Soon after, I found Chime Time, by Hyperfine, which turned my tablet into an Aberdeen mantel clock. And I loved the idea of chimes and bells so much that I also installed Bodhi Timer, by Yuttadhammo, which can be set up as a timer and play a variety of tones, including singing bowl, when the time is up.
Chime Time starts up automatically when Android starts up. But Bodhi Timer does not, so I start it in the morning. I might set it to go off every 15 minutes starting at about 7 minutes after the hour (or any 15-minute interval afterwards), or every 10 minutes starting at 5 after the hour (or any 10-minute interval afterwards), depending on when I can remember to do it.
Having bells and chimes sound off every so often reminds me to live in the present. When I hear the sound I ask myself whether I'm using time mindfully.
However, my wife absolutely hates it.
Anyway, after enjoying this for a few days on my tablet, I wondered if there were something similar that I could use on my work computer. I didn't feel like running the tablet just to have it make noise.
That motivated me to search on SourceForge, where I found TeaTimer. But TeaTimer would pop up an alert box at the end of each interval because it was really intended as a timer for steeping tea. So I decided to write my own in Visual Basic 6.
I wrote a simple application that would simply play a WAV file whenever it was invoked. I chose chimes.wav from Microsoft Office, although I'm sure there's an equivalent from OpenOffice, as well. Then I set a job in Task Scheduler to call it every 15 minutes. There is a special trick to pulling this off, though, because while my program worked fine when invoked interactively, it refused to work when triggered by Task Scheduler.
I found the solution on the Microsoft Support website: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/86281.
Here's the source code in its entirety, comments removed for clarity:
Declare Function sndPlaySound Lib "WINMM.DLL" Alias "sndPlaySoundA" _
(ByVal lpszSoundName As String, ByVal uFlags As Long) As Long
Public Const SND_SYNC = &H0
Public Const SND_ASYNC = &H1
Public Const SND_NODEFAULT = &H2
Public Const SND_LOOP = &H8
Public Const SND_NOSTOP = &H10
'Here are explanations for the parameters: (removed)
Private Sub Main()
Dim SoundName$
Dim x%, wFlags%
SoundName$ = "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\OFFICE11\MEDIA\CHIMES.WAV"
wFlags% = SND_NODEFAULT ' Or SND_ASYNC
x% = sndPlaySound(SoundName$, wFlags%)
End Sub
