This is an extension for Chrome and Firefox on Linux that notifies you about new content (such as unread messages) in pinned tabs, using one of your laptop's LEDs, like the power button on newer ThinkPads, or the ThinkLight on older models.
Most interactive websites, like mail and chat web apps, change the page title in order to indicate new messages. If that happens in a pinned tab in the background, the tab is highlighted in order to get your attention. With this extension, in addition, an LED will be used, in order to indicate that a pinned tab's title has changed. This is in particular useful, when the browser window is minimized or on another workspace.
In order to pin a tab, right click on the tab and choose "Pin tab".
blinklight consists of two parts, a browser extension that observes pinned tabs, and a native host application that controls the LED. In order for blinklight to work, both have to be installed.
A package is available from the author's PPA, which can be installed by running following commands (as root):
add-apt-repository ppa:s.noack/ppa
apt-get update
apt-get install chrome-blinklight
The next time you start Chromium or Firefox, the extension should be active, and the settings, where you have to set the LED and trigger, should pop up. If your browser is already running, restart it now. However, if you are using Google Chrome, you have to install the extension seperately from the Chrome Web Store.
In order to build the host application, you need a C compiler, autotools and the json-c development files. Given you have all of these installed, and you are in the project root now, run following commands:
cd native-messaging-host
autoreconf --install
./configure
make
Then, install the host application, by running following command (as root):
make install
Finally, install the extension for Chrome or Firefox, if not done yet.
During development, you can also load the extension directly from the
extension subdirectory in the source tree, this however, is not recommended
for normal usage.
The available LEDs in the options, are all LEDs exposed by the Linux kernel under
/sys/class/leds. Not all of them might work, some LEDs are exposed by Linux
even though they don't exist, or cannot be controlled in software, on your laptop.
A bug in blinklight isn't entirely impossible too. Or you just might want to
figure out the name of a particular LED, or vice-versa.
The easiest way to test the configuration, is to run following code from the developer tools console. While the tab is pinned and in the background, this should generate an event that triggers the LED, once a second.
setInterval(function() { document.title = Math.random(); }, 1000);