@screwtape
Hello, I see you are an Emacs hacker. My system lacks dbus and,
thus, notifications-notify doesn't work.
Could that be mimicked with Herbe called in an async way,
and play(1) from sox?
My alert script almost works like notify-send but without
dbus:
#!/bin/sh
play 2> /dev/null -q -v 1 "$HOME/.sounds/msn/type.wav" &
herbe "$@"