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It looks like Seagate, one of the largest employers here in the North West, are going to tell over 900 workers at their Limavady plant this afternoon that the company is pulling out.

This would be a major blow for the area. So far there is only the news about an announcement online, but nothing concrete. Other sources are the Derry Journal and UTV.

The Derry News newspaper reported this morning that they learnt that Seagate has built an exact replica factory in Thailand where labour costs are significantly cheaper, and that there had been speculations about the future of the company over here.

I wonder what this will mean for the Derry plant. Didn’t they reduce their workers’ hours over the summer?

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Update: According to a friend of mine it’s normal that Seagate cut back the hours for a week in the summer. And apparently there’s talk about announcing an investment in the Derry plant.

Update 2: It’s been confirmed, Seagate Limavady is closing.

Earlier I came across a post on Lifehacker about gcalcli, a python script which provides a command line interface to Google Calendar. It lets you search and display your events, even quick add new ones from the command line. Here’s how I got it running in Feisty and Gutsy:

First we need 2 additional python modules. Download the latest version of GData and dateutil and extract them. Open a terminal, cd into the first extracted folder and enter

sudo ./setup.py install

Run the same command in the second folder. Both modules are now installed and you can download gcalcli. I extracted the script to ~/bin. Open the script in your favourite text editor and fill in your username and password. Save the script.

Test the script:

gcalcli list

If you see a list of your calendars after a few seconds, then congratulations. If not, go over the installation instructions again

Now to some examples on how to use the script:

• Search for events (matches whole words): gcalcli search <text>
• Display your events for a 6 day period: gcalcli agenda
• All events for October: gcalcli agenda 10/1 10/31
• Display detailed events: gcalcli --details agenda
• Quick add an event: gcalcli quick 'Lunch with Paul 1pm 10/4'

You can also display your events on the desktop with conky. Just add the following line to ~/.conkyrc:

${execi 300 gcalcli --nc agenda}

gcalcli can also pop up event reminders. The script uses gxmessage to display a window with the start time and title of an upcoming event. For this to work I had to install the gmessage package:

sudo apt-get install gmessage

To start the reminders use

gcalcli remind

You will now get a popup if an event is starting within the next 10 minutes. You can specify a different interval, e.g. gcalcli remind 30 will pop up a reminder half an hour before the next event. To run reminders in the background add it as a cron job.

See the gcalcli wiki for more options.