Good:

Installing Beryl was brain-dead easy: add a repository and `apt-get install beryl`. About the same as Gentoo I guess, where you’d `layman -S whatever-the-repo-name-is` and then `emerge beryl`. Except Ubuntu didn’t take 30 minutes to install it, and it was nice and tested and likely to work. I’m using the Emerald theme […]

Someone asked me to post my conkyrc so I did. I also posted all the Ruby scripts that I use with it. If you don’t mind spawning 6 or 7 Ruby interpreters every couple minutes, you might find them useful, though they are extremely simple.

Click for full-size version. In the first shot you can see the “wave” effect in progress that occurs any time a window is unmapped; the window sort of waves and dissolves. Beryl’s “Animations” plugin lets you specify animations for mapping, unmapping, focusing, and min/maxing windows. There are some nice effects too, like […]

I wrote a Ruby script that parses a Yahoo weather RSS feed and prints it in a form suitable for use in Conky. This is what it looks like:

The source code is here. Bugs are likely, I wrote it in 20 minutes. It requires the xml-simple Ruby module, but that’s in portage […]

I posted earlier about getting Conky to be transparent in KDE. Unsetting and resetting the “Show icons on desktop” and “Allow programs in desktop window” options would allow Conky to look correct when transparent. Otherwise it would be a black box.
This is OK but it’s a hassle to do this every time I […]

A new screenshot:

This is KDE/Xgl/Compiz with a Milkish sort of cgwd theme. Just enough transparency to make things interesting. Of course Compiz is best when you see it in action.
The wallpaper from Interfacelift. Such a nice wallpaper.

For the benefit of any Googlers who are looking for how to do this, and for my own benefit when I forget:
Trying to get Conky to be transparent in KDE would either cause all my icons to disappear, the entire background to turn black, or Conky itself to appear entirely black. “own_window” and “own_window_transparent” […]