The anatomy of a Twitter spammer (aka Twammer, as I’ve discovered… just now…).

Calendar

cal
Refresh: 300s, Font: Monaco
Pretty self-explanitory. It just brings up a calendar of the current month

Time

date '+%I:%M %p'
Refresh: 10s, Font: Helvetica Neue
The date command is pretty flexible. It’s used often in my setup. The format string at the end is fairly basic, too. The ‘+’ just signifies a user-defined format. %I is hours, %M minutes, and %p is the AM/PM designation. I really wanted to find a way to turn the AM/PM on 90°, but I don’t think it’s possible with GeekTool. The single quotes are necessary since there is a space in the format string.

Current Date

date +%d
Refresh: 300s, Font: Helvetica Neue
Again, date command. %d is the current day of the month.

Current Month

date +%B
Refresh: 300s, Font: Helvetica Neue
%B – current month, non-numeric

Day of the Week

date +%A
Refresh 300s, Font: Helvetica Neue
Self explanitory.

Now the fun parts:
Current Weather Conditions

curl --silent "http://xml.weather.yahoo.com/forecastrss?p=USWI0455&u=f" | grep -E '(Current Conditions:|F<BR)' | sed -e 's/Current Conditions://' -e 's/<br \/>//' -e 's/<b>//' -e 's/<\/b>//' -e 's/<BR \/>//' -e 's///' -e 's/<\/description>//'
Refresh: 1800s, Font: Helvetica Neue
That’s a mouth full. Let’s take this one piece by piece.
curl will take a url and dump the server response, most often the raw HTML. The ‘–silent’ flag prevents curl from outputting a progress meter or error messages. The url of Yahoo’s weather page follows in quotes. “CITYDATA” should be replaced with your results when you search for your city/zip on their site.
grep is a command line search utility. We’re basically searching for the part of the XML file that starts with “Current conditions” and ends with “F
sed is basically taking out grep search results and paring it down to just the bit we want: the text of the current conditions.

IP Addresses:

myen0=`ifconfig en0 | grep "inet " | grep -v 127.0.0.1 | awk '{print $2}'`
if [ "$myen0" != "" ]
then
echo "$myen0"
else
echo "INACTIVE"
fi
myen1=`ifconfig en1 | grep "inet " | grep -v 127.0.0.1 | awk '{print $2}'`
if [ "$myen1" != "" ]
then
echo "$myen1"
else
echo "INACTIVE"
fi
wip=`curl --silent http://checkip.dyndns.org | awk '{print $6}' | cut -f 1 -d "<"`
echo "$wip"
Refresh: 60s, Font: Helvetica Neue
Yay full-on scripts! In simple words, this pulls the IP addresses from the ifconfig command for each interface (ethernet: en0, airport: en1). The fun bit comes in with the if-then statements. If no IP address is returned, it outputs “INACTIVE” instead of just a blank space. It just looks a little nicer. The last bit gets our external IP using curl on dyndns.org.
If you’re wondering where the labels are in this code (Ethernet, Wireless, External). They’re in a separate script with echo commands. It was just easier to get the spacing down that way.

Transmit Rate

mytr=`airport -I | awk '/lastTxRate/ {print $2}'`
if [ "$mytr" != "" ]
then
echo "Airport Transmit Rate: $mytr"
fi
Refresh: 5s, Font: Helvetica Neue
For some reason, my Leopard installation has trouble with keeping the transmit rate up. So I monitor it with this command. Now, by default, the airport command is not readily accessible. We make it that way with the following command in Terminal (found here):
sudo ln -s /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/Versions/Current/Resources/airport /usr/sbin/airport
awk is another way of just pulling the info out we need, in this case “lastTxRate.” the print $2 command limits the output to the second ‘word,’ in this case, the transmit rate in Mbps.

Uptime

uptime | awk '{sub(/[0-9]|user\,|users\,|load/, "", $6); sub(/mins,|min,/, "min", $6); sub(/user\,|users\,/, "", $5); sub(",", "min", $5); sub(":", "h ", $5); sub(/[0-9]/, "", $4); sub(/day,/, " day ", $4); sub(/days,/, " days ", $4); sub(/mins,|min,/, "min", $4); sub("hrs,", "h", $4); sub(":", "h ", $3); sub(",", "min", $3); print "Uptime: " $3$4$5$6}'
Refresh: 300s, Font: Helvetica Neue
Okay, this one is sloppy. I’m sure there is a better way to do this, but I just haven’t found it. The code was cobbled together from this forum post and modified to work a little better. But I still get weird output for the first 60 minutes of uptime.
What does this do? uptime displays a few stats, but we’re just interested in the hours, minutes, and days the computer has been up. Not number of users, etc. So this script just outputs and reformats that bit. All the sub commands substitute one bit of text for another. For example, instead of ‘mins’ I just wanted ‘min’, and instead of “3:42″, I wanted it to say “3h 42min.”
If anyone has any suggestions on how to clean this up or how to stop if from displaying the logged in users during the first 60 minutes (eg “15min1″), I’d love to hear it.

Now, my proudest moment:
Current Weather Image

Image URL – PHP script on my server
Refresh: 300s
The interesting bit isn’t in GeekTool, but in the PHP script I wrote:
<?php
$url="http://weather.yahoo.com/forecast/CITYDATA.html"; //Yahoo Weather URL. Sub CITYDATA for your code.

$divStart = "<div class="\"forecast-icon\"";">$strEnd = "'); _background-image/* */: none;"; //HTML after weather image
$start = strpos($file_contents, $divStart) + 50;
$end = strpos($file_contents, $strEnd);
$length = $end-$start;

$imagepath=substr($file_contents, $start , $length); //Pulls path to image
$image=imagecreatefrompng($imagepath); //Pulls image source into PHP
imagealphablending($image, true); //Enable alpha blending (important)
imagesavealpha($image, true); //Applies alpha to image.

header('Content-Type: image/png'); //Identifies itself as a PNG image
imagepng($image); //Outputs image contents
?>
I tried to comment the code as best I can, but basically, it just pulls the raw HTML from Yahoo weather, extracts the image url for current conditions, and spits out that image data as if the script itself were that image. I might be violating some TOS, though, so your mileage may vary.

So that’s my GeekTool setup. There’s even more impressive things that people are doing like pulling Twitter feeds, so I suggest you hit up Google.

UPDATE (2009/04/16): Apparently some people have been having problems with these scripts. Due to the formatting in WordPress, there may be some new line feeds or line wrapping that is preventing the scripts from working properly. And though I’ve been pretty thorough, there may be a place or two where it ate some HTML. In any case, I’m attaching a text file that has all the shell scripts and another text file with the PHP (which should be renamed with the .php extension before using)

For some reason, I decided to upload my current desktop. So here it is, minimal and all!

Details:

• Geektool for text (date, calendar, etc.) on the desktop.
• Adium for messaging.
• Minimal dock (black bkg, no indicators, only currently running apps).
• Spirited Away to auto-hide unused programs.
• Hyperspaces – Spaces on steroids!

Click on the thumbnail to see it full-size with notes in Flickr.

1. Random Wikipedia article title is your band name.
2. Last four words of the last quote of these 10 random quotes is your album name.
3. The third picture on the last seven days page on Flickr is your album cover.

Mine worked out surprisingly well.

Photo credit: Photographer in Alberta.

Inverse Bridge Effect (Also, Rebel Syndrome) — wherein someone does something or makes a choice because everyone else is doing the opposite. Named from the motherly question “if everyone else jumped of a bridge, would you, too?” The inverse being “would you jump of a bridge because everyone else isn’t?”
Examples:

• Refusing to use a Mac just because everyone else seems to be
• The near immediate urge to point out downfalls in what everyone perceives to be a Good Thing™, or conversely, to defend what everyone else is bashing (commonly in message boards)

Indie Band Anomoly — Suddenly developing a dislike for something previously liked once it becomes popular.
Examples:

• Seeking out alternatives to Google just because they’re now No. 1 in search
• Nearly every emo kid ever
• Most social networking sites (“Oh, everyone’s on Facebook, I use such-and-such now!”)
• Indie Rock Pete

UPDATE 3 (03/04/2009): Facebook is updating their home page in the near future, though they don’t say when. I can almost guarantee that FB Duct Tape will no longer work once the new home page goes live.

Have you seen this video on “The 25 things I hate about Facebook?” The important bit is at 2:54…

After seeing that, I thought “It can be done.” So I did it. This is not a Photoshop™. This is now what I see when I log in to Facebook:

How’d I do it? You’ll need the Stylish Firefox extension, and this script I wrote. The huge chunk of characters is the image. That’s the only way I found to get Stylish to load a local image instead of using a server.

Now enjoy your still useless, but now duct-taped sidebar on Facebook..

(I’m fully aware this is just a simple CSS background image, and it’s entirely pointless, but so is Facebook. I just wanted to say “I can duct-tape over that crap in Facebook.”)

UPDATE: Script has been updated to duct tape over the ad-bar, too.

UPDATE 2: Even Julian loves the duct tape:

Dude – hahaha YOU are my hero. That is incredible. Totally sending that to my facebook list.
[...]
–Julian

[Inspired by @pablokorona]