For the past three months or so I have had various pictures of BYU basketball players as my desktop background, but as BYU basketball ended, so too did the backgrounds. I didn't feel like finding any special pictures at the moment so I just opened up the default picture folders that Apple gives you, browsed through some of the pictures (they give you a lot, some cool B&W pics, some weird nature ones, and a couple classic pieces of art). I ended up picking this Japanese looking wave painting called "The Great Wave."
As I enjoyed my new background I began to fantasize of how great it would be to have a truly functional background, one that could display the time or date perhaps, or maybe show weather or have a calendar even. So I began a google search for 'function desktops' or 'live desktops' even 'auto-updating desktop pictures'... and although it took me a bit I was sitting in a boring class, so time wasn't an issue.
Eventually I stumbled upon GeekTool 3.0, and well, it's a tool for geeks! With the program (a simple system preference pannel) you can create "geeklets" that allow you to take auto-updating images, files, or unix-shell commands and paste them on top of your existing desktop image. It's really a great and amazing little tool, and as far as I'm aware it's for mac only, which makes me feel special.
I browsed a website where people had uploaded pictures of what they had done to customize their desktops and also uploaded files and scripts of their geeklets. Some of them were really cool, and eventually I made my own desktop collection:
Now, the most exciting part of this is in the front and center of my desktop, a countdown! This I'm particularly proud of because I had to do a hefty bit of editing to the geeklet I downloaded inorder to get this one to show up just the way I wanted it to. I however did not go in depth enough to program it to read of singular times with singular units (1 hour, instead of 1 hours). And this is why I am pleased to announce that I have precisely 1 weeks, 1 days, and two hours until my last class is over :-)
(Sorry this post is so long, but another new toy of mine is Bowtie, a desktop-level iTunes controller/identifier.)
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