Emphasis on "Geek", Apparently

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I mentioned last week in Decorating Your Life that I've got a new job, new desk new computer new office new people, and I've been paying more attention with adding some outward signs of Shakespeare.

Today I was looking at my screen saver. I don't usually bother with one, but I'm hooked up to a big monitor so you can see it from across the room. It's a brand new computer without much on it, so I defaulted to the usual floating picture slide show, using pictures from National Geographic.

Until today. Why can't I have Shakespeare images?

I have a Dropbox cloud account where I've collected all my images over the years.  Cartoons, original art, screen shots from my app, various headshots of Mr. Shakespeare, and so on.  The only problem with using that is that it's become a real catch-all for literally all Shakespeare-ish image content, and I have no true idea the extent of what's in there. It would be bad in a new office environment to flash up on the monitor something that could be considered offensive.  Better safe than sorry!

But!  I have a source of almost a thousand images, better known as the First Folio. I don't know about you, but I consider old literature to be very much like art, and I enjoy looking at HD images of book pages, especially the most beautiful book in the world.  I had a bookmark button to one of the searchable sites, because I went there so often to get screenshots and things whenever I needed an original FF reference. At one point I had managed to scrape it and make myself a directory of images, but alas I do not have that directory on this new machine.

Why should that stop me?

The site in question is SCETI. The interface is made to jump right to the work you want to look at, but if you look under the covers a bit you discover that the pages are sequentially numbered (even though the images are not).

Again, why should that stop me? This is my thing. This is what I do all day anyway. Heck, it's practically like work experience.  Keeping the skills sharp.

So I wrote a little scraper to hit that site and pull down 10 random images, which I then use as my screen saver (and, while I'm at it, desktop wallpaper).  There's 900+ pages, but you don't want to be a bad web neighbor and kill people's bandwidth.  Every time I run the script it'll just go grab me 10 more images. It's not like I need them all.  I was just looking for decorations.