James Andrews

Halloween this year was pretty “eh”. Rainy and windy, makes for not so many kids out, and a lot of left over candy. My brother being smart sometimes brought it up to the bar with him and got rid of it while drinking with friends. I spent much of the evening doing some fall cleaning. Putting things in truck bed to ready for next weekend’s trip to the transfer station at the old landfill. Moving electronics stuff into a cardboard box so I can bring it to the electronics recycle center. I have a LOT of electronics, and it’s $.25 a pound. Made a lot of headway.

I want to get a machine with a little more power than my itty bitty laptop. Something I can do my photo editing from. I am a Mac user, but I don’t want to shell out $2500 for a power mac. I spent some tie researching on “hackintosh” which is a project for using OS X on non apple hardware. For a fraction of the cost I should be able to get power mac equivalent running OS X. Found a great article the other night that shows you how to prepare an install thumb drive to be an installer of OS X Snow Leopard. I took care of that this morning, and put it in a place I won’t lose it.

Then in talking with a friend he told me about a neat OS X preference pane called Geek Tool. Allows you to display information from a script, image, or a file on your desktop. So you can have your error logs for your web local development web server. With an image you can watch your favorite comic, a security web cam, or even network statistic graphs. The most power comes from scripts. You can have scripts run every so often and the output will get displayed to the screen. You can use any kind of shell script you like, perl, bash, php python, whichever.

There are some great screen caps of what people are doing. A lot of it’s basic like stick the date, time, or calendar on your desktop, or even your to do list.

I’ll be playing a lot with this later this week.