Stoic Quote — Cinnamon Desklet

A Linux Mint Cinnamon desklet that displays a daily Stoic quote drawn from seven philosophers across the school's full history:

Features

• 63 curated quotes across seven authors (Zeno, Cleanthes, Chrysippus, Epictetus, Musonius Rufus, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca), with source attribution
• Deterministic daily rotation — the same quote is shown to all users on a given date (hash of YYYY-MM-DD mod corpus size); it does not change if Cinnamon restarts
• Midnight auto-refresh — switches to the next day's quote at local midnight via a Mainloop timer
• Manual refresh button — circular arrow in the corner reloads quotes.json and re-renders
• Live settings — width, source visibility, refresh mode, and button toggle all apply without a restart

Settings

Local Installation

1. Copy the files

mkdir -p ~/.local/share/cinnamon/desklets/stoic-quote@orion
cp -r ~/stoic-quote@orion/* ~/.local/share/cinnamon/desklets/stoic-quote@orion/

2. (Optional) Generate a PNG icon from the included SVG

If you have rsvg-convert (from librsvg2-bin):

rsvg-convert -w 48 -h 48 \
  ~/.local/share/cinnamon/desklets/stoic-quote@orion/icon.svg \
  -o ~/.local/share/cinnamon/desklets/stoic-quote@orion/icon.png

Or with ImageMagick:

convert -background none -resize 48x48 \
  ~/.local/share/cinnamon/desklets/stoic-quote@orion/icon.svg \
  ~/.local/share/cinnamon/desklets/stoic-quote@orion/icon.png

3. Add the desklet to your desktop

• Right-click the desktop → Desklets
• Find Stoic Quote in the list and click + to add it

Reloading after edits

After editing files (e.g., updating quotes.json), reload without a full logout:

• Right-click desktop → Troubleshoot → Restart Cinnamon
• Or from a terminal: nohup cinnamon --replace > /dev/null 2>&1 &
• Or open Looking Glass (Alt+F2, type lg, Enter) and run: imports.ui.main.loadTheme() or remove and re-add the desklet

Adding / editing quotes

quotes.json is a plain JSON array. Each entry:

{
  "text":   "Quote text here.",
  "author": "Author Name",
  "source": "Work Title, Book/Letter N"
}

The desklet picks today's quote as djb2_hash("YYYY-MM-DD") % len(quotes). Adding quotes at the end shifts all future dates; inserting in the middle shifts more. If you want stable date-to-quote mapping, only append.

Submitting to Cinnamon Spices

1. Fork linuxmint/cinnamon-spices-desklets
2. Copy the stoic-quote@orion/ folder into the repo root
3. Add a screenshot.png (1920×1080 or a cropped portion showing the desklet)
4. Ensure icon.png is 48×48 (convert from icon.svg above)
5. Open a pull request — the Spices team reviews and merges

Debug output

All log lines are prefixed [stoic-quote] and visible in Looking Glass (Alt+F2 → lg → Log tab).

License

Public domain / CC0. Quote texts are historical works in the public domain.