Ever since we started the Flickr Desktop Pool, I’ve marvelled at the cool desktops which generally involve some tooling around with GeekTool. It’s something that brings in such a lot of dynamics to your desktop while keeping a low overhead, and allowing you to customise it to the last pixel.
Here’s a little screencast I’ve put together, to get you started on GeekTool. It’s a really simple tool, which just takes a little time and understanding to get used to.
First, watch this little video screencast (download link at bottom or subscribe to podcast) on how to setup GeekTool, and then proceed on to find some interesting GeekTool scripts you can use. You can start with some scripts I’ve collected below. It’s by no means exhaustive.
Time:
"date +"%I:%M %p" (which results in 11:30 pm)
If you want a 24 hour clock (e.g. 03:00 a.m.) then replace %I with %H. If you want to add seconds there, add %S to the mix. Remember to change the refresh rate to every 1 second if you’re adding seconds.
Date:
"date +"%A %d %b" (which results in Monday 12 June)
World Clock:
TZ=NewZealand/GMT-13 date +"Wellington:%l:%M %p on %d %B"
Just change the names and GMT value to get the required clock.
Uptime:
uptime | awk '{sub(":", "h ", $3); sub(",", "min", $3); print "Time since last system boot: " $3}'
(results in 14h 23min)
RSS feed
Download the news.sh file from here, copy it to your home folder (or wherever). Then open it in a plaintext editor and change the RSS feed to whatever you choose. Then in the terminal, enter “sudo chmod u+x ~myhomefolder/news.sh”. Once that is done, add “sh ~myhomefolder/news.sh -4” to your shell script. As demoed in the screencast.
Using GeekTool to add an xkcd comic on your desktop.
S.M.A.R.T status alongside your hard drives (via Bioneutral)
diskutil info disk0s2 | grep Verified > /dev/null
Replace ‘disk0s2’ with the disk ID of choice. You can find the disk ID in system profiler. Once you’ve added that, go to the last tab “Icon”. Select “Show icon” and click on default. That will place a little green blip whenever that disk is fine. You can then place the green blip next to your hard drives on the desktop, to tell you that everything is A OK. Doesn’t work on external drives though.
Add a title
If all you need to do is add a title or bit of text on your desktop, simply type in
echo "my title"
Adding a semicolon (;) at the end will break the line.
Memory Hoggers
top -orsize -FR -l1 | grep % | grep -v Load | grep -v COMMAND | cut -c 7-8,64-69
Change the number 8 to the number of processes you want displayed.
CPU Usage:
CPU -
echo CPU usage
top -l 1| awk '/CPU usage/ {print $8, $9}'
top -l 1| awk '/CPU usage/ {print $10, $11}'
top -l 1| awk '/CPU usage/ {print $12, $13}'
Memory Usage:
top -l 1 | awk '/PhysMem/ {print "Used: " $8 " Free: " $10}'
Adding iTunes data on your desktop is best done with Bowtie. There’s loads of themes for that, so you don’t have to do any of the work.
If you’ve got some cools scripts up your sleeve, do share them in the comments.
[Flickr desktop pictured above by A. Till]
