Zen Desktop the 332nd.

This took me so damn long to get perfect, I figured I'd share it in the hopes it helped someone else.

I have no idea where I found the wallpaper, but it's tagged Grasses II by 'Ethereal Clockwork' for the author, so thanks to that person! It's 1920x1200 native and this whole desktop was mostly born of the desire to have a decent looking refeed of my twitter feed right on my dekstop.

This was accomplished through the use of my Twitter RSS feed, passed through Yahoo Pipes used to filter it down to display only the last 10 items rather than Twitter's default 20, and then the resulting RSS was fed to GCALDaemon's feed converter and lastly into Rainlendar using the Exceed skin and turning on only the Events list for the Calendar attached to the feed. Pain in the ass, yes, but I'm a picky bitch.

Oh, the globe.png file located in the root of the zip package is to replace an UGLY globe that comes in the latest beta version of Rainlendar -- you have to insert it into the resources.zrc file (which is really just a zip file). Just overwrite the globe.png in the archive.

GCalDaemon
Rainlendar
Yahoo Pipes

Rainlendar is also tied to my Google Calendar so I can do normal calendar/reminders/events/todo stuff and I also have that configured to remind me of my favorite TV shows via the lovely free service (which exports to iCal format) from Pog Design.

I have a scheduled task which refreshes it every 5 minutes so I never have more than the 10 entries cluttering up my desktop (Rainlendar or GCaldaemon caching can get messed up.)

Pog Design UK TV Calendar
Gmail. I know.

CD Art Display is pretty self explanatory, using the lovely transparent Diverge skin, recolored to match my desktop background better than it's default grey. (And Adam Lambert was robbed. You suck America! )

CD Art Display


Rainmeter supplied the lovely clock background-ish, one-click LCD overlay/dimming tool in the lower right corner for those nights when you're working and your eyes are BUGGIN', and shutdown/restart utility in the lower left corner.

Also, my 'Minimize to desktop' icon on the quicklaunch has been customized to actually be 'minimize to desktop' which removes the utter pain in the ass that is Vista desktop being treated as a window, and replicates the functionality of "pin to desktop" in XP perfectly.

Throw a shortcut to a .vbs file somewhere on your harddrive into your taskbar, and insert these lines into said .vbs file:

Set shell = wscript.CreateObject("Shell.Application")
Shell.MinimizeAll

Enjoy. Or not.

Link to full desktop pack (minus the colorizing of Vista's interface ... which will probably get fixed in the next version of this) is here.