KDE: “Run a command” on notification trigger
KDE had a feature a lot of people didn’t know about. You could run a command when a notification triggered. The feature wasn’t very well documented and nobody really blogged about it.
However with the release of KDE Plasma 6, the feature was removed. I learned about it by accident, as it is tracked by Bug #481069. I really need the feature and I re-implemented it in KDE Plasma 6. I will be available in KDE Plasma 6.1 and KDE Frameworks 6.1.
Text-to-Speech for calendar events
I’m using the “Run a command” feature for calendar events. Normally you get a popup notification. The popup notification is small and pop up where all of them are shown. When I’m concentrated and working on some code I simply miss them. If I play a game, I miss them.
The solution for me is to use a Text to Speech (TTS) Engine. I’ve setup speech-dispatcher with piper-tts on my system. When an a reminder triggers it says: “Andreas, you have an appointment in 10 minutes: Samba Meeting”.
You can find the python script I use here.
Endless possibilities
The opportunities for doing cool stuff with this are endless. Here are some ideas what else you could do:
- Start your meeting/conferencing application prior to the meeting
- Change the desktop activity before a meeting
- Lock the screen if a specific WiFi gets disconnected
If you have some nice idea or already used it in the past, leave a comment to let me know what else you can do.
