Trying to keep tabs on everybody’s birthdays is a pain if, like me, your brain tends to shelve dates away in a dusty box rarely to be accessed…
Hallelujah then for Birthday-Aware – a small python application that uses Ubuntu’s Notification bubbles to remind you of approaching birthdays.
Reminders are given at 7 days before, 3 days before, 1 day before and one final alert on the actual date itself – which means I guess I’m out of excuses for forgetting!
Gmail vCards
Birthday-Aware gleans its data from that stored in your GMail contacts’ vCards. You’ll first need to export these to a .vcf file (how-to for that here) in order for the application to do its’ thang.
Install Birthday-Aware
No .deb installer yet so getting this tool up and running requires some manual pokery – but nothing too taxing.
- Download Birthday Aware @ freelanzer.com/birthday-aware
To install we need to do the following mundane tasks: –
- Extract the archive
- Enter the extracted folder
- Right click ‘birthday-aware-install.sh’ and choose ‘Properties’.
- Ensure the ‘allow executable permissions’ box is checked (ticked).
- Double click on it and in the dialogue that pops up choose ‘Run in a Terminal’.
- Enter your user password to install the application
The last step is to place your ‘contacts.vcf’ file from GMail into the hidden ‘.birthday-aware’ folder located in your Home folder. (Press CTRL+H to see hidden folders).
Finally you can run it via the terminal (python /usr/bin/birthday-aware.py) or create a launcher/start-up menu entry for it using the same command.