/memo

Under development

Primary LanguagePythonMIT LicenseMIT

Memo

memo is a small python+shell project aimed at passive and delicate expansion of the user's vocabulary. It harnesses notify-send to show <phrase-translation> pairs on the screen, a systemd unit - to start the program on boot, and anacron - to regularly auto-update the vocabulary from a public collection on translate.yandex.ru.

Яндекс Переводчик allows one to collect favorite translations, amend them, and, most important, make them public, thus, available for automated download.

Installation

  1. Clone the repository
    git clone https://github.com/lukoshkin/memo.git
  2. Cd to the project folder and run the installation script
    ./install.sh <path2vocab/collection_id>,
    where as the only argument one specifies the path to their vocabulary
    or the public collection id on translate.yandex.ru

For full functioning (namely, to stop showing word pairs when the user is idle),
it needs xprintidle installed. On Ubuntu, one can install it with

sudo apt update && sudo apt install xprintidle

Removal

sudo systemctl disable memo.service
sudo sed -i '/update-dict.memo/d' /etc/anacrontab

Troubleshooting

  • For some laptops, it is not enough to export just DISPLAY variable in the systemd unit file, and DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS is also required. In this case, one pastes their value of the latter variable
    (check it with echo $DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS) in the generated after execution of install.sh script memo.service file, on the same line as the former variable, separating them with a space.

    For example,

    Environment="DISPLAY=:0" "DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS=unix:path=/run/user/1000/bus"

  • Due to an unknown bug in notify-send, the next notification after the user becomes inactive hangs. That does not prevent the program from operating. That is, after they click or press a key, it will show all the notifications it was going to but could not. A remedy option suitable only to a few laptops would be making the opposite to the point above. In other words, if the aforementioned problem is not a problem, then it is the remedy.