GeekTool rocks!

The first thing I wanted to blog about is a great little Mac tool called GeekTool. It is very aptly named in my opinion.

Basically you can add the output of anything from the command line to your Mac desktop. If you work in a terminal a lot and find your self typing the same command over and over you can just add it to your desktop.

There are lots of things you might want to view, such as memory or CPU usage, uptime or disk space for example. However, with a bit more command line magic you can get the latest content of your favourite blogs, weather forecasts, todo lists or anything really.

Things I have on my desktop:

• Time
  
• Date
  
• My jobs running on the cluster
• Cluster status
• Weather
• Workdays this month, elapsed and remaining
• To Do list, from redmine

I am using GeekTool version2, but I believe that there is a version 3 available here.

The Code:

• Date: date "+%A %eth %B %Y"
• Time: date "+%l:%M%p"
• Jobs: ssh userName@clusterUrl bjobs |grep userName |wc -l |xargs echo "My Jobs Running:"
• Status: ssh userName@clusterUrl bqueues