Does anybody know of a tool or a utility that will take a machines vital statistics and display it on the backdrop so when I've VNC'd into a bunch of computers I know at a glance which one I'm working on?

I could just Photoshop the hostname onto an existing backdrop, but it'd be cool to have something the did it automatically, especially when there's a load of machines to do.

There are some tools that will allow you to embed a screensaver in the desktop (there are hundreds: it must be a sample app in some MacOSX programming book; look on VersionTracker) and there are screensavers that have uptime-type information in them (ShowOff, among others). I think I'd go that route.

There are also tools that will embed Safari in your desktop. You could point it to a local file that reloads, maybe. I like the first option better.

A simple approach is to render the text you want on the fly (perhaps with something like pbmtext). I imagine there must be an OSX-equivalent of xsetroot. If nothing else, you could probably do some awful AppleScript thing to drive the system preferences.

I'll give showoff a try next week when I'm back at work. Could anyone recommend a windows version as well for the sake of completeness?

That one is easy:

http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/BgInfo.html

That's interesting, googling BGinfo osx resulted in AquaMon, not a background app, but useful nevertheless, it can also poll several machines at once. Attached is a screenshot running on my iBook.



EDIT: Also BGinfo turned up CoolMon as well for Windows, looks like I'm spoiled for choice!

I used to use something called GeekTool on my desktop on OSX for constantly updated stats and logs. Don't know if it's still updated or not but it did the trick.