Geektool
November 22nd, 2004Since finding geektool (for the second time) a few weeks ago, I’ve come to really love this little app. It sits nicely in the background constantly gathering information, in a very matrix-esk way, quietly displaying it on the desktop. I just wrote my first “from scratch” script after being unable to find an equivalent online anywhere.
Here’s the script:
curl http://slashdot.org/index.rss | grep <title | sed -e ‘s/<title>Slashdot</title>//g’ | sed -e ‘s/<title>Search Slashdot</title>//g’ | sed -e ‘s/<title>//g’ | sed -e ‘s/</title>//g’
If you haven’t guessed it from the liberal use of ‘slashdot’ in the script, it simply pulls the rss feed from slashdot and puts the titles of the current slashdot articles on your desktop, one per line.
Be careful, slashdot has a policy I didn’t know about “You may only load headlines every 30 minutes.” So set your refresh time above 1800 seconds. You have been warned, you will be banned if you don’t follow this rule.
Maybe not the most useful script, but it’s always nice to know you haven’t missed a post. In addition I found the best weather info I could get was from nws.noaa.gov, give them a look.