Using remind to always be on time with birthdays

I'm sure a lot of people are like me, always forgetting the birthdays, because it's coming faster than expected (March already?? No way! it was January just yesterday!)

Step One: get remind
Anyway, if you are using Unix or Linux, you can install remind, a small software that we'll help you stay on track with your friends and their ages. To get it, with Mandriva, pretty easy:

urpmi remind

Step Two: create the reminding file
To use remind, you must create a file with the list of all your friends' birthdays. That's probably the longest part of this how-to, but you only do it once, and then it's good to go for all your life !! You can call this file file_remind for example. The file doesn't need any extension.

The file is just a plain text file. You can use vi, the simplest editor. I personally use gvim, its graphical version (with colors). Now, ready to start? Here we go !

The first line of the file is going to be the most difficult one: we are going to create an age calculating function, considering that you know in which year your friends are born. Mine looks like this:

FSET depuis(x)(year(trigdate())-x)

FSET means (c'mon you're not morons!) Function SET.
depuis is the actual name of my function ('cause I'm French)
x is the variable (you can call it toto, fcuk or yr if you like, it doesn't matter)
year is a remind function which gets the year from a date
trigdate() result is the exact date where you launched the remind command

So if we analyse quickly, depuis is going to get the year from the actual date (the year we are in right now), and substract x from it.

You'll understand better when I show you the second line of my file:

REM 9 Nov +7 MSG Anniversaire POIPOI: [depuis(1982)] ans %b

REM tells remind that this line is a reminder. If you're looking for the others, here is Remind man page. You can also access it by typing man remind in your console.
9 Nov is the date of the birthday I want to remember (and you should remember it too, that's mine! ;))
+7 tells remind to give me this information for 7 days before the birthday date. If you want to be reminded only the day before, just put +1.

MSG and what is following is the actual message that remind will show upon using remind.
[depuis(1982)] is the function we created in the first step, where x is 1982 here, my birth year. So dpeuis is going to substract 1982 to whatever year we are in today. (2007-1982 = 25)
%b shows, when you run remind, the number of days remaining until the actual date of the reminder.

Step Three: Result
To run remind, you just have to launch the command remind, followed by your file's name. And here is the result I get (on Nov 3rd 2007):

remind file_remind

Anniversaire POIPOI: 25 ans dans 6 jours

Everything that was behind MSG is showed. Anniversaire POIPOI just appears normally, then the depuis function calculates my age (you must put "ans" to actually get a French sentence, because depuis only gives you the number). And thanks to %b we know that it's "dans 6 jours" i.e. in 6 days.

Now you just have to copy and paste this line as many time as friends' birthdays you want to remember, change the dates and years, and you are good to go. If you don't want to deal with this (basic though) programming, there is a graphical version of remind, that you can find on the official site. And here is the Wiki, if you want to know more!

P.S: now the next step is to get remind to be launched when your computer start, because is you forget to run remind, you'll miss so birthdays for sure !

RSSOwl

urpmi rssowl: v.1.2.3. But the version 1.2.4 is available on the official site. The version 2.0 is on its way.

I used to have my RSS links in my Firefox bookmarks toolbar, but if you put too many in the toolbar, you end up not having enough space for your other bookmarks. And I already created some folders to sort my bookmarks, but I still have a nice collection of bookmarks in my bookmarks toolbar.

So I decided to look for a RSS reader. And I picked up RSS Owl, euh, I don't remember why. Maybe because of their slogan: May the owl be with you.

The install via urpmi went easy. But it's the first time I have that many supplementary packages to add. In the end, 93 packages to install.Be sure you have a bit of time when you launch the install.

When you start RSSOwl, your screen looks like your web browser, open on an empty page (white). You can see the address bar, like in a web browser, and a toolbar at the top. RSSOwl is compiled with a whole database of rss feeds, already set up in the favorites. If you press [F11], or Display>Favorites, a left frame will appear, with this database.

If you want to gain time, there is a search engine, that you can call with [CTRL+G] or Tools>Search. It will look for the RSS on the internet, and tell you if the RSS link you're looking for is already in the database, or if you need to add it: if the bow next to the result is ticked, it means that the RSS is not in your favorites, and you can add it by clicking on "import" at the bottom of the search dialog box.

When you click on one of the favorite, it will open as a tab in the frame on the right. A list of all the news will appear, leading you to be aware of everything that is going on in the world in only one quick glance. If you double-click on any of the title in the right frame, your favorite web browser will open the page with the full article.

Of course, you can edit your list of favorites, by creating new categories, deleting the existing favorites,...
No more reason not to know what's going on in the world :)