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Second Last Post on Super-Duper Personalized Productivity Background - TV guide [GTD Wannabe]

Second last post on my Super-Duper Personalized Productivity Background series (see end of this post for a list of other posts in this series). Again, I’m talking about getting a wickedly cool productivity desktop background for your computer, using such lovely things as: Cygwin, Remind, Samurize.

But today, we’re not focussing so much on productivity, as on keeping your TV schedule straight. Of course, you could always modify this to keep some other schedule straight - work outs, kids’ soccer games, etc. The point being is that you have some things that you want to keep track of, but not necessarily on your main calendar.

Let’s say that I watch TV and that I have a few favourite shows, but I never remember what’s on when. So, I create a little text file with information about the regular dates and times for these shows. It looks like this:

rem wed at 21:00 msg Criminal Minds %b
rem sun at 21:00 msg The Apprentice %b
rem tue at 20:00 msg NCIS %b
rem thur at 20:00 msg Survivor: Fiji %b

The %b tells Remind that in addition to seeing the date/time of the reminder, I’d like to know in how many days time it will happen.

What I’d like to be able to see, on my desktop, is a list telling me when my shows are on next. I just want to know that Survivor is going to be on in less than a week, but before then, I can watch the Apprentice. This will make more sense with an example. What I want to see is output that looks like this:

See how it tells me the date and time of the next episode of each show? And even easier for me, it says in how many days time. If the Apprentice was on today, it would say “today”, etc. And, it’s even sorted in order the next episode.

How is this magic accomplished? More console program meter goodness in Samurize. In this case, the command line is simply

f:\todo\bin\tv.bat

But what is tv.bat? Well, I couldn’t get Samurize to do exactly what I wanted just from the command line (I couldn’t figure out how to pipe the output from a remding command to the sort command), so I just made a simple batch file that calls on remind to output the information, and then pipes it to sort, so that I see it in the order I want. The guts of the tv.bat file are:

f:\todo\remind-03.00.24\src\remind.exe -n f:\todo\tv.txt | sort

The -n argument to remind “causes Remind to print only the next occurrence of each reminder in a simple calendar format” (source: Remind man pages). The | is the pipe command (beautiful, takes the output from one command and feeds it as input to the next command), and the sort just, well, sorts it. Because each line starts with the date, it’s easy to sort it by next viewable episode.

And that’s it. Quick and dirty little list to show you the next occurrence of your special reminders.