For quite some time now I'm using iStat Menus (now by Bjango). With its latest version 3, it's now a paid app and one is urged to upgrade for $16. I don't mind the price so much, but the only reason (for me!) to upgrade would be a fix to one particular bug, the rest is just bloat I won't need anyway. With that being the case, I'm now looking for alternative programs for the features I'm currently using:

smcFanControl - displays temperature and fanspeed in the menubar. It even offers to tweak the fanspeed (why would I want to do this??) but it doesn't display all the other sensors available. However it's opensource, so a big plus here!

MenuMeters - displays CPU and network load (also disk and memory, but I don't need that). Seems clean and simple enough. And it's free (not only as in "beer") too!

The only feature left is the clock from iStat Menus where you can have different timezones displayed and a calendar on top. But maybe I finally have to make friends with the dashboard now. Oh well...