add those as texts to the image using Python
  5. Save the file and set that as wallpaper

I have a 1920 x 1080 size monitor. So I downloaded this image from unsplash and cropped it using paint with dimensions of my screen. I added a text called todo at a place where I intended to add the list of tasks. I downloaded the IndieFlower font from Google fonts and placed inside the same directory. Then I created a text file with list of tasks. The code is as below

from PIL import Image, ImageFont, ImageDraw
import ctypes
import os
filename = 'tasks.txt'

with open(filename) as file:
    tasks = file.readlines()


my_image = Image.open("base.jpg")
title_font = ImageFont.truetype('IndieFlower.ttf', 40)
image_editable = ImageDraw.Draw(my_image)

#Location of the text from top left corner
base_y = 630
base_x = 1000

tasks = [task.replace('\n', "") for task in tasks]

for i in range(len(tasks)):
    image_editable.text((base_x, base_y), str(i+1)+". " + tasks[i],
                        (105, 96, 96), font=title_font)

    base_y += 60

my_image.save("result.jpg")
image_path = os.path.join(os.getcwd(), 'result.jpg')

#Changing the wallpaper
ctypes.windll.user32.SystemParametersInfoW(20, 0, image_path, 1)

The complete code can be found in this repo

Future Todo : Make this program run on system startup and also automatically run when I change something in the text file.