Computer As an Alarm or Timer - XFCE4
What
You’d like to use your Linux computer as an alarm clock, egg timer, or just to remind you of things beyond what a calendar program or cron or at support.
How
The best solution depends on your selected OS and window manager. I am currently using xfce4 as my window manager. That means I’ll look for a solution that docks with the xfce WM. xfce4 timer is the name of the program. I suspect GNome and KDE and LDXE have their own alarm/timer programs.
I used Synaptic Package Manager to find the program by searching first for alarm. When that search found wmtimer, I tried it, but decided the UI wasn’t for me. It could be good for someone else.
The 2nd search was for timer and bingo, xfce4-timer-plugin was found. I selected it to be installed and added it to my dock. It is a nice little dock-app.
A few other options:
- Under KDE, kalarm is popular.
- Under gnome, galarm is used.
- Under Vista and Win7, there are many gadgets that could be useful.
- Under Maemo, I’ve been happily using the built in clock/alarm application for 2 years and would continue if I always had my N800 next to my computer and powered on.
I’ve never used most of these other tools, so I don’t have an opinion about them.
The xfce-timer app lets me set a command to run, so I’ve written a script that plays a song, opens an xterm and shows a text file inside that xterm window. Here’s the trivial script:
#!/bin/sh
SONG=“/Data/Music/ZZ_Top/Eliminator/03-Sharp_Dressed_Man.mp3”
MSG=“$HOME/alarm.msg”
- Play a sound
if [ -f “$SONG” ] ; then
mplayer “$SONG” &- Turn up the volume
- I need to figure this out
fi
if [ -f “$MSG” ] ; then
- Open a window with a reminder message
xterm -e “cat $MSG; sleep 200”
fi
You don’t need to have a script, without it the timer will pop up a small acknowledge window, but I wanted both sound and in-my-face visual reminders.
Why
For years, I’ve wondered why we can’t easily talk to our computers to have them remind us of things. Things like
- My eggs will be ready in 20 minutes
- Get my attention in 2 hours – force me to acknowledge
- Don’t let me forget a meeting in 20 minutes
All of this is needed since my company calendar reminders aren’t in my face and loud. It is really easy to miss appointments because of the subtle nature of the reminders of our enterprise calendaring system. I need something that will make a noise AND open a big window in my face to get my attention. Doing this is doubly difficult since I run my main OS inside a virtual machine (for many good reasons), so sound isn’t always be enabled.
Anyway, I hope that you’ll search and find an alarm or timer application for your OS.
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