Jess needed a simple timer that would beep after 10 minutes, and asked if one shipped with OS X. Sadly, there isn’t one, and my first thought was to search VersionTracker for a timer. But I was feeling lazy and didn’t want to have to test 50 different crappy timers written in RealBasic and another fifty MyFirstCocoaApp projects. Also, I was feeling too cheap to shell out $50 for EnterpriseTimer.jar.

My next thought was to just echo ^G (the beep character) in Terminal after sleeping for 10 minutes, but how was I going to explain to Jess that you have to type ‘echo control-v control-g’ to put the beep character on the command line? So on a lark I tried typing ’say beep’ on the command line and it worked.

So here is your absolutely free 10 minute timer for OS X. Launch Terminal, which is the Utilities Folder inside your Applications folder, and copy/paste this line into the command line:

sleep 600; say beep

Hit return to start the timer. When it’s done, you can start another one by hitting the up-arrow and then hitting return. 600 is the number of seconds to sleep, and you can change this to be larger or smaller.

From across the living room I occasionally hear Jess’ mac saying ‘beep’ in the Vicki voice. It’s very cute :)

Filed under: lifehacking |
Tagged: commandline