GeekTool has been around for years for the Mac.  It is a great utility for overlaying information onto your computer desktop. Recently it was released through the Mac App Store.  A friend of ours Don McAllister of Screencastsonline.com also recently did a members introduction show to GeekTool.

I have been playing a lot with IFTTT.com and Yahoo pipes.  But what if we want to monitor some site and web service statuses directly and have it show up on our Mac desktop all the time?

That is where GeekTool comes in handy.  Just add a couple of Shell Script objects to your desktop.  Make sure to set the display status to feedback image, choose a reasonable refresh period and a suitable title via the override text fields as seen below.

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Here are two shell scripts.  One monitors status for a WoW Realm I made for some friends.  The other is the example of monitoring the FiT Web site status via downforeveryoneorjustme.com.

WoW Realm Status:

curl –silent http://us.battle.net/api/wow/realm/status?realms=thorium-brotherhood | grep -m1 -E ‘status’ | awk -F “:” ‘{print $5}’ | awk -F “,” ‘{print $1}’ | grep true

FiT Site Status:

curl –silent http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/www.friendsintech.com | awk -F “</span> is ” {‘print $2}’ | grep up

For those who listen to Victor’s podcast, the Typical Mac User Podcast, you might have heard me talk about this product — PodWorks.

Recently my 6 month old MacBook’s hard drive crashed…  and crashed hard!  Nothing was salvageable from the drive.  Fortunately, I DID have a backup of my important data, to include my iTunes Library.

I had backed up my iTunes library via rsync to a FreeNAS server that I had recently setup.  Unfortunately, I couldn’t seem to get the on-board NIC of the NAS unit to run at 100Mb/Full-Duplex — it was stuck in Half-Duplex mode.  This was causing any transfer to take forever!  With a 26GB iTunes library, I was looking at a 16+ hour transfer to restore my library.

So I started looking at the concept of pulling my library back off my iPod instead.  Unfortunately, Apple only provides for a one-way transfer of your library EXCEPT for the case of purchased music.  If you hook your iPod up to another installation of iTunes you can at least transfer your purchased tracks to that library, but no podcasts nor any other content that you may have ripped from CD.

A quick Google search yielded a couple of hits — one of which let me to PodWorks.  I connected my iPod to my MacBook, fired up PodWorks and clicked on a single button (after I paid my $8 registration fee) to copy the contents of my iTunes library (on the iPod) back in to iTunes library.

45 minutes later I was then able to associate my iPod with this new installation of iTunes — which, of course, wipes the iPod clean to do so — and then begin the process of pushing the library back to the iPod.

In just under 2 hours, I was back in business.  Not bad for $8!

Pssst…  it also works with the iPhone!

Technorati Tags: Mac, iPod, PodWorks, iTunes

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