Nifty scheduling/scripting tips?

September 6, 2008 4:15 PM

Nifty scheduling/scripting tips? See this recurring calendar events thread for an example. Or, a cronjob that prints out the day's weather, output from remind, and a to-do list just before I wake up. Or David Seah's Compact Calendar. Don't be fooled by the categorization. This doesn't have to be techy.

And if you know of a calendar program that runs in text-mode on *NIX, uses vi-like keybindings, looks like the Compact Calendar, accepts scripting like remind, and produces pretty printouts---well, I might just squeal like a girl.

posted by d. z. wang to computers & internet (3 comments total)

One thing that I've been dying to figure out for ages is a way to various sections of various newspapers (off their website), combine them all as one PDF without any cruft and then print them out daily. I'm on a Mac, and with a combination of Automator and various commands I've managed parts of it, but never the whole. I guess if you're on *NIX you might have the savvy to be able to accomplish this.

I also had a neat cron job that would download music from various MP3 blogs, but that started taking up lots of space and I didn't have time to really listen to everything, so that fell by the wayside.

I use iCal to email me and also have pop-up alerts about buying cards for my immediate family's birthdays - I always remember the date, but what with posting etc. it's one of those things where it's always helpful to have a reminder before the window of opportunity closes. Otherwise you have to send awful e-cards...
posted by djgh at 4:31 PM on September 6

You might have a look at Wyrd. It's an nCurses-based frontend to remind. Not as pretty as Compact Calendar, but gets the job done.
posted by word_virus at 8:25 PM on September 6

This has nothing to do with the weather, but it's a GREAT cron/calendar tip!

Every night, my webhost makes a backup of my site (a nightly "snapshot", they call it). I have a script that makes a zip file of that snapshot and places it one level outside of my domain. A cronjob executes that script for me automatically at 1am. I set up an iCal alarm to run an Automator file I created to download the zip file from my site to my Mac. I also set up a separate zip/backup for my site's mysql databases, and another iCal alarm launches a download of that.

This happens three times a week. So - if the absolute worst happened and my webhost were to have a catastrophic crash, losing all of my stuff, I have a backup that is at most 2 days old.

Sweet, eh?

Initially, I screwed up and placed that snapshot zip in a folder of my site. This proved to be stupid since my site has about 3 gigs worth of files. That meant the download would be 6 gigs, and then 9 gigs the next time... 12 the next... and so on, since the zip backup was being backed up as part of the nightly snapshot. D'oh!!!
posted by 2oh1 at 8:45 PM on September 6