I heard of the calendaring utility remind a while back, and always kept wanting to get around to using it, because my system for remembering when to do things is some combination of scraps of paper, datebooks (used for a while until about March each year), notes taped to the back of the apartment door that I stare at when stumbling out to work each morning, random text files and relying on my leaky and sieve-like mind tends to work about as much as you would expect.
A co-worker working on getting a frontend to remind called wyrd installed on machines at work prompted me this lazy Saturday morning to finally sit down and get it installed at home. In short, I'm impressed, because with about 10 minutes of looking at it after getting it installed I've managed to start doing useful things with it. Sure, I'm not using any of the more fancy features of it, but I've got a simple way to do about 99% of what I'd need to do.
Of course, dealing with my environment, I wanted something that would read my remind file out of my AFS home directory and send me an e-mail every morning at 6am with various reminders. This incantation works fairly well:
/usr/pkg/bin/k5start -f /local/kula/keytab.kula.cron -k `/usr/bin/mktemp /tmp/krb5cc_cron_XXXXXX` -q -t -u kula/cron@TPROA.NET -U -- /usr/pkg/bin/remind -q -g /afs/tproa.net/users/k/u/kula/.reminders | mail -s "Today's Reminders" kula@tproa.net
Which uses the ever helpful k5start to get credentials that are allowed to read my .reminders file out of AFS, running remind and then sending me mail. Call this out of cron at 6am and it seems to very well.