Hot-Babe

This is the description of hot-babe you can find on the program’s homepage.

Hot-babe is a small graphical utility which displays the system activity in a very special way. When the CPU is idle, it displays a dressed girl, and when the activity goes up, as the temperature increases, the girl begins to undress, to finish totally naked when the system activity reaches 100%.

It’s a very nice way of keeping control of your CPU usage, even if it occupies a little too much of your precious and useful screen surface. And in the end it’s also somewhat distracting.

Hot-Babe

Anyway, as explained in the homepage, there are some options to control the behavior of this nice girl, in order to avoid her getting undressed without reason; in fact when this “utility” is started without any option from the command line, it will check the CPU usage too fast, causing lots of resource consumption. In this way this babe will alternatively get dressed or undressed, because of its own CPU usage alone.

So i found that on my machine, (AMD athlon-xp 2800+, 1024 MB RAM), for normal activity (firefox + thunderbird + file manager + gnome-terminal), without excessive loads, this “utility” does its dirty job with this options:

hot-babe -t 4 -n 15 -d 200 &

just fixing the threshold to 4% CPU usage (no effect below this threshold), setting a low priority (high nice value at startup, 15), and setting the delay in screen refresh to 200 ms.