A buddy of mine downloaded and installed GeekTools a couple of days back. I have installed/uninstalled several times for various screwings around. Once Dave installed it, I got to thinking, and Googleing, ‘What can (should) be done with this marvelous tool’. As it happened I also subscribed to Lifehacker (finally) the same day. I also got an email with link to some rather sexy desktop layouts.
But I am getting ahead of myself, a little bit.
I have been working a contract on site (that is to say at my client offices as opposed to mine) and as such I am on my Macbook (Mid 2006). It is a Core Duo 2.0ghz model sporting 2 gigs of ram. If you know your Mac well enough, you are likely to realize this is nice enough laptop, but those numbers right there aren’t getting any bigger. (All I have left is to buy a huge SATA2 harddrive, and it is upgraded as much as possible.) This go me thinking about area where I might be able to trim the fat (reduce my memory overhead, and possible CPU load) especially since once in a while I have to open Photoshop, or Fireworks. (Poor Macbook takes it like a champ, though.)
There are some things I like to have always available; my calendar, my to-do list, some system stats (CPU load, memory usage, and CPU temp, mostly so I know when I need to give my poor overworked Mac a break), Twitter, and my current iTunes track info. This is where GeekTools comes in.
From Lifehacker I discoverd, and installed a shell script called todo.sh and something called Remind. Todo is a command-line-interface to do list. it is quite elegant and simple. Remind is reminder program, that you can out put onto a calendar. Between those two I have all the functionality of iCal, locally anyway. (It s unlikely I will stop using iCal, as I put in it my school, work, and various other schedules so I can propagate my info out to my family, and iPhone.
Next up I needed to get rid of Twitterriffic. There is nothing wrong with it, but it takes up valuable resources, so I found a shell script that pulled from an rss feed. Guess what rss feed I have it polling. (Finding the right Twitter feed was a PITA, but once I did, all was right in the world.)
From there I went on to my system info; Uptime, CPU usage, and RAM usage. All I did there was played with uptime and top (both just run from the shell) and fed the output to awk, changing the formatting, until I got the look I wanted. (Top will disseminate a whole lot of info, but is useful to know, but for this, thank god there is awk.)
Finally there was the matter of iTunes info. GeekTools can handle Applescript as well. So through it I grab the info, format it, and output it all in script. GeekTools just calls the script.
And my current background is a free wallpaper clock from Vladstudio. He is a Russian(?) artist with a great eye.
I like it.