I've been running the N900 again for a few weeks since Skywalker suggested the anniversary event. Discovered that during the absence of the SIM, I'd made a little progress in my ill-conceived, poorly thought out, and even more poorly named, "Auto Speak Incoming SMS" project.

I found that I didn't need to write my own dbus monitor, a QueenBeeCon widget (beewidget? bwidget? whatever.) can listen for "IncomingSegment" and trigger running an arbitrary command. That command can look through the SMS database and retrieve the last one and pipe it to espeak. Only works part of the time, since it may take longer to populated the messages table with the latest message than it does for the widget to trigger the script, so it might read the second to last message instead. Or it might not do anything. Or it might read the last SMS at some other time.

Obviously it needs more work. And even more obviously, it's still a really stupid idea, because the number of situations you wouldn't want your phone suddenly to read a private communication from any arbitrary person with your phone number vastly outnumbers the number of situations where that would be useful. Unless you live or work alone in a cave, of course. And then it wouldn't work since you can't get reception in any decent cave -- been there, done that.

Nevertheless, I'm glad this commemorative activity was suggested, because I've had fun with both using the phone and messing with sqlite3 and the messages table.