This week’s mac techmail is Fun tricks with Growl and GeekTool which looks at a (probably rather unique) scenario of running an IRC client in a virtual machine (running Linux) and having alerts show up on the OS X desktop. The tip, while relatively specific to one function, should provide some ideas on cool things you can do with GeekTool and Growl. In this case, it allowed me to use irssi in a virtual machine and have Growl send hilight alerts to the desktop as popups, and GeekTool keeping a running “backlog” of hilights on the desktop so that my attention can be grabbed even if I’m not in the vm or ssh’d into it, or paying attention to it.