# I Think I Found A Good Timer/Alert Program



## Quarter Wave Vertical (Jan 18, 2016)

I've been looking for something that will remind me of upcoming events, similar to iCal in OS X.

Over the past few days, I tried out several of them, including Evolution.  While I found that its timer works nicely, at least in the Linux version I've got on one of my other machines, the timer itself is only one of many features.  I really don't need the address book and e-mail bits, so I was looking for something to run on FreeBSD that would just let me know if, say, it was time to switch on my TV to watch a movie.

It appears that Remind (deskutils/remind) might just be what I'm looking for.  It's quite compact and the various dates and times are stored in a file that I could readily edit.  I also added Wyrd (deskutils/wyrd) as an interface (which runs in Terminal, by the way) and I set things up that Remind opens a Gxmessage window (deskutils/gxmessage) to display the alerts.  Using a suggestion from the Wyrd manual, I put a command in my account's .xinitrc file to start Remind whenever I log in.

So far, it appears that my setup works, though it took a few tries before it did.  The only thing that would make it better is if I could get it to play a sound whenever the alert window appears.  Doing this would be quite helpful as I'm sometimes away from my desk and hearing that sound would let me know of something that I need to be aware of.


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## Quarter Wave Vertical (Jan 20, 2016)

For an audio alert, I happened to find the following:
audio/dtmfdial

DTMF tones are the sounds produced by keypads, such as those for digital telephones.

I've been playing with a command that has the following form:

`remind -z -k'gxmessage -title "WINDOW" -geometry 200x25 %s & dtmfdial --tone-time 500 --volume 25 dial 12345 %s &' /usr/home/myaccount/.reminder &`

I get both a window with a message as well as an alert.  I still have a lot of tweaking to do but it's a start.


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