Matthew Todd

So I don’t burden my poor brain trying to remember stuff, I’ve rigged up some crontab entries that fire off Growl reminder messages every so often:

Arguably, I could have just put a bunch of event reminders in iCal, but it’s nice to avoid cluttering the calendar and I like the way these Growl notifications look. :)

crontab

The crontab file is an old-school unixy configuration file on the Mac (and many other platforms) that expresses a schedule of recurring tasks.

For what it’s worth, here’s mine:

matthew-todds-computer:~ mtodd$ crontab -l
MAILTO=''

15 10,14 * * 1-5  /usr/local/bin/remind 'Take a minute to pray for Valerie and our marriage.'
0  16    * * 1-5  /usr/local/bin/remind 'Open the gate for Valerie if she honks.'
30 16    * * 1-5  /usr/local/bin/remind 'Now would be a great time to turn on the water heater.'

(The schedule information is a little cryptic—the last line makes sure I turn on the water heater every weekday (1-5) at 4:30pm.)

remind

Here’s the remind script, just a simple wrapper around growlnotify:

matthew-todds-computer:~ mtodd$ cat /usr/local/bin/remind
#!/bin/sh

/opt/local/bin/growlnotify     \\
  --appIcon iCal               \\
  --message "$*"               \\
  --sticky                     \\
  --title 'Just a reminder'