Glasto Countdown

mikeb · May 1, 2009

Following the "comments were made, a fence was taken, a camel suffered horribly with acute spinal trauma, a mass ejection of toys from a pram occurred and then the Glasto countdown timer subsequently went AWOL" incident, part of my penance as well as putting the webpage back up was to produce an appropriate desktop page as well:

So, as well as the shiny new(ish) common or garden webpage HERE which is usually available [Martini] any time, any place, anywhere [/Martini] there is now also the shinier and even newer "now with added piccy" desktop version available. If you fancy a rather jolly nice desktop something similar to the example screen grabs below coming to a PC near you then this is what you need to do:

( 1 ) Decide which ONE of the desktops you would like according to your screen size, grab a copy of the ZIP file and unzip the contents to somewhere convenient on your PC. If your screen size is something different cos you have a swish LCD widescreen jobbie or whatever rather than just a cr@ppy old 14/15" CRT like me then let me know and I can probably resize and/or crop the piccy to the right size for you and add it to the options available for anyone else who might also want it. It may take a day or so as I have way too much other stuff going on at the mo.

( 2 ) No matter what your screen size might be, if you want to use a different piccy altogether then that's no problemo. Just grab a copy of the PLAIN BACKGROUND version then bung any appropriate sized piccy named "background.jpg" with the unzipped files and voila ... your piccy will appear as if by magic instead of the plain background. The piccy really needs to be the exactly same size in pixels as your screen but it can be bigger if you aren't able to crop it to be the right size. If your piccy is wider than the screen, the right hand side will get cropped off. If it's taller then the bottom will get cropped off. However, if it's smaller then it all gets very messy because the piccy gets tiled to fill the screen and it will probably look very cr@p.

( 3 ) You can now quite simply set the unzipped "Glasto 2009 desktop countdown.htm" as your desktop using the Display applet in Control Panel and arrange your Task Bar and Desktop Icons to be as you want them. This works just fine on WinXP with no problems at all. I think it should also work on Win98/ME providing that you have Active Desktop enabled although I haven't actually tried it as Ye Olde PC can't really cope with anything too complicated. Sadly I don't think you can still do this on Vista unfortunately although maybe someone else knows a different way of achieving the same kinda thing and can help.

( 4 ) If you don't know how to set a webpage as your desktop then here is a (hopefully correct) quicky guide for WinXP:

( a ) Select CONTROL PANEL from the SETTINGS option on START MENU

( b ) Double click on the DISPLAY applet when CONTROL PANEL appears

( c ) Click on the DESKTOP tab and then the CUSTOMISE DESKTOP button

( d ) Click on the WEB tab and then the NEW button

( e ) BROWSE to the unzipped files and select "......countdown.htm"

( f ) Keep clicking OK until the Display applet closes.

( g ) A small resizable window should now have opened on your desktop

( h ) Hover mouse in the top left corner until the control bar appears

( i ) Click the DOWN ARROW and select COVER DESKTOP [##] from the options

( j ) Enjoy your shiny new desktop with Glasto piccy and countdown !

[##] If you select SPLIT DESKTOP rather than COVER DESKTOP then you can easily use one of the 'normal' sized desktops on a widescreen display if you want to. For example, if your screen is is say 1066x600 then use the 800x600full version and select SPLIT DESKTOP. The counter will appear on the right-hand side of your screen with your standard desktop on the left-hand side. All you need to do then is tweak the width of the counter window by dragging the left-hand side border with the mouse until the horizontal scroll bar just disappears.

( 5 ) If you add a background piccy or change it at any time after setting the countdown page as your desktop, you will probably need to go back to the standard desktop and then select the webpage desktop again to ensure that the background is updated. I don't think "synchronise" actually works with local files. It's just another Windoze feature I guess

( 6 ) And talking of Windoze features, I seem to have had to put in a bit of a bodge to centre the page on the screen. It shouldn't have been necessary as the page should centre automatically just like it does in any old browser so I think it must be a Windoze feature to offset it slightly when used on the desktop ! I guess it uses the same display mechanism as IE does but as the desktop doesn't have a vertical scroll bar like IE always does, the page ends up offset slightly to the left as though it's been positioned for IE rather than the desktop. This was with XP/IE6 and it may well be offset slightly the other way or something else equally stupid if you have IE7 installed Let me know if anything looks odd and I'll see what I can do.

The same basic piccy is used in all cases so there's absolutely no need to DL all of them just the ONE that you actually want ! The piccy isn't very good either I'm afraid as it was only a taken with a very cr@ppy low resolution camera but it's the best I have lying around. If anyone has a similar but much higher resolution/quality piccy they wouldn't mind being used instead then please bung up a link or something and I'll update the ZIP files ASAP with appropriate sized versions of a better piccy. These are the variations that I've done so far:

Plain background suitable for any size screen and/or for custom piccy

Grab ZIP file from HERE to get something like this depending on your actual screen size:

Or featuring absolutely any piccy you would like to use instead of just a simple plain background. Just add your piccy (which must be the right size for your screen and be named "background.jpg") to the same directory/folder as the "glasto 2009 desktop countdown.htm" file.

Piccy background for 800x600 screen