linux

Sometimes the function of my Caps Lock-key is inverted. I get lowercase characters when caps lock is on, and uppercase characters when caps lock is off. Every time this happens, I have to spend a good amount of time to search for the solution, which I have forgot since last time it happened. So to save myself this trouble next time, I write this blog post as a not to myself. Hopefully, someone more find it valuable.

If you are running Ubuntu on your desktop, you certainly have seen the ephemeral balloons that pop-up with notifications. These are designed to make you aware of something, e.g. that you have email, without interrupting your work with a window that you must close.

These balloons, also called bubbles, are shown by a notification daemon, that receives messages from other programs, queue them and presents them in a overlay for a short period of time. On Ubuntu (from 9.04) the notification daemon is called Notify OSD.

Many GUI programs use this desktop notification service to provide unobtrusive information about progress, events and such things. Wouldn't it be nice if you could send such messages from your own Bash scripts? Well, you can with notify-send.