Random Meme Wallpapers

Inspiration

I had the idea to create an extremely benign form of "malware" that only mildly annoys and/or amuses the user and does no harm to the computer nor collects any of the user's personal data.

What it does

It downloads a picture of fat yoshi and sets the user's desktop wallpaper to it.

How we built it

I used PyCharm community edition to write the code, importing requests, shutil, and ctypes to be able to use the necessary commands to download the image and change the user's desktop wallpaper.

Challenges we ran into

At first I only used ctypes, which allowed me to change my desktop wallpaper using Python, but this was dependent on the full file location (containing my user name), and the image having a specific name and being in a specific directory. I wanted this program to be able to work on anyone's computer regardless of if they had the image downloaded in the directory I initially had it in or not.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I used three new modules that I hadn't used before to do something that I hadn't done before in Python. Now the program will work (read: change your desktop wallpaper to fat yoshi) no matter what computer it is run on as long as it uses a Windows operating system.

What we learned

I learned how to use Python to directly download a file so that it can be referenced later in the code without needing the end user to download anything themselves or place a file in a specific directory.

What's next for Random Meme Wallpapers

I want to write a very long program (possibly a simple game using Pygame and poorly-drawn MS paint graphics) and then hide the code for this within it so anyone who runs the program inadvertently has their desktop wallpaper changed to one of the memes from the list.

Built With

• pycharm
• python