Daniel Hruska Are you bored with your wallpaper? Do you like as much information as possible on your desktop? GeekTool is the right choice for you, but don't expect any friendly user interface. This utility doesn't get its name for nothing.
The basic principle is adding so-called geeklets to the desktop. Geeklets can be in the form of a file (or display the contents of a file or .log file), an image or a shell, acting as if they were part of the wallpaper. If you change wallpapers often, you don't have to worry about constantly moving geeklets. With a little effort, groups of them can be created by individual wallpapers, and you can have any number of these groups active at once. Each geeklet can be assigned to any number of groups.
You can add a geeklet by dragging the cursor on the desktop. After pressing "... " to the left of the field Command you must modify the relevant command, script, enter the path or URL to the script. For inspiration on what the command can be used for, look at the following image.
I'll start with the simplest - the date. I used a total of three geeklets with the following commands.
date +%d – day date +%B – month date +%A – day of the week
A complete list of all data specifiers can be found at Wikipedia (English only).
I will add one more example for a date of the form "Monday January 1, 2011, 12:34:56". Individual specifiers must be separated by text strings that are delimited by quotation marks. Everything between the quotes is displayed as plain text. For all geeklets with time, be sure to enter their refresh time. In window Properties of the given geeklet so search for the item Refresh time.
date +%A" "%e". "%B" "%Y", "%T
Now let's move on to the weather. Again you just need to insert the commands, again I used three geeklets.
curl http://gtwthr.com/EZXX0009/temp_c curl http://gtwthr.com/EZXX0009/flike curl http://gtwthr.com/EZXX0009/cond
The data is downloaded from the website GtWthr. After the address and slash is the area code, which you can find out by entering the name of the residence on the listed pages. If there is no code for your municipality, try the nearest big cities. For the next slash, what remains to be added is what the given geeklet should display. A complete list of these "tags" can be found again on GtWthr. To item Refresh time enter 3600 or one hour. For a shorter period of time, you may be blocked from accessing GtWthr for some time.
The last two geeklets show the currently playing song in iTunes. Here I used a script I found in geeklet gallery. I modified this script a bit to my liking so that I could have the artist and album in a different geeklet than the song title (below).
#---iTUNES | LOCAL CURRENT TRACK--- DATA=$(osascript -e 'tell application "System Events" set myList to (name of every process) end tell if myList contains "iTunes" then tell application "iTunes" if player state is stopped then set output to "Stopped" else set trackname to name of current track set artistname to artist of current track set albumname to album of current track set track_playlist to name of current playlist set track_source to (get name of container of container of current track) set output to trackname end if end tell else set output to "iTunes not running" end if') echo $DATA | awk -F new_line '{print $1}' echo $DATA | awk -F new_line '{print $2}'
Replace line by line in geeklet to display artist and album
set output to artistname & " - " & albumname
You can find a lot of other geeklets in the mentioned gallery. Some of them also contain images that serve as a background for the text. It looks really effective. Download, edit, try. There are no limits to imagination.
GeekTool – free (Mac App Store)
…very nice wallpaper, where can I find it please? Thank you
Here:
http://interfacelift.com/wallpaper/details/2597/quiet_time.html
In general, there are really beautiful wallpapers on that website. One of the best resources.
Here is an interesting animated wallpaper.
http://www.xericdesign.com/earthdesk.php