Technetium NPM

Technetium — Discover the cosmos, one wallpaper at a time.

Unique ever-changing desktop wallpaper, with the NASA Astronomy Picture Of The Day and your name on it. Technetium is a small but stellar project which supports customization on many levels, including an accent, shadow, text and even an overlay.

Installation

Beginner (non-techie)

This tutorial assumes you know little about NPM/NodeJS and haven't got either installed. If you don't meet this criteria and want to head straight to the installation command, you may skip this part and head to the Advanced section.

By far, the easiest and best method to install Technetium is using Node Package Manager (NPM) which comes with the installation of NodeJS (the platform this project was built on).

NPM and NodeJS can be installed together at this link. From there, you can walk through the setup until to reach the point where everything's ready to go and you're able to successfully run in a command-line terminal like cmd.exe:

npm --version

Finally, you can install the package itself by running the following command. The different parts of the command refer to different elements of the installation:

npm is the base command for anything Node package-related and manages installation, updates, removal and more.
i is short for install and is pretty self-explanatory (it installs the package into your computer).
Next is -g which tells NPM to install the package globally so that you'll be able to access it from anywhere.
And at the end is of course, the package name (technetium).

Combining all of these arguments together, you get your full command:

npm i -g technetium

This command will install and setup your the entire project and should only take a matter of seconds to install. Once complete you're all ready to go and can move on to the usage.

Advanced

This area of the installation assumes that you've gotten a decent understanding of NPM and know your way around the terminal. Install Technetium with the following command:

npm i -g technetium

Setup

In order to use the package effectively, you require an API key for NASA's Astronomy Picture Of the Day project. You can easily get a free API key in a matter of seconds from NASA's website.

Then you can set the API key for Technetium by running the following command, making sure to replace the value in brackets with the actual API key:

technetium set [API KEY]

Now, this is the only feature truly necessary in the setup but it is highly advised that you change the overlay by following the tutorial below.

Usage

Once the installation is complete, the basic command to run the script is:

technetium

To see a list of all available commands, you can enter:

technetium help

Changing the Overlay

If you do test the project once the previous steps are completed, you'll notice a strange attribute of the generated wallpaper: it will have the name, "Spike Raxstone", and title, "Codiscite CEO", on it.

Naturally, this wouldn't be ideal and therefore we've provided the overlay.png (default look) file which allows modification of the default overlay. On Windows 7, 8 and 10, that file will be located in the %APPDATA%\npm\node_modules\technetium directory.

From there, you can modify the overlay.png picture however you want and then rerunning the script will update the overlay. In the file itself, you can include text (like the example shows), images or anything else that a png file can hold.

Changing the Shadow

At the bottom of each image, by default, there is a shadow that helps the text/overlay fit in more nicely with the ever-changing background. Although, you may want a stronger shadow or something different. This file is similar to the overlay.png but it sits beneath it and is quite subtle.

The bottom shadow file is titled accent.png and can also be located in the same directory as the overlay.png file. This one probably shouldn't be touched unless you absolutely know what you're doing.