Hourly wallpapers

The wallpapers shown on the plates page are the output of a small service that produces one image an hour. Its origin is incidental. An Anima image-generation server had been in service for several months for another project, and the thought that the same server could produce a desktop wallpaper on a schedule occurred to me while that project was being maintained. The specification was given to Claude Code in a few sentences, and the service was running within the hour.

The system is a scheduled pipeline in three stages. A prompt is assembled from a set of templates and slot lists, so that each hour’s image is a random combination of a landscape, a time of day, an atmospheric condition, and a palette. The image is then rendered by the diffusion model, and the result is published through an RSS feed.

The rendering stage is two-part for a reason that is specific to the model. Anima is coherent to roughly two megapixels and degrades beyond that size, so a native render at 3840 by 2160 pixels is unusable. The pipeline therefore renders at approximately 1888 by 1056 pixels for a 16:9 target, passes the result through an ESRGAN upscaler, and crops to the exact target dimensions. The cost of one wallpaper is about one minute of GPU time.

A rolling window of recent images is kept, and the feed is the interface to everything downstream: the plates page reads it, and so does the desktop, whose own slideshow performs the rotation.

The prompts are deliberately quiet: sea cliffs at blue hour, dune fields under fog, geological strata in shadow. A wallpaper is a background, and a background is not meant to compete with the windows in front of it. That preference is encoded in the templates, and the slot lists supply the variation.