Past EED rants

Labels

Live leaderboard

Poker leaderboard

Voice of EED

Thursday 26 January 2006

Serious Samurize [Spiny]

Desktop customisation. Isn't that all useless faggotry lapped up by people who are suckered into all form & no function, arty types with pointless anime themed desktops that have window borders so thin as to make unusable?

One of the advantages of being terminally bored locked up here in Spiny Towers is that I've looked at stuff I normally wouldn't sneeze on (if I could sniff that is).

Today, I stumbled upon Samurizer. This thing will take all sorts of info from your system and enable you to display it on your desktop, or on trasparent on-top windows etc. I'm not usually into these sort of gadgets, dismissing them as useless baubles. Not to worry though, even those 1980s Windows95 user interface types can find something here. I just found my (personal) killer feature. One of the many sources of information you can display is from VB scripts and some bugger has kindly written one to leech info from TV.com, so I can have a reminder on my desktop of when my favourite TV shows are due to air. You can more pointless stuff like display media info too. There's loads of input sources, stuff like basic system settings, VB scripts & plugins. For overclockers and tweakers. Of more interest to me is the fact that it can get info from Windows WMI so you can use it to monitor all sorts of critical system activity (like checking your servers have backed up to tape OK or checking for flat mates maxing your ADSL while leeching rude pictures ;)). I was going to write a little WMI consuming app that checked the SMART status of hard drives (until I found a free one) but I think I'll pick up what code I've done (C# natch) and transmodrify (TM) it into a plugin for Samurize. Samurize can read the SMART failure status, but not predict a date for threshold failure.

Oh yea, it's got a pretty small memory footprint too, so should even fit into your 286 !

0 comments:

Post a Comment