SO I just found the coolest thing on a mac since the easy share desktop feature in iChat. It’s called GeekTools, and it’s geeky. The image to the left is my desktop at work (2nd monitor). The cool thing is you can put in little scripts that go and do things, like grab the date and time and pretty much any text from the internet. I’m grabbing the current weather and a weather image. This keeps my basic needful info up to date and plastered as if it was my desktop so there aren’t any stupid clickable widgets. Plus since they are all little scripts who’s refresh rate you can control it takes very little CPU power compared to widget/dashboard systems. I highly recommend pimping out your mac with geektools. Here’s how:
- Grab a cool desktop image
- Download and install GeekTools 3.0
- Fill in all the geeklets you want & make em pretty
For the nitty gritty of how I accomplished the image above, hit the more link.
Ok so first I grabbed this image off of socwall.com then I downloaded and installed GeekTools 3.0 RC3. It installs a pref pane in your control panel. Going to that pref pane gives you the option to create a file geeklet, image geeklet, or shell geeklet. All but one of mine are shell geeklets. Click on shell and drag a new one onto your desktop.
A dark properties box then fills in. You can name it, resize it, and a bunch of other stuff. About the middle where it says command is the cool part. There you can run any terminal command you want. Enter date +%A to get the day of the week. Then under style click set font and color. Use the dropper/magnifying glass to pick colors from your desktop image. I’m using helvetica neue ultralight and light. Then drag it around and make the whole thing look good. Repeat.
To keep GeekTool entries from hogging unnecessary system resources, try to be as conservative as possible with each entry’s refresh rate. By default, shell commands refresh every 10 seconds. If you need to run your script only once an hour, set Refresh to 3600, one day is 84,600 secs, etc.
You can add a bajumble of info. Google “geektool shell commands” or search for geektools in flickr to get some inspiration from what other people have done.
Here are some great resources:
You can also export your geeklets and quickly import them to another computer… so here’s mine (geeklets.zip). if you install geektools then double click on one of these and it will pop up on your desktop.
*Note for weather image, there are two geeklets, one that grabs the image and puts it in your user dir, and another geeklet that is an image geeklet that points to that image. On the image geeklet you’ll have to replace my username with yours and on the current conditions you’ll need to put in your zip code.
My work laptop
Send me a screenshot of what you do with it, while writing this I thought of more stuff useful stuff I could put up. There are so many possibilities!