Creating a simple laptop notification
Tutorial – Desktop Bash
With Bash, keeping a task simple often means using several different tools that all do their jobs well. Here's an easy, effective way to create a notification for when your laptop is unplugged.
If you trawl forums where newbies hang out (like I do), you'll often come across people yearning to learn Linux and asking things like: "Where can I learn about [insert some technology here]?" "Some technology" being anything ranging from the very basic stuff, like "the shell" or "the filesystem," to the quite advanced, like "systemd" or "Docker."
That, I think, is the wrong question to ask and, hence, tutorials often get the answer wrong and center on one tool and one tool alone. This forces the creator of the tutorial to jump through hoops to be able to do everything they have set out to explain with that single tool. It can be taken to the extreme with the author writing about how you can use LibreOffice Writer to open a socket to a remote host – probably not the best way to get data from the network.
A better question may be what are the best tools to carry out this specific task? The answer is usually whatever is easiest and most effective, regardless of whether you have to use four or 40 different tools to achieve your aim. And even with an easy task, you often have to resort to several things in the Linux box of tricks to make sure the project is effectively tackled.
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