Make your own chimes
April 17th, 2008I just bought a Mac Mini. I love it. Apple spent a lot of time polishing OS X.
I configured OS X to create a chime, a 21-st century chime. In the Date & Time settings, I selected it to tell me the time every hour. At 6pm, a voice from the computer says, “It’s 6 o’clock.” At 10pm when South Park comes on, it reminds me by saying “It’s 10 o’clock.” The chime keeps me conscious of the time passing when I’m online.
I dual-boot Ubuntu on this Mac Mini. Ubuntu, unfortunately, does not have this chiming feature. However, I set it up in minutes. I installed festival, the free open-source text-to-speech synthesizer, as well as an American voice (I struggled to understand the British voice).
sudo apt-get install festival festvox-kallpc16k
Then, in crontab, I added one line:
0 * * * * echo "(SayText \\"Its`date +\%l` oclock\\")" | festival
Now I easily keep track of the time.
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