Monday, Valentine’s Day morning, we had our place broken into. Nobody was hurt. We were barely gone for an hour and when we got back we noticed the glass was cut out on our front door. They were able to unlock the door pretty easily. We had been asking our landlord to fix the outer front door since we moved in a few months ago since it doesn’t quite shut all the way because it isn’t seated correctly. There are no deadbolts but, we were under the impression that Wyman Park was a pretty safe neighborhood. And, it is… we were just unlucky.

We saw a suspicious couple across the street at the bus stop when we left in the morning. They just looked out of place: not dressed for school/work and not really sitting waiting for a bus. I don’t really remember what they looked like. They were just some tweaker-looking 20-somethings. They must have seen us leave or knew that we were always gone in the morning during the week. They pushed through the outer front door, cut the glass on the inner door, unlocked it from the inside and they did a quick sweep to grab anything portable and valuable. They took our bikes, PS3, pearls, random dvd’s, a blu-ray player, some new Nike’s a laptop and my bread and butter: my MacBook Pro.

I’ve been looking for a centralized database to report my Mac as stolen so that it might be flagged as such by Apple and the Mac community at large. I’ve heard of stories where the stolen computer gets taken in for service and the serial number pings as stolen and thus gets retrieved. There’s not much I can do about it now and I’ve accepted that I will never get it back.

My friend Dana had a great idea to post about the theft with my serial number so that if a repair shop or prospective buyer wanted to check if the computer was hot, this post could come up in search results. Dana also recommended setting up a Google Alert with my serial number to email me if the interwebs had any new information concerning it. I am grateful for Dana and MacMedics for being such good friends.

So here are the details on my stolen computer:

MacBook Pro (15-inch, 2.53 GHz, Mid 2009)
Serial Number: W89338F67XJ

I am offering a cash reward for the return of my MacBook Pro. I really can’t afford a new computer right now and I need my files in order to work.

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.