Ytdyklly

Countless times over the past few weeks I have been notified about the low battery in my wireless mouse. Every time it wakes up from sleeping mode and reconnects over Bluetooth I get a notification. I have gotten hundreds of notifications. I do not want them and I do not need them. Yes, battery is low, but at 0% (as reported) it will go on for another week at least. The notification has no timer and will stay visible until I close it.

How do I disable this torture?

Realizing I might sound like a grumpy old man I am not going to replace my batteries that are good for another month as a workaround. I am running Ubuntu 17.10 with GNOME Shell. I have no clue what is causing this. Pointers and suggestions will be greatly appreciated!

UPDATE: It turns out the mouse ran for another ten days or so after the initial notification. With the OS constantly reminding me that it will soon stop working. Wasting fine batteries is not a very good design. People should care about that and have an option to turn the notifications off.

UPDATE 2018-10-22: I asked the question some time ago. The marked correct answer might not apply anymore. It appears to be a bug in the gnome-settings-daemon. See the report for updates revolving this issue: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-settings-daemon/+bug/1798166

OK, I hit the same issue. Reasons are similar; my Logitech M570 is fed on "dead" batteries as it lasts MONTHS on a very low voltage alkaline. So I use batteries in other things and keep the dead ones for my M570.

The best answer I've found was to lower the Power Plugins critical level warning. This way you can customise when it nags.

You need dconf for command line or dconf-editor for the GUI version (for GUI you'll need to do sudo apt-get install dconf-tools).

Setting is generically for batteries though, so if you're on a laptop or a UPS then you will be altering the warning levels for those, which may be non ideal.

For Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) go to org → gnome → settings-daemon → plugins → power. Alter the "percentage-low" setting to what you want. I changed from 10% to 4%.

It is not a perfect answer if you have a laptop, but it is fine for a desktop computer and better than filling landfill with batteries or being nagged.

You could use a script that closes the message as soon as it opens (with the delay of 0.5 seconds, it takes time for the message window to open).
This is not perfect, because it closes the last notification window in the window stack. Therefore there is a small chance to close the wrong notification if it appears at almost the same time as the one with the message summary "Mouse battery low".

Dependancies:

sudo apt install python-dbus wmctrl -y

This one is for xfce. You'll have to tweak it for gnome, if that is what you use.
For xfce next command closes the last notification window:

wmctrl -i -c $(wmctrl -lx | awk '/xfce4-notifyd.Xfce4-notifyd/{print $1}' | tail -n 1)

awk filters the window(s) with the window class xfce4-notifyd.

For mate-desktop window class is mate-notification-daemon, I'm not sure for Gnome.

Change that line for your DE in the script.

Save next script, make it executable and set it to run on startup.

#!/usr/bin/env python

import glib

import dbus

import os

import time

from dbus.mainloop.glib import DBusGMainLoop



def close_notification(bus, message):

  keys = ["app_name", "replaces_id", "app_icon", "summary",

          "body", "actions", "hints", "expire_timeout"]

  args = message.get_args_list()

  if len(args) == 8:

    notification = dict([(keys[i], args[i]) for i in range(8)])

    if notification["summary"] == "Mouse battery low":

       time.sleep(.5)

       # Adapt next command for your DE

       os.system("wmctrl -i -c $(wmctrl -lx | awk '/xfce4-notifyd.Xfce4-notifyd/{print $1}' | tail -n 1)")



loop = DBusGMainLoop(set_as_default=True)

session_bus = dbus.SessionBus()

session_bus.add_match_string_non_blocking("type='method_call',interface='org.freedesktop.Notifications',member='Notify',eavesdrop=true")

session_bus.add_message_filter(close_notification)

glib.MainLoop().run()

I never used bluetooth mouse, but if I click on its icon, it gives me plugins options. There is a power management plugin among them. Perhaps disabling it may help.