One of the physical therapists in my office wants to get or create something for his patients who work at computers that would alert them & remind them to get up and stretch every, say, half an hour.
Is there something simple that would do this? Anything that would help, for any OS, would be helpful.
You could do it with MS Outlook, I guess.
But it would be really bloody annoying.
The easiest way would be to set a reminder using MS Outlook. Basically you set a recurring appointment for every 30 minutes, or a daily appointment and snooze it every 30 minutes.
I’m sure a more savvy XP guy can recommend something that’s inherent to the OS and uses it’s own scheduler.
The third option would be to write a fairly simple script, which a programmer would have to do. That’s outside my skills.
From the first page of Google results searching on reminder stretch computerhttp://www.paratec.com/
http://www.workpace.com/
http://www.stretchminute.com/
Looks like they’re all available in Windows and Mac versions.
:smack:
Thanks!
Cheap & crude option…copy the following into Notepad:
:START
START/min sndrec32 /play /close %windir%\media\ding.wav
ping -n 10 127.0.0.1
goto START
Save it as ‘reminder.bat’ (or anything ending with .bat) on the desktop. Then just doubleclick the icon to run it.
‘ping -n 10’ has it set to repeat every ten seconds, so you can change this to whatever you want. And you can change the ‘%windir%\media\ding.wav’ section to point to a different sound file.
Ooops, forgot the crucial phrase: “On a Windows computer…” 
There’s a freeware utility called “wav.exe” which you can find on this page. Record a message saying “Get up & walk around!” or what have you, then in the windows “Control Panel” create a scheduled task to run “wav.exe get-up.wav” or whatever you called it.
I think it would be fairly trivial to write a small program that could play a sound at a regular interval.
Some monitors have this built in, too. We shipped a new set of computers out to all the branches a while back on a contract I was working on, and they kept locking up on a blank screen every hour on the hour. Got to be annoying as all get out, and generated a great many calls to the help desk. Anybody who wanted to get any work done figured out how to defeat it.
I should have mentioned - the various unixes & linuxes all have command-line sound utilities (assuming the end-user has the correct stuff installed). You could also write a trivial bourne-shell script that does:
#!/bin/sh
PLAYSOUND=/path/to/whatever/soundplayer
SOUND=/path/to/soundfile
while [ true ]
do
sleep 1800 #or however long...
$PLAYSOUND $SOUND
done
If you want to do it the fancy way, you could use the command scheduler (on Windows NT/2000/XP).
This link describes how to use it (scroll down to command scheduler) . To play the sound, use the command GorillaMan suggested:
START/min sndrec32 /play /close %windir%\media\ding.wav
Now, if you wanted to be fancy about it, you could write a nice cross-platform app using SDL. It would take a little C programming, but would have the benefit of being (almost) write-once-compile-anywhere. Given the small set of requirements, you could probably knock it together in less than a day.
On any *nix, use cron.
May I request you to add another line or whatever many that are required to the above program so that I can set the time upto which or the duration of this reminder.
Thanks and God Bless you!
It can be done with this quick and dirty method, but it’s a bit weird. The black screen that pops up can ask you how many minutes you want. (Stopping at a specified time is a bit more complicated.)
@ECHO OFF
set /p n=Please enter duration in minutes:
set /a n*=6
:START
START /min sndrec32 /play /close %windir%\media\ding.wav
ping -n 10 127.0.0.1 > NUL
set /a n-=1
If Not %N% == 0 Goto START
Or if you just want to be able to set it only once in the file itself, try
@ECHO OFF
set n=8 'minutes
set /a n*=6
:START
START /min sndrec32 /play /close %windir%\media\ding.wav
ping -n 10 127.0.0.1 > NUL
set /a n-=1
If Not %N% == 0 Goto START
Change the “set n=” line to whatever number of minutes you want.
Or you could just go with an oven timer…
There’s freeware out there that does exactly what you want it to do. A former coworker used it. Every 45 minutes or so it would interrupt her work and lead her through a bunch of little stretches. It runs on every platform and is extremely customizable. It also has a snooze button. Unfortunately I can’t remember the name of it. But I googled on “freeware exercise reminder” and came up with a bunch of hits. This isn’t it but it looks similar.
No need for that fancy coding that just beeps.
I’m guessing that the person in question found a solution or is no longer watching this 4 year old thread…
satheb’s request is recent, though.
It is nowhere near fancy coding. There’s a reason it’s called a quick-and-dirty method. I mean, you’re relying on DOS (well, the command shell) and pinging your connection for 10 seconds. It’s a kludge.