[HOWTO] Poorman's Reminder

**diaa** · July 4th, 2008

Poorman's Reminder

Do you forget to make tea/eggs after you have already started?
Do you forget to call your friend/parent again after 10 minutes(because he was busy)?
It happens to all of us, I kept searching for the perfect reminding program for this but then I noticed it doesn't need a program on its own, you can accomplish this using a couple of simple bash commands.
Ok, now I'm making tea and I don't want to forget it, it should take 5 minutes, all I want to remember is a special beep.
Type the following in a terminal window:

Code:

sleep 300;beep -l 2000

What's 300? it's the number of seconds to wait, 5 minutes * 60 seconds per minute = 300 seconds, ok what's 2000? it's the length of the beep in milliseconds(one second is 1000 milliseconds), so 2000 is 2 seconds, which is a noticeably long beep so you can notice, that's all, isn't it nice?

If you don't like the beep and you want a friendly message box with a meaningful message, don't worry, use the following command instead:

Code:

sleep 300;zenity --info --text="Time for making the tea"

Note: This requires that you have zenity installed

If you don't like doing math, don't worry too

Code:

sleep $((60*60*2));beep -l 2000

This beeps after 2 hours.

Note: You can also mix and match, you can have both the beep and the message box

If you use yakuake or tilda or something similar, this gets very convenient as it doesn't require a new window(which just clutters the taskbar), if you don't use them and you don't want to keep a terminal window open for this? No problem, use the following command

Code:

 screen bash -c "sleep 5;beep -l 4000"

then close the terminal window and it'll continue running in the background

I've also wrote a small helper script to make this easier, It's called beepafter, you can find it attached, it can be run like this

Code:

beepafter.sh 5m
beepafter.sh 1h
beepafter.sh 1.5h

Note that beep is not a standard package and needs to be installed manually, one possible way is

Code:

sudo apt-get install beep

UPDATE: Added beepafter script

If you prefer a GUI reminder, I suggest trying the open-source, cross-platform CookTimer

**manfer** · July 5th, 2008

Maybe you'd like this one too:

prompt:~$ sleep 300; espeak "Time for making the tea"; beep -f 1100 -r 10 -l 200

**Butthead** · July 5th, 2008

Or, if (lazy, like me

) and using the KDE desktop, just install "KTeaTime" from the repros.

**Herman** · July 5th, 2008

I agree with what the other people have already posted.

I would like to add that we can also easily have a picture pop up, (perhaps a picture of a tea pot or something), at the same time as we have espeak reminding us '"Time for making the tea".
I recommend installing gthumb picture viewer and optionally, openclip art for that, (you can use your own image files instead if you prefer).

Code:

sudo apt-get install gthumb openclipart

So, the command would be:

Code:

sleep 300; espeak "Time for making the tea"; beep -f 1100 -r 10 -l 200 ; gthumb /usr/share/openclipart/png/food/beverages/teapot_ganson.png

Or, if (lazy, like me

) and using the KDE desktop, just install "KTeaTime" from the repros.

Yes, and if you use Gnome you can configure calendar appointments in Evolution similarly.
Here's a link about how to do that, Memos, Tasks and Calendar Appointments.

Regards, Herman