I get the markers from EmacsWiki:EmacsUserLocations. They go here: `~/.xplanet/markers/emacswiki`
The config file is here: `~/.xplanet/config/alex`
[earth] marker_file=emacswiki cloud_map=clouds_2048.jpg arc_file=political
In my window manager startup script `~/GNUstep/Library/WindowMaker/autostart`:
xplanet -origin moon -target earth -config alex &
Very neat! Now I’m looking down on the earth like the man in the moon.
Now I just need to get a new `clouds_2048.jpg` every now and then. Start `crontab -e`, and add a line like the following:
24 13,16,19,22 * * * /home/alex/bin/get-clouds
A note for people copying this file: The first number represents the minutes. You better change it to some other random minute of the hour so that the cloud-image server is not getting all requests on the same minute. The second comma-separated list represents the hours. Usually a cloud-image server will only update the image every three hours, so don’t fetch the image more often than that.
This starts get-clouds at 13:24, 16:24, 19:24, and 22:24. Which is plenty enough for me. And the content of the get-clouds script:
#! /usr/bin/zsh -f
/usr/bin/wget -q -N http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~jml/clouds_2048.jpg \
-O /home/alex/.xplanet/images/clouds_2048.jpg
The last thing to get is the file `~/.xplanet/boundaries/political` – I downloaded it from Lathi's site, but he says he got it from the xplanet homepage.
Done!
If you want to get really fancy, check http://hans.ecke.ws/xplanet/ – an URL I got from a comment on Lathi’s blog ¹.