My personal Comm Station.

November 4, 2007 on 5:46 pm | In Code, Graphics, Interface Design, Open Source

I have been working on a few technical things over the course of the weekend; first meshing my home wireless network by letting two routers form a single network, and after I was done, setting up MRTG (Multi-Router Traffic Grapher) for my Airport Extreme, which is the border gateway.

MRTG produces pretty graphs of networks statistics, and I integrated them into my Leopard desktop using a space station icon I am working on, a bit of Photoshopping and Geektool 2.1.2 (since the website is down, I’ll host it here for the interested). Geektool, in turn, is a preference pane that lets you show console output or images on your desktop, refreshed at a certain interval.

I’ll let the result speak for itself (click for larger version over at flickr);

Picture 1.jpg

If there’s any interest for it, I’m willing to write a nice how-to for setting all of this up easily. Drop a comment if you want to see such a post.

9 Comments »

RSS feed for comments on this post.

  1. Looks really nice.. would love to see a how to.. :) Don’t have an Airport Extreme, would it still work?

    Comment by Øyvind Robertsen — November 4, 2007 #

  2. Øyvind, it depends; it’s only possible if your router supports SNMP (check the internet, manuals, or web interface - these three are not mutually exclusive, even if there is no trace of it in your manual or web interface, do check on the ‘net).

    Comment by sebastiaan — November 4, 2007 #

  3. A to-do would be awesome!

    Comment by Connor — November 4, 2007 #

  4. I’d definitely be interested.

    Comment by Raven — November 4, 2007 #

  5. I’d love to get the network stats graph — I have a linux box as a node on my network exclusively so I can play around with things like this. ;-)

    (And yeah, I use an Airport Extreme, the new model.)

    Comment by Brian Amerige — November 4, 2007 #

  6. You can change the colours of the MRTG graphs, might make it blend in with the background.

    Comment by dbr — November 5, 2007 #

  7. Yeah. I’d like to have a “how-to” post.
    And BTW - is GeekTool 2.1.2 support unicode?

    Comment by NilColor — November 12, 2007 #

  8. NilColor, you might want to check up on your reading. The how-to has been posted for several days now.

    Comment by sebastiaan — November 12, 2007 #

  9. I’d like to see a how-to if you want to do it…. Great stuff.

    Comment by Joseph Forte — March 10, 2008 #

Leave a comment