APOD Viewer v1
Posted on October 02, 2008 in Microsoft Office
I love APOD - Astronomy Picture of the Day - as I'm privately quite interested in the universe and all that stuff. But I do not visit APOD daily, so once in a while I browse the site. But, wouldn't it be nice to have a slideshow with the pictures? Surprise! PowerShell to the rescue. This script really show the power of PowerShell. It has a web client, caculates dates and controls Internet Explorer. Give it a shot. If you make any clever changes, please post those as comments. I have a big wishlist myself, but this got me going. function apod { param([int] $days=1) # show latest picture by default $baseurl="http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/" # create IE COM object $ie = new-object -com internetexplorer.application # create .net object $webclient = new-object system.net.webclient # date manipulation $date=[datetime]::now $date.AddDays(1) # start tomorrow as the loops starts by subtracting a day $ie.fullscreen=$true $ie.visible=$true # You may have to press the window in the taskbar to make it appear # An easy way to do a for loop - could have used for, but as said this is easier 1..$days | % { # back one day $date=$date.AddDays(-1) # construct url $url=$baseurl+"ap" + $date.tostring("yyMMdd") + ".html" $url # get HTML page $html = $webclient.downloadstring($url) $html.length # Pick up the link the picture has - links to the high resolution version # I want to display # This is not idiot proff coding - but, hey, scripts are easy to change $html -match '<a href="([^"]*)">W*<img' $matches.count # get the value matching the pattern in parenthesis $img=$matches[1] $img # show high resolution picture $ie.navigate($baseurl+$img) # wait for IE to load picture while ($ie.busy) {sleep -s 1;"busy"} # give me 10 seconds to enjoy the picture sleep -s 10 } # shutdown IE $ie.quit() $ie=$null # wish list: load pictures overlapping (but keep presentation interval) # wish list: include some kind of fancy transition # wish list: pick out the explanation and present it in some way # add our own... } cheap oem software buy software