I 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.