BellAqua released!

A record time for development, no doubt!

Actually, this is just the prototype.

BellAqua's purpose is to announce aloud the hour on the hour, like some feature I heard on a friend's computer once.  I hope to write a trivial GNOME Panel applet for this, which is definitely overkill. Here's the prototype though:

#!/bin/sh 

# by Richard Schwarting (aquarichy  gmail  com);
# 2009/07/10
# http://www.kosmokaryote.org

function calc_period {
    CURMIN=`date '+%M'`
    CURSEC=`date '+%S'`

    # I should learn how to calc things in the shell properly 
    export WAITSEC=`echo "(60 - ${CURMIN})*60 - ${CURSEC}" | bc`
}

echo `date`
while true; do
    calc_period;
    echo "waiting ${WAITSEC} second until next hour";
    sleep ${WAITSEC};
    CURHOUR=`date '+%l'`; # it should be hard to arrive here *before* the hour # %k for 24-hour, %l for 12-hour 
    spd-say "It is ${CURHOUR} o'clock";
    echo `date`;
done;

I'm not very good at bash shell scripting, so this could break a bunch of times, and might say the wrong hour, but I don't think it will (I reckon I'll probably over sleep instead!  Or, at least I hope this programme is as lazy as me).

It's GPL2 of course.

To use it, save to a file, run with bash, and forget.  You might consider setting it to run when you start, using System > Preferences > Startup Programmes (or whatever it's called in the English localisation) or however you like.