pushme – a simple script to push a notification to the phone
There are many times when I end up waiting for a computer. Whether it’s a long running rsync or someother command that takes time to finish, I just don’t like endless checking on a process. That sort of “screen polling” isn’t really time well spent and just increasing that polling interval also doesn’t appeal.
In the past I’ve often just resorted to sending myself and email from the command line and I’ve even sent it to my phone via the email to SMS service most providers offer.
However, sometimes I’m on a machine that doesn’t let me sent email or perhaps just doesn’t have an email service installed.
That got me thinking about other ways to let me know when something finishes.
To my delight there are services that allow you to push to phone. pushbullet and notifymyandroid are just two of them.
So, I wrote a script that uses their API via HTTP to send a notification to my phone.
The script is available as pushme on github. Instructions on using it can be found there.
The script will work with both of the services I mentioned above. If you’re trying to decide which one to use, I can offer the following observations:
- both work
- notifymyandroid limits you to 5 notification per day
- pushbullet doesn’t limit the number of notifications
- pushbullet has a plugin for chrome, so you can also get the notification there
While pushme is intended to let me know when a job finishes, it should be flexible enough for other types of “push to phone form the command line” scenarios.
Cheers,
\@matthias