Offensive Thinking

March 2010

2010-03-21 New snippets on github: alarm and bitify

I’ve added two more scripts to my github snippets repository that you may find useful. I use them quite frequently.

bitify

I know, I’m all creative with names, aren’t I ;)? This little script, basically a one-liner, uses bit.ly to shorten a URL on the command line. Because, you know, I hate leaving the command line. Web interfaces are for WIMPs. Together with twidge, it enables me to use twitter and identi.ca from the shell.

alarm

I searched for a good solution to the following problem for quite some time: I am notoriously forgetful. So, besides my trusty remind, I was in search for a simple command line tool to pop up a message at a certain time. Sounds easy, doesn’t it? Well, the problem is the “command line” part. Sure, you can just use the “at” command, but I wanted a popup box, not a message in a terminal I may already have forgotten about.

Fortunately, remind implements something called “daemon mode”. It allows you to run a remind instance in the background, triggering arbitrary commands at a certain time. Perfect. All I needed was a simple script to allow me to conveniently add reminders to the file watched by remind. That’s how alarm was born.

Alarm messages take either an absolute or a relative time and a message. Examples:

alarm ‘12:00 Prepare dinner’
alarm ‘30m Dinner is ready’

I start the remind daemon in my xmonad.hs file as follows:

remind -z ‘-k zenity —info —text=“%s” &’ ~/.alarm_reminders

This pops up a nice message box with zenity when an alarm is due.

2010-03-20 New ical2rem.rb version on github

I finally pushed a new version of ical2rem.rb to github. It’s been a while that I’ve worked on this. I’m using the update I pushed today for quite a while now, I just didn’t came around to actually release it.

It’s a major update in the sense that ical2rem.rb now uses Rick DeNatale’s RiCal for all its VCAL parsing. I switched because VPim didn’t work with Ruby 1.9 at the time and as an Arch Linux user, I made the switch quite early.

So please go and check out the new version on github. Drop me a mail if you find any bugs, I appreciate it.

On a completely unrelated note, I also updated my dotfiles a little and added four new ones: inputrc, irbrc, vimperatorrc and wyrdrc. Have fun.

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