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Geektool vs4/2/2023 ![]() ![]() GeekTool is a PrefPane (Runs in System Preferences) and allows three types of outputs to be embedded in your desktop. For example, you could use your screensaver to run in the background, a picture of your pet, or something pretty amazing for us geeks called GeekTool. GeekTool went up on the Mac App Store on August 21, which explains why my various GeekTool posts have seen a jump in traffic.There are many different things that you can do with a Mac OS X desktop. I’ve been using NerdTool since I saw this Brett Terpstra post several months ago. I had to abandon it for a while on my MacBook Air when I upgraded to OS X 10.7, but I’m running it again now that Mutable Code has made it Lion-compatible. Based on a short test, I’ll keep using NerdTool, mainly because of this: Since GeekTool is free, and Brett seems to have gone back to it, I figured I’d run the two programs head-to-head to see how they compare. I suppose I shouldn’t be concerned about a hundred megabytes or so, but I’ve had trouble with GeekTool eating up memory in the past and just don’t want to worry about that again. For reference, both Tools were running my old Date and Time scripts and this set of Spotify scripts I wrote a couple of months ago.Īnother point in NerdTool’s favor is its support for shadowed text. The Finder uses shadowed text for files on the Desktop and for good reason-it definitely makes the text easier to read. GeekTool doesn’t have a checkbox to shadow the text, although I’ve found that you can edit an exported Geeklet file (it’s just a plist) and turn on shadowing. Unfortunately, GeekTool’s shadowing looks like shit with smaller fonts: Just change that false to a true and reimport the file to get shadowing. The NerdTool screenshot is on the top and the GeekTool is on the bottom. I use this command: lynx -dump -width 120 | /Users/lloncosky/library/scripts/lee/weathergeekA Nobody wants to see the harsh shadowing that GeekTool uses.I use lynx dump and WU to get instant weather updated every six seconds. # I want the temperature line to print on the bottom to make it # Keep only certain lines for the current = grep /^ +(Temperature|Wind|Humidity|Conditions|Updated|Observed|Pressure)/, Erase the leading spaces and parenthetical values. # second line, so exchange it with the last line. # Sometimes there's a windchill line, and sometimes there isn't. # Add a blank line to the front of the array if there isn't. # Print the lines of interest in the order I want. Print join "", can change the script to get the facts you want. I have geektool display 8 lines in the bottom left of my desktop. I always have an accurate outdoor temp and wind direction. It has been a good run but the weather underground printing Web site seems to have died. When it happened I figured I would just transition my weather scripts over to their official xml api. Long story short, I am now using python and weather undergrounds xml api to get my weather into geektool, nerdtool. It is not as good because they do not have cool stuff like conditions, sunset or lunar stuff in their xml data. # start with first variable and turn into type string and then strip the xml Wu_pressure = dom.getElementsByTagName('pressure_in') Wu_wind = dom.getElementsByTagName('wind_string') Wu_temp = dom.getElementsByTagName('temperature_string') Wu_time = dom.getElementsByTagName('observation_time') # grab the xml elements that we want to use and put into variables # grab the location which is a child element of current_observation and put into variable # finally pass the current closest pws station to wu_url and then to url to get the current observation api Wu_idpws = domarea.getElementsByTagName('id') # will always be the first 'id' element that is run across, the sequence goes # parse the url with minidom looking in this order for the closest pws which #first we need to select the closest online pws station from the location area api # get the url for my local station and put it in variable 'url' # cobbled together by Lee Loncosky 2009 from readings on the web Maybe someone else can shed more lite on how they scrape the WU mobile site. Wu_location = wu_location.replace("'","") Only needed on location and pressure_string # replace the crazy charaters with white space. You will have to change the following line to reflect your zipcode. If not please modify to suit your needs.Īll the standard stuff applies. ![]()
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