The virtual one that is. Especially for Ann - she wants to know about the weather. Along the bottom you see four active desktop items. They all come from the Met Office web site. (In case you are new to blogger you can click on the picture to display a larger version)
How to create them?
The slow, methodical, "let's understand what we are doing" way:
Right click on your desktop, choose Properties/desktop/customize desktop/web then New.
Create new desktop items with the following URLs:
http://www.meto.gov.uk/datafiles/flat3ani.gif, http://www.meto.gov.uk/datafiles/composite2.gif, http://www.metoffice.com/satpics/latest_uk_vis.jpg,
http://www.meto.gov.uk/satpics/latest_vis.jpg
The quick and cheap way:
Right click on a link above and "open in new window". Right click on the picture that appears. Choose "Set as desktop item". Bingo! Note: you can do this with any picture from any web page.
When you have gone through all those you will find four small windows on your deskop. That is they are on your desktop, but are behind all the icons and other things. Move the mouse over one of the windows, near its top edge, and a ghostly title bar appears - use it to drag the little window somewhere convenient. Move the mouse to an edge of the little window and resize it to your desires.
Of course that tiny little window is not a lot of use so move the mouse near its top edge again and see four icons, the down arrow at the left edge and three others at the right hand side of the title bar:
Counting from the left number two is best - it covers your desktop with the picture. Number one gives you a list of options - "make available offline" is good, as is "Synchronize" (Number three will seriously mess your desktop as it pushes all the icons around.)When you cover the desktop like this you can get it back by moving the mouse to the top right hand side of the screen where you will see the little icons appear again. Choose the third from the right to shrink it back to the small window. You will then see your normal desktop background picture again. (You can see my background picture described here!)
The Met Office satellite pictures are updated every hour. You can either set a schedule to refresh them automatically (number one icon, synchronize/setup/scheduled) or just right click anywhere on your desktop and select "Refresh" when you want to see the latest.
Read more about active desktops at Microsoft.
3 comments:
Thanks your instructions which very useful!!!
In case you wondered - the UK Met Office ahve reworked their web site so these picture links do not work any more. I shall look around and see if I can find alternatives.
Now on my desktop I have http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/uk/surface_pressure.html#view which is a whole page rather than just a picture. Size it as convenient and then use the scroll bars to bring the part of the map you want to the centre.
It is a much better pressure animation and you can jump to 12 hourly forecasts one-by-one rather than having them flash by.
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