Schedule your time by using remind, wyrd, conky as well as rem2html


How do you schedule your time?

I was using gcalcli for couple years, however, it is become very difficult to use in mainland China, due to the GFW policy; on the other hand, I prefer to using my own server other than using the server from others, in this case google calendar.

So I start to find a better solution. Fortunately, I managed it by using remind, wyrd, conky and rem2html.

Screenshot

remind_conky screen shot Screen shot of my schedule based on remind and conky

remind

Plain text is the most portable, munge-able, searchable, dependable, and software-agnostic file format there is. We’ve covered how to track your tasks and projects in a todo.txt file; today we’re going to extend our plain text personal information manager to include a full-on calendar, using an old school UNIX program called Remind.

Remind is really a powerful tool to schedule your time. I am not going to the detail for the usage of Remind, you might go to the shell, and type:

$man remind

For example, you can shedule a date with your GF/BF like this:

REM 2014/12/24 MSG Dating this evening with honey.

Or you can check your salary on the first day of each month:

REM 1 MSG Checking salary.

Or have a meething:

REM 2014/11/25 AT 9:00 MSG Meeting now

wyrd

wyrd Screenshot of wyrd

Remind is very powerful but not handy enough, as you have to remeber lots of commands. If you use it in a very simple way, just like me, wyrd is a good choice.

Speaking of regularly using - wyrd will be used just as much as Remind. In addition to the easy to navigate display of events it also has a fully-configurable set of hotkeys that, for the little that I’ve used them, seem to work a lot like Vim. There happen to be two things that I like best about wyrd right from the start. The first is the fact that it’s written in OCaml. The second is that the developer took the time to make a well-orchestrated SWF file that walks through some sample uses. It just warms my little heart to see a developer caring about their users. ;-)

For me, the most fantastic usage of wyrd is its quick_event function, similar to gcalcli.

You could use it in a smart way, like this:

wyrd --add 'Have dinner with John Fri 6pm.'
wyrd --add 'Tomorrow 7:30am prepare breakfast.'

and also there are a lot more handy short cut for using Remind by wyrd.

conky

You can also add such line in your conkyrc script, then you will get a week scale schedule calendar on your desktop.

${execi 300 remind -c+1 -n ~/.reminders}

In addition, you can get a schedule summary in text style by adding this line to your conkyrc file:

${execi 300 remind -n ~/.reminders | sort}

rem2html

Sometimes, you might want to public your calendar on your blog, you can use rem2html for generating a static web calendar.

You can have a look at mine via: My calendar

Usage:

remind -ps12 /home/ming/.reminders | sed 's/^\(.*:.*:.*m\) .*$/\1 BUSY/g' | /home/ming/bin/rem2html --title "ming's calendar"> /var/www/cal/index.html

The sed command here is aiming to replace your schedule detail to BUSY.

-ps12 means you will publish the following 12 month calendar to the web page.

reminding

text message to your cell phone

You might able to find some particular method to send text message from shell to your cell phone.

Here are some hint:

  1. How to Send SMS Using Email to Major US Cellphone Carriers
  2. if you are a china telecom user, you can use their free service indirectly: i setup your china telecom email address; i setup the email system text to you in its setup; i send a reminder email to your china telecom email address by using mutt, then your cell phone will receive a text message.
  3. if you are a china mobile user, you can txet to your cell phone from use some shell-drived-fetion on your system; one of the well maintained one is FetionRobot

email and desktop reminder

You can also send email to you for remindering, I believe there are many ways to do this. In my case, I using mutt for email.

The basic usage of mutt:

echo email body | mutt -s subject send-to-email-address

Combined with remind

You might also want to get a desktop reminder by gxmessage, you can install it by (debian like system):

apt-get install gxmessage

And you can start remind server and enable both gxmessage reminder and mail reminder by using:

$remind -z -k'gxmessage -title "reminder" -center %s && echo %s | mutt -s %s YOUREMAILADRESSn &' ~/.reminders &

You can also add this to your .xinitrc file.

苏命
苏命
副研究员

我的研究方向:水源地水质安全保障,主要针对水源地由于藻类爆发引起的水体嗅味问题开展研究。