
Posted on 30 October 2009 by Tina Brunner
For the SuperMac design, we decided to go with a cityscape background and used PhotoShop to create an alley with rundown, broken PC’s. And the Mac to the rescue. The tools we used to create this look was PhotoShop (for the design), GeekTool, Magnifique (Titanium), and the Moon Phase II Yahoo Widget.
The fonts used are as follows (they can be found at www.dafont.com):
Amsterdam Graffiti for CPU, Uptime and RAM
Graffonti Atomic Bomb for the Day of Week and Day of Month
Graffonti 3d Drop for the Month and Year
Here are the codes used in GeekTool:
CPU
top -l 2 | awk '/CPU usage/ && NR > 5 {print $12, $13}'
UPTIME
uptime | awk '{print "" $3 " " $4 " " $5 }' | sed -e 's/.$//g';
RAM
top -l 1 | awk '/PhysMem/ {print "" $8 " "}' ;
Day of Month
date +%d
Day of Week
date +%A
Month
date +%B
Year
date +%Y

To download this image (without my desktop info), click the download button.
Image size 1,280 x 800


Posted on 21 October 2009 by Tina Brunner
Since Halloween is right around the corner, I wanted to make a realistic spider web effect sucking in the Apple logo. My husband is the guru when it comes to design, so he created a cob web and added the Apple logo and gave the effect of it being pulled into the spider web. In fact, there are spiders in the screen, can you see how many there are? I wanted to make this fun for those viewing it, so I had him add some spiders, and asked the audience to see how many they can count. To add to the effect, I used GeekTool to add a countdown of how many days left to Halloween and used the echo to add ‘days to go’ behind after the countdown number. There is of course a way to do it without having to add an extra shell command, but we didn’t see the code until after the fact. However, you can use the echo command to add text to your screen though, so this is why we added it to this article. We used the Moon Phase II Yahoo Widget for the moon. Here are the commands for GeekTool:
Days To Go shell command:
echo "days to go"
CountDown shell command:
echo '<?=(int)((strtotime("Oct 31")-time())/86400)?>' | php
To add the Yahoo Widget, click on the moon to be directed to the download page on Yahoo Widgets.

To download the background without my desktop screen, go to the Freebies tab in this site for the download. This concludes this article, if you have any other GeekTool commands or Yahoo Widgets, please, leave a comment to help fellow readers. Also, check out more designs by my husband at http://philipbrunner.com.