Birthdays notifications and Remind

raphix · 2011-03-24 14:12:54

I would like to have a way to get notified when it's the birthday of a friend of mine.

I am rather a CLI-guy and I like the 'remind' package. I think a mail in my inbox every morning with reminders would meet my needs but, since it is on my laptop and I already have a convenient mutt+msmtp+offlineimap setting, I am not in the mood of installing a full-fledged MTA like postfix. Anyone got an idea?

More generally, people, how do you get reminded for your friends' birthdays?

Last edited by raphix (2011-03-24 14:15:16)

karol · 2011-03-24 14:41:18

heirloom-mailx can send e-mail from the CLI, I use this for sending mail via gmail:

set sendmail="/usr/bin/mailx"

set smtp=smtp.gmail.com:587
set smtp-use-starttls
set ssl-verify=ignore
set ssl-auth=login
set smtp-auth-user=login@gmail.com
set smtp-auth-password=YOURPASS

I've used google calendar to send me a text message reminding me of appointments etc., but nowadays I have a text file where I put all the things I have to do along with a date. I check it to see what do I have to do in the upcoming month, week etc.

archman-cro · 2011-03-24 15:03:34

You could just use Conky for that having something like this in your conky rc:

${execi 3600 grep "$(date '+%d %m')" /path/to/dates/file}

And dates like this in your separate file which is called with conky:

01 05    Mother's birthday
04 12    Parents Anniversary

That's how I use it. It's pretty much ok.

the_isz · 2011-03-24 15:20:52

I'm using calcurse for that and just call it at the end of my .zshrc to print
out upcoming events. The amount of time in advance can be easily modified (I use
two weeks, leaves enough room to take vacation and get presents) and you can
still parse the output to use it with conky.

bohoomil · 2011-03-24 16:30:11

Remind you wish, remind you get. You can combine it with your favourite notification system (if any), and feed ~/.reminders with things not to be forgotten.

quigybo · 2011-03-26 09:58:39

I also use remind for most things, not only birthdays but also appointments etc. I have remind in my autostart, along with the -z and -k flags using notify-send for the actual notifications. Of course as mentioned already instead of notify-send you could use mailx to suit your needs.

raphix · 2011-03-29 11:28:35

Ok, thanks guys, your solutions are cool. Since I posted the topics, I found esmtp on the wiki to get cron errors delivered in a mailbox (/var/spool/mail/username). I was quickly able to use it also with remind (a cronjob everyday at 11:11 now delivers a mail with reminders and mutt indicates that there's new mail, works like a charm).

for the record :
11 11 * * * /usr/bin/rem | sendmail raph

Markus00000 · 2011-04-13 14:48:23

bohoomil wrote:

Remind you wish, remind you get. You can combine it with your favourite notification system (if any), and feed ~/.reminders with things not to be forgotten.

@bohoomil and quigybo
Would you please be so kind to share your remind-notification setup? I would like to combine remind with xmessage or something similar but I couldn't find out how exactly this works. That would be totally archsome.

Markus00000 · 2011-04-13 17:23:58

Oh, well. To answer my own question:

remind -z -k'gxmessage %s &' ~/.reminders

This starts remind as a daemon and launches gxmessage passing the MSG.

Arch Linux

#1 2011-03-24 14:12:54

Birthdays notifications and Remind

#2 2011-03-24 14:41:18

Re: Birthdays notifications and Remind

#3 2011-03-24 15:03:34

Re: Birthdays notifications and Remind

#4 2011-03-24 15:20:52

Re: Birthdays notifications and Remind

#5 2011-03-24 16:30:11

Re: Birthdays notifications and Remind

#6 2011-03-26 09:58:39

Re: Birthdays notifications and Remind

#7 2011-03-29 11:28:35

Re: Birthdays notifications and Remind

#8 2011-04-13 14:48:23

Re: Birthdays notifications and Remind

#9 2011-04-13 17:23:58

Re: Birthdays notifications and Remind

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