Episode: 2837
Title: HPR2837: parallax live desktops in android
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2837/hpr2837.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 17:43:55

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This is HPR Episode 2837 entitled Parallax Live Desktop in Android.
It is hosted by Operator and is about 17 minutes long and can remain an explicit flag.
The summary is Parallax wallpaper, mouse giggling, system B, YouTube background play and more.
This episode of HBR is brought to you by an honesthost.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HBR15.
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Hello and welcome to the episode of Hacker Public Radio, your host operator.
I'm going to go quickly go over live wallpapers in which what I'm currently messing with now
is Parallax based, which is essentially kind of creating fake 3D images and when you rotate
the phone, those layers will move around and make it appear like it's going to be in
and provide a cool effect when you're playing with your phone.
So there's a few apps out there that majority of them will give you a selection of however
many default 3D live wallpapers, Parallax wallpapers and then some of them will have a predetermined
number for you ones and then you can actually create your own by adding one or more or two
or more multiple layers and then if you want to add like 10 layers then you have to pay
whatever to unlock the ability to add more layers.
So this Parallax effects is basically taking, there's kind of two approaches from the actual
creating the images that I've seen so far.
One is just to take random images and stack them on top of each other.
So you might have the background of space and then maybe in front of that is a hand, a big
hand that's reaching out or whatever, grabbing down something and then inside of that hand
you might put a ball or a planet or something inside of that hand and maybe some effects
around that between those layers.
So when you're rotating around it kind of looks cool, like lens flare effects and things
like that.
So I've seen a number of pretty decent ones that have multiple layers but they're also
somehow changing the dimensions of the layers as they get moved around.
So as they're rotated they appear to shrink and expand to give it even more of a 3D effect.
So there's, now I'll talk about more of that in a minute, the other method that I've
seen online is also based on images like a image that is one image based off creating
multiple layers based off of one image.
And that's just using our Photoshop, the lack of a better term effects to put some distance
in between your outlines, what you've cut out of the image and what you're going to
remain in there.
So for example, if you have a picture of a beautiful woman on the beach and you don't
have a beach picture that will fit with that woman on the beach then you can actually
cut the woman out of the beach and then pull her out and then you can take background
and with some photoshopping you can add a percentage of 5% or whatever of the missing area
around that with just guessing and doing some Photoshop techniques with some Phil techniques.
And that allows you to shift right to put the girl in front of the beach and you can
shift it around and you won't, there will be a minimum amount of noticing what, what
noticing that there's going to be any loss of, of fidelity, right, a keys or thing, sorry.
So that's kind of the cool part about it, it's actually some money here.
Try not to be too obnoxious.
So I think it's interesting, I've run across a few live wallpapers and I think the wall
paper market could use some refreshing and I've looked at least within Android space.
I've looked around and I've seen some pretty decent live wallpapers but due to CPU usage
or something that just haven't really seen anything that's really blown me away and
I've done some research and I've looked at other live wallpapers and they're all just
kind of stinky or they're more tweet based wallpapers, well they'll tell you the weather
or something equally stupid or unimportant.
So those are halfway decent, the ones that are provide data or for example if it's raining
outside it will show the rain in the background or if it's sunny outside it will show that
it's sunny.
Those are a little bit different and a little more creative but I'm wondering if you guys
have any ideas around using this parallax effect to make some really cool interesting
three-dimensional images into our objects or instances of environments, 3D environments
with this parallax effect.
I've got a few ideas of my own, I just haven't messed them all together or found an
app that will let me add more than like three layers.
But anyways, I just wanted to give that an update or just a little posts or a little
quick tips on what I've been poking around with in that space.
Let's see I'm trying to think of some other good live wallpapers.
There's a few, a few of them out there that are just special effects, right?
You know, they'll be like a water droplet or whatever, so whenever you touch something
on the interface it'll drop a drop of thing of water, some kind of net nature-based effect.
Outside of that there just doesn't really be anything super cool and I think with all
the information on your phone, your personal device and all the things that it can do and
all the information that it can pull, there has to be something creative that nobody
has done yet.
I'm trying to find what that live wallpaper would look like and how people would interact
with it, right?
The interaction is the key and then maybe if you have to or can think about social media
aspect of it to make it somehow interactive with a social media aspect, maybe it hooks
into say Facebook or whatever the kids are talking about nowadays.
But that's just some of the options and some of the things that I've thought about here
kind of recently.
Let's see if I can get over, not get on with 10.
Okay, anyways, I'm trying to think what else is going on.
Still doing some mobile app testing.
You might see some stuff on that.
I wanted to talk about some of my LinkedIn posts.
This one is on caffeine or what I'll call on ExpressO, so there's an app application out
there called like mouse jiggler, I don't know if you ever heard of it, so this mouse jiggler
app will every 59 seconds it'll press like the function 21 key or something like that.
The cool thing about it is that the theory is that it'll keep your computer alive and
jiggle your mouse, right?
The last version I saw of it was quite obnoxious.
It would substantially jiggle your mouse at least relative location and didn't move it
to the center of the screen or anything like that.
But it would jiggle your mouse like an unreasonable amount, like there's no reason to have the
mouse jiggle that much.
It only needs to move one pixel and back to the same direction.
So that was kind of interesting.
So I ran into a program called caffeine.
This caffeine program will essentially do the same thing as, like I said, it'll press
like the function 22 button every 59 seconds after and will keep the computer from going
to sleep.
That's kind of better than mouse jiggler.
What I wanted was a script to automatically keep me logged in to web pages.
So I looked to auto hotkey for this.
Now auto hotkey has a thing that they can do where you can, in the background, send
keys to a window that's not activated.
So I said, cool.
I can send, like, control shift to all the window titles and all the internet titles,
all the internet backgrounds and refresh my page and keep myself logged in.
What I found was that it doesn't appear to even work with those, maybe it's a security
feature or whatever.
But so what I ended up having to do was actually activate each window title within the whole
environment and then control, press control, shoot me, control f5 on each one.
So that's kind of cool.
It's actually surprisingly not that useful.
It actually out of the, you know, I want to say out of the seven or eight, nine, ten websites
I tested three of them actually, it did not work for almost like you had to post something
to the website to keep it, to keep it still active.
So I've thought about some techniques, maybe some kind of browser plugin and I referenced
those in the link for LinkedIn posts.
But I've thought about some kind of browser shenanigans where it just arbitrarily posts
data to the server to keep you alive with the current credentials, but that gets cookies
involved and not really what I'm mess with, other people's cookies.
So there might be a way to do it through, through auto high keys somehow to send a post
request on a page that you're currently on, maybe through some shenanigans.
But anyways, that's for that.
Let's see.
The next one was some of my system D scripts.
So if you guys haven't poked with system D, better jump on the train.
I have seen some implementations of system D. I think what you're supposed to do is create
a script that points to another script.
So create a system D service, that system D service points to a script and then that
script actually does the stuff that you want to do.
Now what I ended up doing was you can double escape basically environment variables and
things like that.
And I think it's kind of not really kosher to do this, but I essentially escape all my
scripting inside of this system service.
So all I have to do is modify the service.
So instead of having to modify two scripts when I want to update my services, I only have
to update the service.
And I can say, okay, well, I want the service to change.
And I also want the script that actually executes when the service just changes inside
of there.
So I have an all in one script.
And I've got some links on the system D article on LinkedIn post for that one.
Now I have seen this used in other places, system D scripts and like bass scripting inside
a system D.
So it's been done before and it's not super uncommon.
But I would imagine that's not the kosher way to do it.
But I have some examples that work for me that start up all my services and it's all in
there and all in one file.
You don't have to worry about doing that system D is actually really cool.
If you're coming from a Windows environment, it's a bit like having the resource monitor
for Windows 10 and up or whatever it is.
It's a bit like the resource monitor.
So you can actually get it to cool.
Do all kinds of fun stuff where you can look at the logging, you can tailor the logging
out.
It's almost like an event manager slash system recovery thing or system resources thing.
It's also similar to like for Linux, Linux environment, combination of like H top and
IO top.
So you can really do some really cool stuff with it.
I just don't have that need.
I don't have the need to like, you know, partition out, part dry space and CPU cycles and
RAM to services, right, I just give everything 100%.
So once you get on the system D bandwagon and these scripts will help you, that won't
be too hard of a thing to worry about.
I think I've already talked about my pirate naval action thing.
I did a naval action script without a hockey that sails this shit for you.
I'm pretty sure I did one on that.
If I haven't, I might do a more whole episode on that one.
You play YouTube and background.
So if you have a YouTube or Android device and you're trying to play YouTube stuff and
you turn your phone off, here's some other methods to get that across to do that.
If you do not have root, the only way I know of is to actually have a program that keeps
the, that kind of puts a picture in a picture basically for iOS or Android, I think 6162
and up or 717 up, that basically does a picture in a picture and has YouTube playing inside
of that picture.
And then you can, it's an overlay.
So that way the video is still playing, it's still on the foreground, but it's not actually
in the foreground, it's playing in the background.
It's kind of chinky.
You can't actually turn the screen off in some cases, in most cases.
There was another one called pipes, new pipes, and that's part of the whole, the new pipes
were actually shitty.
New pipes is actually a replacement for the YouTube, the normal YouTube player.
And if you can get a hold of removing the normal YouTube player and just install, install
a new pipe, it's a pretty different experience, especially with some ad-walking and things
like that in place.
The foolproof way around all this is to install, remove YouTube app and install YouTube
vans.
Now YouTube vans is a root-based thing that comes with just the root tool, whatever, it's
a replacement of X, X mod type of thing.
So it replaces the YouTube app.
I think it basically hooks the YouTube app, pulls out, it's a replacement for the YouTube
app, pulls out all the ads and stuff, pulls out the ability to stop the playback when
you turn the phone off.
And essentially makes it like the YouTube player, YouTube red player.
So that's pretty cool.
Oh, see.
My mass active directory unlocks script, and that's pretty much it.
Anyways, let's check out my LinkedIn, I'll put the links in there for this stuff, and
I hope I might be able to do an episode on the parallax stuff once I've had some time
to do a few other projects, but it's something I'm interested in and something I'm keeping
in and out for, I'm getting into drawing a little bit and doing art on whether it's
acape, and I might do some trials, tribulations there too.
Cool.
Have a good one.
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