Ok, I rarely find any use of the Thinklight that's supposedly there to help you type in the dark (isn't the light from the LCD screen enough ?). Then, I came across this really cool pidgin plugin called pidgin-blinklight by Joachim Breitner that blinks the thinklight when you receive a new message. Honestly, that's the perfect usage, the light can possibly find, keeping in mind the fact that I hate my sound card to be disturbed when I am doing something serious, err.. watching a movie or playing a game i meant! I did feel the need to make some changes to the original sources. Notably, I wanted the light to blink until I do not see the pending message. Also, there was a silly path error that prevented me from writing to /proc/acpi/ibm/light as a normal user. I am also now linking against pidgin libraries unlike the original sources that link only to libpurple and so I thought it makes sense to provide the whole sources rather than a patch. You can find it here.
You can get the sources yourself by running
git clone git://code.makefile.in/git/blinklight
Note that the sources are quite beta but nevertheless they solve my purpose :)
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