I know there are a few tools like this out there for both mac and pc that let you do this, but here at work I use a program called Samurize to display system data, email status, and other information. The program itself is all about the information you want to display and not how it looks, but it can be configured to look any way you want. The screenshot on the right is what mine looks like right now. There’s a lot of information on this thing, but for now I wanted to point out the little image on the bottom. In the image is a live view of the heart of Pisa, Italy – looking down from the clock tower upon the Arno river which winds through the city. Since I took that screenshot though, that same square is now showing a view of the street outside a window of the Fashion Institute in Milan. The views are actually provided via a plugin for Samurize called FetchImage that randomly grabs an image every so many minutes from a list of URLS in an XML document.
I actually installed the plugin a few weeks ago, but after seeing all the talk out there on BoingBoing and various other weblogs about about finding unsecured axis webcams via google by simply searching for inurl:”ViewerFrame?Mode=”, inurl:”view/index.shtml” or inurl:”MultiCameraFrame?Mode=”, I thought people would want a good way to display their new found webcams about: