
It started simple. My mom keeps forgetting birthdays and important dates. I wanted something that lives on her desktop, stays out of the way, and just... reminds her.
So I built a small animated desktop pet in Python.
Then I kept adding things.
What it became:
A fully animated desktop companion that lives on top of all windows, sits in the system tray, and has a chat assistant you can talk to in natural language.
You can say things like:
"birthday Tanya May 28" — it figures out the age, asks how to remind, done
"move meeting to June 1" — finds the event, updates it
"delete birthday Ani" — fuzzy search, finds it even with typos
Tech stack:
Python + PyQt5
JSON for local storage (no cloud, no accounts)
PyInstaller for the exe build
Everything runs locally in %APPDATA%
Some things I learned building this:
QCalendarWidget is a nightmare to theme. You can style everything around it but the moment you touch its internal table — visual artifacts everywhere. Solution: keep the calendar light, theme everything else.
Natural language parsing without ML is humbling. Lots of edge cases. "в час дня" should be 13:00, not 01:00. "meeting with doctor" should not become "meeting today doctor" because of a slang dictionary entry.
The result:
Mom has a pet on her desktop now. It works. She likes it.
GitHub: https://github.com/kaiCATs/pet-reminder
Open source, Windows, free. If you want a tiny animated friend on your desktop who actually remembers things — give it a try.
United States
NORTH AMERICA
Related News
What Does "Building in Public" Actually Mean in 2026?
20h ago
The Agentic Headless Backend: What Vibe Coders Still Need After the UI Is Done
20h ago
Why I’m Still Learning to Code Even With AI
22h ago
Students Boo Commencement Speaker After She Calls AI the 'Next Industrial Revolution'
5h ago

Testing for ‘Bad Cholesterol’ Doesn’t Tell the Whole Story
5h ago
