Feature request: auto launch menu item(s) on boot

[zecoj]

It would be nice to be able to launch menu item(s) when NickelMenu is loaded at boot time. Perhaps via a flag in the menu item file to say that this item should be launched automatically.

[marnovdm]

I would also like a hook to attach scripts to waking the device, so I could automatically switch the device to dark mode at night. I looked for a cron option or existing hook to use but couldn't find it.

[shermp]

You might be interested in NickelDBus.

However, I've noticed that the NickelDBus version of NickelMenu is rather out of date, so I might have to do an update over my upcoming long weekend to bring NM up to date.

[marnovdm]

Thanks for the suggestion! I've actually looked into NickelDBus earlier today (I should have mentioned that!) but couldn't find a hook/event for the wake/sleep of the device or a cron-like feature but admittedly I only looked briefly so I might have missed it. I also couldnt figure out how to actually toggle dark mode from a script, otherwise I figured I could maybe even make a udev rule to trigger a script on the events I see in dmesg when I wake/sleep the device.

[shermp]

A lack of dark mode is a consequence of the aforementioned out of date NickelMenu in NDB.

As far as wake/sleep goes, I'm not sure how useful that will be. Sleep is probably doable, but waking (from suspend) may not be, because I believe Kobo's (eventually) go into a suspend mode that requires button/sleepcover to wake from, although @NiLuJe could say for certain how that works.

[marnovdm]

Ah oke then I misunderstood!

The idea behind the wake/sleep would be to hook a time check into it; if after 20:00 and before 07:00, enable dark mode. Otherwise, enable light mode

-------- Original Message -------- On 11 Jul 2023, 22:00, Sherman Perry wrote:

A lack of dark mode is a consequence of the aforementioned out of date NickelMenu in NDB.

As far as wake/sleep goes, I'm not sure how useful that will be. Sleep is probably doable, but waking (from suspend) may not be, because I believe Kobo's (eventually) go into a suspend mode that requires button/sleepcover to wake from, although @.***(https://github.com/NiLuJe) could say for certain how that works.

— Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub, or unsubscribe. You are receiving this because you commented.Message ID: @.***>

[NiLuJe]

I believe Kobo's (eventually) go into a suspend mode that requires button/sleepcover to wake from, although @NiLuJe could say for certain how that works.

Yeah, triggering a wakeup from suspend programmatically would require an rtc alarm (there's probably an internal API for that, though, as Nickel doesn't just call rtcwake (because that doesn't work without a patched rtcwake binary anyway ;p)).

On the other hand, doing something on wakeup, which is what I assumed OP meant here, is another thing entirely ;).

[marnovdm]

Yes, doing something on wakeup (custom script which checks time and enables/disables dark mode as required) is what I meant here. It seemed like wakeup event would be a sensible place to hook this functionality as it seems cron is not available.

[NiLuJe]

Because of the aforementioned "system is actually in suspend (or standby) 99.9% of the time" thing, a cron wouldn't help you anyway ;).

And the issue with standby is that it happens a lot (basically, after ~6s of inactivity, the device goes asleep), which means, if you can't discriminate wakeup from standby from wakeup from suspend, you'll get a lot of wakeup events.

[NiLuJe]

I haven't looked into that, FWIW, because when I'm working on this stuff, I'm the one triggering the PM entry, so doing something on wakeup is entirely transparent: the next line of code after the PM entry one is what will run on wakeup ;D.

[marnovdm]

I'd think a small script which only checks the time and current state of fhe display mode could be cheap enough to execute on each wake event, but perhaps I should just accept to do it manually which of course isn't the end of the world, it just feels a bit silly that you can't configure time based dark mode on native kobo. To me it seems like such an obvious feature to add :-)

[shermp]

I wonder if it would be possible to set something up with a QTimer?

[NiLuJe]

That reminds me that there's a fairly clunky way to detect wakeup events outside of Nickel, at least on halfway recent devices (Linux 3.0+), and that's by catching discontinuous clock changes on CLOCK_REALTIME via a TFD_TIMER_CANCEL_ON_SET timerfd.

If you like pain and low-level Linux timekeeping shenanigans, NanoClock does that. (It's even more unreadable because FFI! :D).

(To be clear: I really wouldn't recommend doing that. But you can ;p. Also, I may be misrembering how this actually behaves in practice ^^).

[shermp]

In NickelDBus, I should be able to connect to the following signals if any would help:

aboutToSleep()
resumingFromSleep()
resumedFromSleep()
aboutToPowerOff()
aboutToReboot()

[marnovdm]

resumedFromSleep() sounds exactly like the hook I was looking for. If I could trigger a simple SH script from that event which checks the current time and sets dark mode as needed this should work :-)