Geektool free download, and many more programs. GeekTool is a great way to display the results of little scripts on your desktop. Using ANSI color codes can make those scripts even more useful. You can also change the status of the status button from “success” to “failure” depending on your script’s exit code. Command-line mail on OS X: re-alpine and Geektool. Would you rather have your boring desktop space filled with useful system information or family photos? If your desktop is looking a little boring you can ad.
In this week’s video, I look at GeekTool, a free system utility that lets you display images, text files, and the output of Unix commands on your desktop (or floating above other windows).
Download Macworld Video #106
• Format: MPEG-4/H.264
• Resolution: 480 x 272 (iPhone & iPod compatible)
• Size: 13.3MB
• Length: 7 minutes
In the course of the video, I reference a collection of sites where you can find more powerful examples of what you can do with GeekTool. These include:
- Hints that mention GeekTool on macosxhints.com.
- Ultimate GeekTool Setup on Keynote 2 Keynote.
- GeekTool and bash one liners on Mac Geekery.
- Geek to Live: Monitor your Mac and more with GeekTool on Lifehacker.
- Mega Roundup of GeekTool Scripts on Francesco Mugnai’s blog (which contains links to many other sites).
- In the video, I show one GeekTool entry that displays my external IP address, which can be useful if you’re trying to debug a network connectivity problem. The Unix source for that entry can be found buried in this hint on Mac OS X Hints. To save you the digging, though, here’s the command:
curl --silent http://checkip.dyndns.org | awk '{print $6}' | cut -f 1 -d '<'. Just enter that as the Unix command, and you should see your external IP address in GeekTool.
Geektool Scripts
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