Again with the Apple fanboy/geek knowledge sharing…
I got a new MacBook Pro earlier this year and essentially started from scratch. I did restore from a Time Machine backup but, I’ve been getting carried away with customizing my Mac OS X Snow Leopard experience.
I changed my dock alignment to sit to the left instead of the default center but, you can also pin it to the right:
To pin your dock to the bottom left use this command in Terminal: defaults write com.apple.dock pinning -string start
To pin your dock to the bottom right use this command in Terminal: defaults write com.apple.dock pinning -string end
To put your dock back in the middle use this command in Terminal: defaults write com.apple.dock pinning -string middle
Ok, so that was pretty easy. There are lots of Terminal commands to get the information that you want. I’ve been using geektool for a while now to display command line output to my desktop/wallpaper. Currently I have the time, date, weather, iTunes song, artist and album, the latest 20 tweets from people I follow on Twitter, iCal events and even Time Machine backup status.
I’ll start you off with the date and time:
For the Time: date "+%l:%M %p"
Month: date "+%B"
Date: date +%d
Day: date +"%A"
You could do them in separate Shell containers like I did or put them all in one command. I just found it easier to play with typography and layout with each element in its own container.
For your local weather, you will have to find out your locale’s code from Yahoo! Weather by searching for your zip code, hitting that orange RSS button and looking at the URL for the code after p=. Just copy that code and paste it in place of USCO0105 (that’s for Denver) in the following:
curl --silent "http://xml.weather.yahoo.com/forecastrss?p=USCO0105&u=f" | grep -E '(Current Conditions:|F<BR)' | sed -e 's/Current Conditions://' -e 's/<br \/>//' -e 's/<b>//' -e 's/<\/b>//' -e 's/<BR \/>//' -e 's/<description>//' -e 's/<\/description>//’
I know this is kind of vague but, it’s really simple stuff. If you google “geektool tutorial”, you’ll find all kinds of tutorials. And go check out some of these geektool desktops on flickr for some inspiration.