BreathingReminder Home Page

« how some free lines of code can change your geek / hacker's life »

Laurent FACQ – facq@u-bordeaux.fr
http://facq.reaumur.net

(Last Change 09:10 25/03/2006)

http://facq.reaumur.net/BreathingReminder

Introduction

Air is the first « body fuel » : you should never run out of !

As breathing is living, taking care of good and regular breathing is very important.

When spending hours on a computer, because of heavy concentration, breathing is often reduced, bad body positions are taken, dehydratation can occur, and so on... alos this ending in an excessive and unnecessary stress and tiredness.

BreathingReminderer is a *very* simple script to remind you, when spending long time in front of a computer, just to take care of you so that you can spend even more hacking hours :)

How it works

It just popup an friendly image at regular interval (default 2 min) and remove this popup after a small delay (default 1 sec).

Each time the popup appear, take a deep breath, try to feel happy, smile, check your body position and correct it if needed, also check if you need to drink (some water!) to rehidrate yourself and so on...

BreathingReminder is more a concept than a big program ! It works like a beneficial subliminal message.

Download

BreathingReminder-0.1 (18/03/2006)

Installation

This firt implementation is a simple command line script relying on xteddy et timeout, so you need to install them before.

For Debian : apt-get install xteddy timeout

For Fedora : install netatalk (timeout seems to be part of netatalk in fedora) and xteddy

Then run : BreathingReminder &

Suggestions

Launch it automaticaly at session startup.

For debian/gnome, go here : applications/desktop/advanced/session/startup programs/add

Other solutions : put it in you .xinitrc or .xstartuprc

Customize the popup picture picture to show something that makes you happy and relaxed : photographs of your laughing child face, wife or girl/boy friend, natural things (birds, bear,s stars, sun, trees, sea, moon...)

For public presentations you have the choice to not run BreathingReminder or at contrary, to teach your audience to deeply breath each time the popup arise : after a first surprise, they will be able to concentrate and listen to you for hours !

To Do / Contribute

rewrote BreathReminder as a gnome / KDE applet with full feature configuration interface (help ! i'm not a developper, i'm just a network admin!)
design a new logo ?
option to randomize geometry position
option to randomly choose a pictures
option to normalize picture size
option for quick picture tour (interval delay 1 sec)
list of picture or directories to search for pictures
Windows version
??? standalone (applet?) implementation from scratch or by modifying xteddy
??? found other simple popup programs like xteddy with no window focus grabbing

Licence

BreathingReminder is licensed under the terms of the General Public licence (GPL), version 2. For information on this license look at the source code that came with the software or see the GNU project page at http://www.gnu.org/

Testimony

Send me an email (facq@u-bordeaux.fr) if you feel BreathingReminder is good for you and you want to recommend it to others !

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