Re: [tlug] Ubuntu Facebook popups

[Curt Sampson <cjs@example.com>]

On 2019-02-12 09:42 +1100 (Tue), Jim Breen wrote:

> A couple of days ago I started getting popup Facebook notifications...
> Does anyone know what is generating them?

Your system is almost certianly using the standard Desktop Notifications
Specification.[1] You don't say what desktop environment you're using, but
if if it's XFCE, there's an `xfce4-notifyd` daemon running which handles
the notifications. You can run `xfce4-notifyd-config`, turn on its logging,
wait for your message, and then click the "Open the notification log in an
external editor" button (which for some reason looks like a printer) to
have OpenOffice (or maybe something else) pop up with something like this:

    [2018-12-05T14:34:08]
    app_name=Xfce4-notifyd settings
    summary=Notification Preview
    body=This is what notifications will look like
    app_icon=xfce4-notifyd
    expire-timeout=-1
    action-id-0=button
    action-label-0=Button

    [2019-02-13T16:17:50]
    app_name=google-chrome
    summary=cjs@example.com\nDarren - [tlug] FOSDEM 2019
    body=Saw a link to a talk (about Wikidata), and went up the URL to see what else was at this conference I'd vaguely heard of... It turns out to have enough open source talks...
    app_icon=/tmp/.com.google.Chrome.ekWHQY
    expire-timeout=0
    action-id-0=0
    action-label-0=Mark as read
    action-id-1=1
    action-label-1=Delete
    action-id-2=default
    action-label-2=Activate

That message from `google-chrome` is actually from the Checker Plus for
GMail plugin, so this isn't perfect, but at least you'll know what
application claims to be sending the messages. (I'm not sure how spoofable
this is.)

(And no, I don't actually read TLUG on GMail because GMail is utterly lame
about quoting messages; I just forwarded that to get a notification from
Chrome.)

If you're running something other than XFCE, there is probably a different
but similar system in place. If that system doesn't offer notification
logging or debugging, you can kill your current notification manager and
use `xfce4-notifyd` instead while you're debugging, though you may need to
appease your session manager if it wants to restart what it thinks should
be running.

[1]: https://github.com/0cjs/sedoc/blob/master/x11/notify.md

cjs
-- 
Curt J. Sampson      <cjs@example.com>      +81 90 7737 2974

To iterate is human, to recurse divine.
    - L Peter Deutsch