Posts Tagged ‘msn’

PidginTwitterPy

Wednesday, July 9th, 2008

If I had a radio advert it’d go something like this.

Hey you! Yeah you! I messaged you on msn and you never got back to me for like 40 minutes. Oh you were away, <sarcasm>that makes it ok then!</sarcasm>.

Never heard of pidgintwitter? no? NO? What is it? Well I’ll tell you, it’s a program written in python which listens to messages coming in on pidgin, when your away, and forwards them to a twitter account. Using a second twitter account you can receive updates on your mobile phone.

Maybe a little too much detail :/

So I’ve give it a name. Latest (and final) version is done. Now includes a ban list of people who’ll only be know by their email address and a daily limit for messages. Get it here. Read about it here.

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Posted in Programming | 263 Comments »

IM to SMS Part II

Thursday, June 19th, 2008

Since the previous post on this subject I came across twitter which allows users to be updated by their friends “tweets”, essentially short blog posts of less that 140 characters. The interesting feature is that you can submit and receive updates from your mobile at normal text messaging rates.

The model goes that if account ‘A’ is updated then mobile on account ‘B’ gets a text message. What’s really great is developing applications to work with it is made easy by the open api.

My previous solution only allowed for very short truncated messages in amongst text formatted as a reminder. Twitter however would allow me to send messages up to 140 characters and it would be much quicker than setting up a google reminder to go off in one minute.

So after a little messing with python, dbus and pidgin I give you version 01a. As of yet it hasn’t got a name so drop a comment and help me name my program!

The only downside so far is being in the UK limits me to only 250 messages a month from tweeter, but I’ll just switch plugins to the gSMS based one if I run out. At the moment it’s command line so don’t expect a GUI. Usage is simple run it and your prompted for your twitter username and password. Once it’s running all messages will be forwarded to your mobile when your status isn’t set to ‘available’.

Naming suggestions so far:
TwitterPy
SMS-PidginPy
tweetymcpigeonsnake

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Posted in Programming | 194 Comments »

IM alerts to my mobile for free!

Monday, June 16th, 2008

Right so I was looking for a solution to divert my IM’s to my phone and I came across gSMS. It’s a plugin for pidgin (previously GAIM) which is my client of preference. The clever bit is gSMS uses google calendar’s alerting system to send texts to your mobile notifying you if you have received messages. You need a google calendar and texts alerting enabled, which is free to set up and free to receive.

It works by setting an event to occur in 6 minutes time with an alarm 5 minutes before the event. The message is then set as the title of the event. Unfortunately this means the messages can only be reasonably short in length (so no sending me War and Peace) and you also receive a load of tripe about a reminder and the time.

Perfect! I thought, the problem was that is only tells you that you have new messages and who they are from not what they were. So I grabbed the source and messed with it a little and tada! Now my messages, when my status is set to away, get sent to my phone! Get in touch by email (email@tomhodson.com) or leave a comment if you want it released and I’ll inquire with the original author.

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Posted in Programming | 320 Comments »

Pidgin

Sunday, May 11th, 2008

Pidgin with spell checking

Kids who can’t spell get pidgin

As a Linux user Microsoft doesn’t provide a client to log on to msn messenger. This is where a program called pidgin comes in. It’s a multiple platform multiple protocol messaging client that supports all the protocols I’ve heard of and then some. The knave of all skilled occupations it seems.

But as the phrase goes master of none. It lacks many of the features I’m used to on msn such as handwriting support and personal messages. But these features are in development. So after downloading, patching, compiling, wiping my entire contact list, adding my entire list again, some more compiling, sleep, more compiling then finally just deleting my account out of the list and adding it again and all the problems were fixed. Success!

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Posted in Programming | 260 Comments »