#Don't Miss It

Don't Miss It is a simple tool for polling a set of calendars and sending a notification (libnotify, marked urgency: critical) when the next meeting is in five minutes. Currently, only Google Calendars are supported.

I made this tool because I'm prone to missing meetings while "in the zone", and wanted a notification separate from existing calendar notifications that I could filter on, and make large and super obnoxious in the center of my screen. Makes it much harder to miss.

#Screenshot

Here's what dont-miss-it looks like on my machine, using wired-notify as my notification daemon and explicitly filtering for appname: dont_miss_it to make those notifications obnoxious.

#Setup

Authentication is done via Google's OAuth2 provider. To set things up:

1. Create a GCP project
2. Enable the Calendar API
3. Configure the OAuth2 consent screen
4. Create an OAuth2 client

This is all documented in these instructions.

Then, store the JSON-formatted OAuth2 client ID + secret in credentials.json alongside your dont-miss-it binary. You can also specify a path to this file with --oauth_credentials_file.

#Adding a new account

To add a new account, run:

./dont-miss-it --passphrase<passphrase> login <email>

Replacing <email> with the Google email address to authenticate with. It'll give you a URL to go to, where you can complete the OAuth2 flow and authorize the client. This will redirect you to a non-existent page on localhost, which will fail to load. Take the code query parameter and paste it into the terminal, then hit <Enter>.

This will create a new <email hash>_token.json file that is encrypted with the given passphrase.

#Running

To actually start the service, run:

./dont-miss-it --email=<email 1> --email<email 2> --passphrase=<passphrase> serve

This will decrypt the credentials for the given emails using the provided passphrase, and periodically poll all the accounts to keep track of the next upcoming event. It'll send a notification (via D-Bus) when the next event is less than 5 minutes away.

#Simulating a DON'T MISS IT notification

For configuring your notification daemon to your liking, it can be useful to simulate a DON'T MISS IT notification, which you can do with the following:

notify-send \
  -u critical \
  -a dont_miss_it \
  "DON'T MISS IT" 'Meeting coming up in 5 minutes'

#TODO

• Consider encrypting the credentials.json file as well
• Handle case of "polled late, event is happening now or in the near past" better
  • Perhaps by changing the notification text
• Make more customizable
• Add a systemd config, and maybe example configs for various notification daemons.