Re: Diary Usage Poll (WAS) Re: enhanced diary mode?

[Sacha Chua]

Alan Shutko <ats@acm.org> writes:

> bothered with BBDB info yet, although it's on the list, since my
> phone has all that stuff.  (Still no way to sync the phone.)

I hooked my Nokia 5110 (yes, old phone) up to my laptop through a data
cable. Gnokii can talk to it and some other kinds of phones. Alamin is
a GSM SMS gateway that polls my phone for messages and sends me e-mail
from alamin+phonenumber@localhost. Gnus picks it up, splits it into
mail.text, looks up the sender's real name in BBDB, and uses that for
summary lines. E-mail replies get parsed by a Perl script that invokes
the alamin command to send text messages. Alamin queues outgoing
messages and tries sending it until it succeeds (eventually giving up
after a configurable number of tries). Of course, Gnus gcc:s all
outgoing text I send, so I have a nice, neat archive. I'm thinking of
sorting it by author and then by date. I used to have the numbers in
the subject, which made it really easy to have nice threaded displays,
but I moved the caller identification into the From: address and set
the subject to the first N characters of the message so that I can
browse easily.

I used xgnokii to extract the phonebook, wrote a Perl script to turn
that into an elisp script that created or updated the relevant BBDB
entries, and manually merged some of the resulting entries. Right now
I still add alamin+phonenumber@localhost addresses to the BBDB records
that have phone numbers, although I can probably write a Perl script
to munge my BBDB records (or do it in elisp, of course). I'd love it
if BBDB automatically handled that for me, but I think it only checks
name and net for Gnus integration.

I haven't written an elisp function to initiate voice calls, but
seeing as gnokii has a --dialvoice <number> argument... =)

Anyway, yeah, Emacs + cellphone is fun. <g>
-- 
Sacha Chua <sacha@free.net.ph> - 4 BS CS Ateneo geekette
interests: emacs, gnu/linux, wearables, teaching compsci