Mark suggested I upload my Emacs hack, so here is status.el.

You will need to build your own zenity with my patch applied. And, you will need to hack a couple of path names in status.el in order for it to work on your machine.

The doc strings in the code explain how to use it. There aren’t any interactive functions, just things that are usable from elisp.

I’d forgotten how fun it is to hack on Emacs.