The images in this blog post were originally published on my old blog, My Little Desktop. Which is still up, if you care to read through (although much of the information is now outdated).

For me, data visualization wasn’t always about big data. Once upon a time it was actually really little data, buried inside my tiny little laptop computer. In October of 2009, I was big into desktop customization, and in particular, Conky, a lightweight system monitor for Linux desktops.

One of the big advantages of Conky is that if you, like I did, run a lean computer, old and underpowered, it is an easy way to see (at a glance) how your system is performing. I first started using it on a netbook (remember those!?) that I’d hacked to install Ubuntu, and then I graduated to Ubuntu on a run-of-the-mill Samsung laptop.

Conky, at its core, is pretty simple, but it packs some impressive features. One of which is being able to render system stats graphically, in this case in rings or bars. In the screenshot above, all the rings represent different measures: memory and disk usage, temperature, battery remaining, and so on.

The visualization here is pretty endlessly configurable; at one point I also added analog clock hands and pulled quotes from tinybuddha.com (which used to be a lot simpler of a website than it is now). Have a look at some more examples of these types of Conky configurations, below. Enjoy!