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

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

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

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

apt-get install gxmessage

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