For a short period of time i had the necessity to control some resources (both local and remote) and display the information on a computer screen. Since i am *always* busy doing other things, i wanted this information to be updated automatically and easy to keep my eye on. While i was thinking of an easy way and *time_not_consuming_way* to implement a structure that would bring me this information i remembered my *old* love, the all mighty ImageMagic!
Basically, my solution (UNIX) is definitelynot the most elegant one, yet it works for me and it’s really easy to implement; So let us start.
I gathered the information needed into a file and put it in /tmp directory via bash script; Namely use some unix commands and concatenate the output to a file.
Example:
$shell:> df -h | grep /dev/xxx | awk '{print $3}' > /tmp/foo.txt
Then use the `draw` option of convert, which is a part of the ImageMagick image processing package to *print* the text that you have in /tmp/foo.txt over an image that you choose to be your desktop wallpaper.
Example:
$shell:> convert wallpaper_image.jpg -draw 'text +X+Y $text_from_file' wallpaper.jpg
At this point you have your picture ready to be used as wallpaper. You now need to use crontab to repeat this operation at regular intervals ($shell:> crontab -e) and change the desktop wallpaper accordingly (Platform dependent; On OSX just select the automatic picture shuffle option).
And the trick is done.
Sebb
