Ruby Blink uses gems for Twitter, Facebook, and GMail to make simple use of the blink(1) by ThingM. Its current features are:

• Notify of new mentions on Twitter
• Notify of new Facebook notifications
• Notify of unread email on GMail

The various tools use different methods of authentication, and Ruby Blink uses a simple JSON config file to isolate these values from the code. A sample JSON file is provided to show the format. Twitter and Facebook OAuth tokens must be requested from the developers sections of those sites.

Currently, Ruby Blink assumes that the user has blink1-tool installed on their machine. It also requires that the user have Ruby installed, as well as the following gems:

• ruby-gmail
• mime
• fb_graph
• twitter

To install all these in one go, run gem install --no-ri --no-rdoc ruby-gmail mime fb_graph twitter (prepend sudo or rvm if necessary).

Ruby Blink also currently assumes that blink1-tool is in the user's PATH.

Once you've cloned Ruby Blink, copy sample_config.json to config.json and update the fields. Make sure your blink(1) is plugged in, and then simply run ruby ruby_blink.rb. The blink(1) will flash yellow, red, and blue, where the count of each color is the number of mentions, undread email, and notifications you currently have on the associated accounts.