Reminders (Pop-up & E-mail) with Unix?

mnjaga asks: "What is your solution for handling 'reminders' with Unix? I was using a little freeware called KirbyAlarm , when I was using Windows. After migrating to Linux, it took a while to get a handle on things. Currently, I am using a mixture of cron, remind, and mail . However, I am interested in a better solution than what I am presently using. How do you handle your pop-up and e-mail reminders?"

Comments

Shark jumping

[Anonymous Coward]

First "how do I play sounds when I get new email" and now "how do I pop up dialogs on a regular basis"? Ask Slashdot is obviously following the rest of Slashdot downhill in quality.

If you use KDE, try `kdialog --msgbox "This is your reminder"` from remind, cron, at, whatever you already have hooked up. Other environments have similar commands, but because you didn't give any idea of what environment you are using, it's impossible to give any specific advice.

Try reading How To Ask Questions The Smart Way. In fact, please Slashdot editors, make it mandatory for people to do this before submitting Ask Slashdots.

Re:Shark jumping

[Gleng]

For Gnome/GTK users, an equivalent program to kdialog is "zenity". For example:

zenity --info --info-text "Text Goes Here"

Sunbird might work

[themuffinking]

Sunbird would work perfectly for this. Only downside is, you have to be running the application to get the notifications.

small shell scrip

[nri]

[10:19] [nri@sammy:nri] $ cat bin/xat
DATE=$1
shift
echo "echo xmsg.sh $@ | at $DATE"
echo xmsg.sh $@ | at $DATE

and

[10:19] [nri@sammy:nri] $ cat bin/xmsg.sh
DISPLAY=:0.0 /usr/bin/gmessage -wrap -center -font "12" $@

then usage is

xat 10:21am today "Hello world"

KAlarm

[Danious]

On KDE KAlarm is a exactly what you are looking for...

Re:KAlarm

[JabberWokky]

Kontact (i.e., KOrganizer, which can be run without the whole Kontact framework) is the "complete and easy to use" version.

KAlarm is pretty much what I like: small, easy to use and flexible. If you need more depth, KOrganizer is there, and if you need an entire contact solution, KOrganizer fits right into Kontact.

Of course, each of these applications can be manipulated by scripts in a variety of languages from python to bash through DCOP, or you can use classic commandline calls.

Small solutions that step up and aggregate to complete solutions - the Unix way.

--
Evan

cron and mail

[slasher999]

Been doing that for years here.

did you happen to read the post?

[Beatbyte]

Currently, I am using a mixture of cron, remind, and mail.

remind -- you'll regret you don't thave a life complicated enough to take full advantage of it ;-)

I'm pretty sure he's already aware of the existense of remind.

Use the easy (but low tech) solution

[dheltzel]

Get married, then your wife will always tell you what to do and when to do it.

You only need to remember 2 dates each year and that's easily cronable.

Re:Use the easy (but low tech) solution

[cerberusss]

Hehheh. The other day we were chatting at work:

Colleague: "Who does the cooking at your house?"
Me: "I do."
Colleague: "Well, what does your wife do then?"
Me: "Complain."

Quick and dirty in OS X

[Anonymous Coward]

I know the poster isn't using OS X, but for anyone who is, try this in Terminal:

osascript -e 'tell application "Finder" to display dialog "[your text here]"'

If the Finder isn't the active application, its dock icon will start bouncing to get your attention and you'll see the dialog box once you click on it. You can do something more robust by using osascript and specifying a file containing a longer AppleScript, e.g. something that tells the Finder to activate and then display the dialog.

notifications

[cs]

My desktop just has a small borderless terminal window at the top running "tail -f" on ~/var/log/alert. I write notifications there with ANSI yellow escape sequences so they're bright.

Important email (== personal email and, at work, new-bug email) generates one line messages there via procmail recipes. Opening my email also clears the window (write the terminal-clear sequence to the alert log).

Any decent calendar system should be capable of generating email for reminders, so when my workplace gets a (decent) calendar system the reminders will appear the same way.

I have a few other tiny tiny scripts that use this too; a "run job then alert" script that pops a line onto the log, and so forth.

This is very simple, extensible, doesn't litter my desktop with popups. Works for me!