I promised I would write about this earlier. I use my GeekTool to see the time from across the room, check the calendar, see what the weather’s like outside when I wake up, monitor my bandwidth, check the latest twitter message, and see if I have any unread emails in my inbox.

iTunes controller

This is a custom BowTie theme I made after modifying one of the default themes. I called it Chris because I didn’t ever plan on releasing it. I have since finished it, and you can grab it here.

Time

There are just normal date commands:

• Time: date “+%l:%M:%S %p”
• Date: date +%A; date “+%B %d, %Y”

Calendar

The day header is just static text. The actual calendar is this command:

• Calendar: cal | grep -v “[a-zA-Z*] [0-9]” | grep -v “Su”

Weather

This geeklet uses a php file to grab the image off of Yahoo’s weather site. I used the script found here to do this.

• Temperature: curl –silent “http://xml.weather.yahoo.com/forecastrss?p=46750″ | 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>//’

Network

This section is to see my IP addresses for both my local and school networks. Here at college, I have to stay under a daily upload and download limit, so I load in my current daily up/down stats off of DD-WRT on my router.

• IP Addresses: bash script
• Bandwidth: curl -s http://root:admin@192.168.1.1/ttgraph.cgi?$(date +”%m-20%y” | sed “s/^[0]//”) | grep -E $(date “+d%d” | sed -e “s/^d[0]/d/” -e “s/$/”/” -e “s/^/”/”) | awk ‘ { dl = $8;ul = $12; printf(“Router DL: %d MBnRouter UL: %u MBn”, dl, ul); }’

Twitter

Update: Due to Twitter no longer allowing simple authentication, this method of retrieving tweets no longer works. If someone is able to come up with a way of doing this using the Terminal/GeekTool, please let me know!

This is another bash script. Make sure you set your own username and password. Here ya go.

Gmail

Yay, another bash script!. Be sure you put in your own account details.

Background

People were asking for the Photoshop file of the graphic I used on the bar behind the geeklets. Download them here!

And that’s it! Let me know if you have any questions about it in the Comments below.