Remind: A sophisticated calendar and alarm program

Remind: A sophisticated calendar and alarm program(dianne.skoll.ca)

55 points by n3t 286 days ago | 14 comments

upofadown 279 days ago |

At 6am every day I run a script that dumps the scheduled events for the day out of remind. If there are any events the script:

* Makes a unique noise on the house announcement system.

* Sends me an email with the events.

* Sends me a SMS with the events.

My long term events archive is just the reminders file which I have never bothered to truncate. It's got easy to search stuff in there from decades ago.

n3t 279 days ago | |

> house announcement system

Please tell us more!

upofadown 272 days ago | | |

Just some speakers hooked to an amplifier which is plugged into a computer audio output jack.

ramses0 279 days ago | | |

With Home Assistant (or even Apple HomeKit Shortcuts) it's relatively trivial.

Shortcuts: Intercom: Events: Get [1] Event From [All Calendars]

https://i.postimg.cc/X750NyjC/IMG-9677.jpg

People dump on Apple/HomeKit (deservedly!), but only because there is so much untapped potential!

madamelic 279 days ago |

I love tools like this but I am currently in a cycle where I question why a tool has to operate like this.

These text-driven tools always come across like "programming the space shuttle to drive down the street for ice cream". Like, do we really need... all of this. It's beautiful and neat but does it solve the problem in a user friendly way?

Sometimes it seems like there is a lost art to simple but deep products. Many of these replacements tools are starting to seem more about demonstrating how nerdy you are by over-complicating the solution in a novel one-off way.

A great example of this, in my opinion, is Taskwarrior's sync in both 2.0 and 3.0. Just use auto-discovery of peers using a shared secret key then negotiate the connection seamlessly. I don't want to do SSL setup so I can have my tasks on two computers.

squigz 279 days ago | |

> Many of these replacements tools are starting to seem more about demonstrating how nerdy you are by over-complicating the solution in a novel one-off way.

This is a really pessimistic view on a tool that has been developed since the 80s.

Some people just enjoy the power tools like this - and the CLI in general - offer. You don't need "all of this"? Well then don't use it! That's sort of the beauty of it - it can cover basic needs and much more complicated needs.

That said, I think more users would use more powerful software if they gave it a shot. Unfortunately, many users get intimidated by slightly-user-unfriendly UX and instead go use software where they have little choices. So instead of adapting software to their workflow, they adapt their workflow to the software.

skydhash 279 days ago | |

The nice aspect of these text driven tools is in the name. Being text driven means they are nearly universal. There's nothing more versatile than text on a computer. When I think on anything that operate on text, it feels more like having a set of workflow that act on my data, that the computer doing (and someone else) doing obscure incantation.

> I don't want to do SSL setup so I can have my tasks on two computers.

I use to think that way, then I found that I never use two computers at the same time. At most it would be using one to remote on another, or using one to do stuff I can't do on another (like browsing the web when installing an OS). So I just use my laptop as my main computer. I have some files on my home server and mostly use my phone for HN reading and communication. If I really want to sync something, I just share files using sftp/smb/http/....

jrm4 279 days ago | |

For me it's not "overcomplication," it's strong interoperability with a workflow I like, specifically one that was kind of complicated to write once, but afterwards operates in a way such that I don't have to think at all.

I've been using this for years, so perhaps today there may be some voice or AI driven way to do this but -- first I add weekly events. And for one off events, I have a bash script that's like "whats the event?" then "what's the date/time" using standard linux date formatting, and returns an error and loops if wrong. (So e.g. "tomorrow" works, or "monday 4pm"

Then for retrieval, I can have it do notify prompts, and/or be a part of my bash prompt, and also throw up a nice HTML calendar.

skydhash 279 days ago | | |

Most of these tools are something you set once, write some scripts if it's a CLI, then forget about until someone tries to make a breaking change. Then you switch to the fork that maintains the old feature set.

SwiftyBug 279 days ago |

This is awesome! I've been looking for something to use as my calendar app. I just moved from macOS to Linux. On macOS I used the default calendar app. Because I still have an iOS device, I'd like to sync iCloud events with my computer. I've tried a combination of davmail, vdirsyncer, and calcurse. While this works, it's not a great experience. Calcurse doesn't seem to handle timezones very well and, for a TUI, it has a rather limited keyboard support (I can't copy the description text of an event, for example). I could use a GUI as long as it can handle both iCloud and Microsoft Exchange calendars.

ramses0 279 days ago |

The best intro/wtf link is the slides: https://dianne.skoll.ca/projects/remind/download/remind-oclu...

tldr: REM Dec 25 MSG It's Christmas! (...and then a bunch of other fanciness inclusive of being able to put "MSG Your [$MATH] Birthday is this [$MATHDAY]!")

jrm4 279 days ago |

Ha, not sure why this is coming up now, but it's great. I incorporate it into a few bash scripts for my prompt as well as a nice HTML calendar to look at.

turnTurnAROUND 278 days ago |

Similar but different > turnturnturn.me