Friday, November 21, 2008

Software alert...

It's no surprise to my friends that when I recommend software It's usually related to Linux in some way. I have several friends and family who follow my blog, mostly to get updates about my mother but occasionally just to see how Don's mental health is... hehehe I can be a bit nutty at times I guess. It's nice to just point people to my blog when they ask, so how's your mother doing? Saves me the headache of repeating, not to mention when I'm at the hospital with her when the time comes I'll be able to just update one place instead of many...

My mother by the way is on a heavy dose of Antibiotics and is at home trying to recover from a bacterial infection she has in her lungs. She was hoping to be at the exercise class today (Friday) but I felt she was not quite ready to return so she's going to take the weekend to recover.


Now on to this software I found, well actually it's a well designed python script called "SPECTO" Specto is a desktop application that will watch configurable events (such as website updates, emails, file and folder changes, system processes, etc) and then trigger notifications. For example, Specto can watch a website for updates (or a syndication feed, or an image, etc), and notify you when there is activity (otherwise, Specto will just stay out of the way). This changes the way you work, because you can be informed of events instead of having to look out for them.

So if your running Linux Ubuntu like I am you can drop to a shell window, and type in 'sudo apt-get install specto' the application will then show up under gnome in applications/accessories.

I will post some similar windows applications as I find them since I want to have this sort of thing for my windows laptop. I am waffling on removing windows and replacing it with Ubuntu because it runs XP pro super slow even though it's a 2.8Ghz HP with 1Ghz of ram but there is some video editing software that runs really well on that laptop that is windows only so I've still not decided yet if i'm going to reformat... Maybe I will set up Dual Boot and use ntfs3g to access my winders partition again...

Enjoy!

2 comments:

Wout Clymans said...

Thank you for using specto and writing this nice comment :)

But you made one mistake, specto is written in python, not in perl.

Best regards,
Wout (specto developer)

Don said...

:) thanks for the heads up Wout, the word perl has been replace with the word Python and the link to wiki updated :) I must have been half asleep when I wrote this review...

Cheers!