Adding a social element to exercising is always fun. I was always more into running, swimming or doing free weight personally. I keep the free weights at home so I don't have to go to the gym. A bit lazy that way :P.

The script is there for your convenience. I will not take offense in if you don't use it. It just will patiently wait for you if you change your mind ;).

My body doesn't respond to free weights, at all. It also doesn't respond to cake so I can't complain. I installed a pull up bar in the kitchen door frame that I use from time to time because I figured it's cheaper to lift myself rather than buying all those weights, and for lighter weights I filled two Pet bottles with sand but I can't motivate myself to do any sort of exercise by myself. But throwing around 'human weights' is fun, we have all kinds of people from a 48 kg woman to a 100 kg guy, a while ago we even had a German giant who weighed in at 117 kg, sadly he isn't around anymore. My neighbor also has some interesting ideas for training, a couple days ago he asked me to trample around on him as hard as I could, as a human trampoline so to speak. Good for abs, he says. After that, I punched his stomach for 2 minutes at full force, he could have easily taken more abuse but I was gassed out. I've been playing too many computer games these last couple months and have neglected the physical realm we live in, gotta change that again.
Once it gets warmer, there's also a beautiful lake nearby that I like to swim in but only if it's at least 16 C, right now it's still 12 C and that's too cold for me. When you swim out into the lake, it feels like playing Silent Service (minus torpedoes), there's all these fancy people with ships out there trying to run me over, unsuccessfully so far.

I might resort to your script but I realized I'm more curious as to whether it actually works and less in need of an alert system as I don't need any more games. Frankly I don't need any games at all but I spent 10 years virtually game-free so this is something of a nostalgic relapse phase. And those GOG sales aren't exactly helping :D

It should work. It queries the same page the main page queries, and then parses the response for specific regular expressions. If it finds them, it opens a webpage. If not, it tries again after X seconds.

Yeah, it's tested. I tried inserting/removing regexs pertaining to the current promo at the time and it would properly trigger the alarm when it was supposed to.

At this point, it's been running on my laptop almost continuously (minus commute) for over a day and no crash. It handles the occasional lack of response or error response from the GOG server properly by printing it onscreen and continuing to poll the server.

The code is quite simple and to the point.

Awesome! Wish I had noticed this last night. ;o) Hopefully it will work, or work with minor tweaks during the next Insomnia Promo though too! Either way, cool of you to create it and share!

Sorry for not replying to this earlier. Yes, I intend to update the script when the next insomnia promo pops up assuming I'm not stranded somewhere without internet access :P. Otherwise, anybody with even a cursory knowledge of Python would probably manage to update it.

*Bump*

First, thanks a lot for it. Now, well, I don't know a lot in programming... please, can you simply tell me how to launch this ?

What is your OS?

Of course:

1) In the Github repository, click on the "Download Zip" link and unzip the script.
2) Install Python 2.7: https://www.python.org/
3) Edit the script (called "FlashPromoScript.py") with any basic editor (notepad should do the trick in Windows, gedit should do the trick in Linux):

On the 10th line, you'll see: PATTERNS = [...]

Change the list of strings between the brackets to reflect games you are interested in.

You don't need to put the whole titles, just enough of it to uniquely identify the game. Caps don't matter (the lookup is case insensitive).

4) Run the script:

In Windows, I believe you should be able to just double-click on the script after installing Python to run it (the Python installer should make Windows associate all .py files with the Python interpreter).

Alternatively, if you are familiar with the command prompt, you can just type the following in the directory of the script: python FlashPromoScript.py

Windows 64 bits
I downloaded Python here : https://www.python.org/
But I'm not sure doing well in launching it... I tried to launch it with command line (cmd), but I get an error "SyntaxError : invalid syntax" on line 83. So I think I'm doing something wrong ^^"

Thank you very much for this clever script! :D


@Splatsch: I managed to run it by simply double clicking on it after editing it.

This appears to have been the problem : I installed a too recent version ! (v3.4.3)

Is it possible to have an alarm simply for each time a "new" game is on sale ? (I mean a game is remplacing the one which was actually on sale)

I launched it (double click seems ok) and now, I have a black window opened (with a blinking cursor) : is this the script correctly running ? (I made a screenshot)

Thanks a lot for the help you all, that's very kind :)

Yes, but you'll have to change the script to do that.
As it is, I think the script will halt after the notification, and you'll have to restart it again.

It seems so. If you see nothing, the script is happy. If you see text there, its the script complaining. :-)

Launching the script again isn't really a problem, my concern was to "detect" when one game is changing. But in "pattern" section, I guess I must put ALL the game's names for doing this ?

And more general question : the script closes each time it detects something ?

Okay :)