randota

randota = randomize twitter avatar = randomize your Twitter avatar from the commandline, and automate it using cron.

Idea1 - Glitched avatar

I wanted a way to randomly change my Twitter avatar, to a randomly 'glitched' out version, on a set time (currently hourly), so I created glitchedavatar.py. This method requires that you manually glitch the images you want, drop them in a directory, create a new Twitter App to get permissions to change your avatar, then install and use Tweepy to do the heavy lifting, all called by cron.

Idea2 - thispersondoesnotexist avatar

I wanted a way to update an avatar with a random one, but I took it a step further by having it update it with an image of a person that doesn't exist. The new script getthisperson.py follows much of the same logic of glitchedavatar.py, but this time it pulls a user from This Person Does not Exist. This is a project that uses machine Learning with neural and evolutionary computing to generate images of real looking people, that actually do not exist. See the site, or arXiv:1912.04958v2 [cs.CV] for more information, it's really facinating. To use this script, follow the same steps below, skipping the "Glitch your avatar" section.

Idea3 - moonphase icon in profile description

This commited code changes the user's description to an icon representing the current moon phase. I'd like to expand on this to update the username to the name of the phase of the mooon. As with the last script, to use this, skip the "Glitch your avatar" section - and remind me to redo this README.md to account for all the different scripts soon!

Steps

Get the code

Clone the git repo and start to configure your environment

git clone https://github.com/philcryer/randota.git
cd randota
rm -rf images/glitched/*
cp config.json.dist config.json

Install requirements

For Debian GNU/Linux, or any Ubuntu derivatives:

sudo apt install python3-pip
python3 -m pip install -r requirements.txt

For Arch Linux, or derivatives:

sudo pacman -S python-pip
python3 -m pip install -r requirements.txt

Create a Twitter app

The first step you should take is to create a new Twitter App so you can get permissions to update your user's avatar. While there are many howtos out there, this one is complete and should get you going; How to create a Twitter application

Once you get to "8. Make a note of your OAuth Settings", be sure and save the Consumer Key, Consumer secret, Access token and Access token secret, defining each of the values in your newly created config.json file

Glitch your avatar

To glitch your avatar, play on here, otherwise if you just want to use standard avatars and rotate between them, jump to the next section

1. save your avatar locally
2. hit jpg-glitch, upload your avatar, glitch it as much as you want, or just choose the 'random' option
3. save the file into a directory images/glitched
4. repeat as many times as you'd like to increase your randomness

Run it

To run glitchedavatar.py:

python3 glitchedavatar.py

or, to run getthisperson.py:

python3 getthisperson.py

View the hilarity or disappointment at twitter.com/<your_username>

Automate it

Add a new line to your user's crontab, fill out the path to where your code is

To automate glitchedavatar.py:

0 * * * *    cd ${HOME}/code/randota; python3 glitchedavatar.py >/dev/null 2>&1

or, to automate getthisperson.py:

0 * * * *    cd ${HOME}/code/randota; python3 getthisperson.py >/dev/null 2>&1

License

Modified BSD License

thanks