samurais make good pizza

prior to the break starting i was thinking about how useless my desktop was; there was nothing on it and it showed nothing but a wallpaper -- i ought to put some widgets or whosits and whathaveyous to provide some information at a glance. i've tried the yahoo widget engine (ex konfabulator) before and it was a bit of a resource hog (7 MB for the engine and another 1-3 MB per widget), so i was wary of trying that again. lately i've been in a do-it-yourself kind of mood. where i would once go hunting up the most suitable, prettiest and functional picture or whatchamicallits, i now simply make it to the best of my ability (sprinks them sennamennal valuse on'm). who else knows what exactly i want? yes, other people who have no lives can make it prettier, but this motivates me to learn how they did it, and if it comes out a bit ugly, i'm a whole lot more forgiving of it because i made it (like them delish self-cook'd meals).

so i found Samurize (title link), which has been around for quite some time. it has a reputation for having a fairly steep learning curve (compared to something that works write out of the box) so i had avoided it until now. resource usage depends on how big your set-up is. mine is running at a cool 2 MB.

this is what i've settled on after wasting all of yesterday working on it (Fig. 1), reading Fifth Business for the fifth time (second time for school), listening to a terrible hockey game (3-0 loss to the Bruins), and watching Firefly episodes with commentary from the first two discs.

Fig. 1 - my almost mac desktop
the Samurize thingies i made (3rd iteration) reside in the lower left corner (i should make them smaller and less obtrusive). from top to bottom, they monitor the number of processes running, my laptop battery life (which changes colour as battery life dwindles), the amount of free space left in my hard drive partitions, the CPU usage and the RAM usage. other visible programs are Finderbar at the top (which has functionality that i have yet to fully explore) and Objectdock at the bottom (which doubles as the taskbar where i minimize my windows - Opera is open).

EDIT: smaller it is. and the previous attempts.


Fig. 2 - 4th and current design


Fig. 3 - 2nd attempt, centred in the middle of screen
and hopelessly covered by windows


Fig. 4 - 1st attempt before i went all bubbles.
not pictured: the hard drive meter in the far right corner