I manage my birthday list so I don’t forget about them in a calendar file so I can use it in scripts

The calendar file format is easy but sadly it only works using English month names.

This is an example file with differents spacing:

7  August   This is 7 august birthday!
 8 August   This is 8 august birthday!
16 August   This is 16 august birthday!

Now you have a calendar file you can use the calendar binary on it and show incoming events in the next n days using -A flag.

calendar -A 20

Note that the default file is ~/.calendar/calendar so if you use this file you don’t need to use the -f flag in calendar.

Now, I also use it in crontab with xmessage to show a popup once a day with incoming birthdays.

30 13 * * *  calendar -A 7 -f ~/.calendar/birthday | grep . && calendar -A 7 -f ~/.calendar/birthdays | env DISPLAY=:0 xmessage -file -

You have to set the DISPLAY variable so it appear on the screen.

It’s important to check if calendar will have any output before calling xmessage to prevent having an empty window.

The software developer prx, his website is available at https://ybad.name/ (en/fr), released a new software called prose to publish a blog by sending emails.

I really like this idea, while this doesn’t suit my needs at all, I wanted to write about it.

The code can be downloaded from this address https://dev.ybad.name/prose/ .

I will briefly introduce how it works but the README file is well explaining, prose must be started from the mail server, upon email receival in /etc/mail/aliases the email will be piped into prose which will produce the html output.

On the security side, prose doesn’t use any external command and on OpenBSD it will use unveil and pledge features to reduce privileges of prose, unveil will restrict the process file system accesses outside of the html output directory.

I would also congrats prx who demonstrates again that writing good software isn’t exclusive to IT professionnal.