With three screens on my office configuration, I have a lot of workspace to use. Over the holidays, I did some geeking out and configured one of my screens with Geektool. Geektool allows you to display on your desktop various kinds of information. In the picture above, the to-do list on the left, the post-it note, stock quotes, bible quote, webcam picture and the date & weather information are all embedded in the desktop using Geektool. Download Geektool here.

It is a preference pane module that allows you to display the contents of a file (e.g. the Post-It note which is simply a note that exists in Notational Velocity), an image from a webserver (e.g. the webcam image or the weather image) and the most powerful outputs from shell commands (e.g. my Omnifocus to-do list cut off on the left or the extracted Bible quote from Daily-verse.com). Also, don't forget to customize your desktop image to work with the Geektool elements like the old paper and yellow post-it on my school blackboard.

You can find many Geektool scripts (and images of some very tricked out Desktops on the internet). Just Google Geektool! For the Omnifocus Geeklets to embed your overdue and due soon items on the desktop, please click here.

As for the Bible quote, that is a Python Script written by my good friend Nilesh that extracts a daily bible verse from the website daily-verse.com. You need to install Beautiful Soup, which is a Python HTML/XML parser, and it can be found here, http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/ .

The script is:

from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
import urllib2
page = urllib2.urlopen("http://daily-verse.com/")
soup = BeautifulSoup(page)
thequotation = soup.h2.prettify()[12:][:-15]
thesource = soup.h3.prettify()[5:][:-7]
print thequotation + "\n" + "\n" + thesource

I used a Corsiva Hebrew Bold Font 18 points and full justification. Also, you need to remember to force carriage returns in Geektool.

Have fun customizing your desktop! Enjoy!

Tags: Geektool, Mac, Software