Bitcoin price ticker in Gnome desktop

Linux is very extensible. You can change almost anything in the system. Are you using the gnome desktop and interested in crypto?

Why Gnome? Gnome is the default desktop on Ubuntu, Debian, OpenSUSE and others.

You can create a gnome extension with argos, using Python. You can create a price ticket for bitcoin. But with a price ticker, it needs to update automatically.

How do you do that?

You can name the file like this:

NAME.POSITION.TIME.EXTENSION 

For instance

hello.1r.60s.py 

Argos will rerun the plugin every 60 seconds.

Get price

To get the price, you can use the requests module and parse JSON data. There are many APIs available for the bitcoin price like kraken, bitstamp and others. We'll use coinmarketcap

#!/usr/bin/env python import re from gi.repository import Gio from datetime import datetime import time import json import requests def coin(): data = requests.get('https://api.coinmarketcap.com/v1/ticker/bitcoin/') price = data.json()[0]['price_usd'] btc_price = float(("{0:.2f}").format(float(price))) return btc_price usd = float(coin()) lastupdate = datetime.now().strftime('%H:%M:%S') #print("Bitcoin $" + str(usd) + " (" + str(lastupdate) + ") | n #iconName=invest-applet") print("Bitcoin $" + str(usd) + " | iconName=invest-applet") print("---") #print("Kraken: $" + str(usd) + " | iconName=gedit bash=gedit terminal=false") print("---") 

Now save it as bitcoin.1r.60s.py and it will update the price every 60 seconds. There's a lastupdate variable in the code which you can use, or fork it to create your own clock :P

Resources:

• Gnome argos plugin
• Argos documentation
• Learn Python programming