I had a problem at work. I get scheduled for things such as installs / upgrades and general support, but couldn’t find a decent reminder app that I liked in either Gnome, KDE or XFCE. That’s where Remind, and the curses-based frontend Wyrd come into play. Remind in and of it self isn’t the greatest when it comes to being a user-friendly application, but slapping Wyrd in front of it makes it a bit more bearable. You still need to know the basic Remind syntax, but it’s not bad. The bonus of this setup is that I can look at it remotely with ease through an SSH session, which is a big deal to me as sometimes I work from home.

Remind syntax is pretty basic, and rather than get into a full-blown tutorial right now, I’ll share a basic reminder entry from my .reminders file:

REM Nov 14 2008 AT 17:00 DURATION 1:00 MSG Timesheet

On November 14 at 5 PM, I need my timesheet done. Duration is one hour, and the message shown is Timesheet. If I look at this through Wyrd, I’ll see 17:00-18:00 blocked out on my calendar. Pretty nifty. So, where does cron fit in to this solution? Well, using cron and GXmessage, I can display a list of upcoming reminders. Here’s the line from my box at work:

30 07  *  *  *  export DISPLAY=:0.0 && remind -q -g ~/.reminders | gxmessage -title "Reminders" -file -

At 07:30am every morning, my machine generates a list of reminders for the day in a dialog box waiting for me when I unlock my machine. Eventually I may just send the reminders to my email, but for now the dialog box gets my attention much easier. The best part about this setup is that it will work under any desktop environment you have, it’s text/curses based and not heavy on resources at all. Other options I had evaluated, and why I didn’t choose them:

Sunbird/Lightning
At one point I was using Lightning and Thunderbird for email, but it got too heavy, and I couldn’t easily read email remotely with Thunderbird. Sunbird is just the standalone calendar app, but again, not easily checked remotely.

Google Calendar
I like to stay on the cautious side and not keep anything work related on servers outside of the realm of my workplace. While it would work OK, I don’t think it would sit well with the higher-ups. This also goes for any to-do type applications online.

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