I call my "timer" a "nagger" and use it via a shell nagme() function. Takes care of certain ADHD traits which were previously causing "refocusing" during unpleasant tasks, like emptying the washing machine (half or less clothes would go to the dryer and half would stay in the washing machine while I'd switch to other task). I learned to only turn off the nagger after completing a task and it works.
It's used not just for time-sensitive tasks but also not to over-engineer stuff during hyperfocus.
nagme () {
[ "$#" -ne 2 ] && printf "usage: $0 [in_minutes] [text]\n" && return 1
printf "sleeping $1 min before telling you to $2\n"
sleep $(echo $1\*60|bc)
espeak "$2" > /dev/null 2>&1
while :
do
sleep 30
echo -n '.'
espeak "I'm nagging you to $2" > /dev/null 2>&1
done
}
This reminds me of a feature I had enabled on my previous computer but hadn't enabled on my current one yet: having MacOS announce the time on the hour. Sometimes it would scare the crap out of me, but it was effective at breaking me out of the periodic trance state that's so easy to fall into. I think I'll enable that again...
I despise church bells. Hourly is bad enough but every 15 minutes? Imagine if any other entity decided they could just blast their theme song loud enough for the entire town to hear every 15 minutes. There’d be immediate uprising.
I grew up living next to a convent, and the nuns who lived there had a bell that would be rung every hour.
After moving away from that house I would sleep incredibly badly, and I always wondered if I was waking throughout the night "surprised" at the absence of the bell, which I'd otherwise heard every day of my life.
Which type do you recommend? The two combos I had bought generally didn't work: they could only dry a very very limited load (less than a half). A standalone dryer turned out much more effective.
> Our family just bought a new washing machine and dryer. We didn’t have a very good one so we spent a little time looking at them. It turns out that the Americans make washers and dryers all wrong. … We’d get around to that old washer-dryer discussion. And the talk was about design. We ended up opting for these Miele appliances, made in Germany. … They are really wonderfully made and one of the few products we’ve bought over the last few years that we’re all really happy about. These guys really thought the process through. They did such a great job designing these washers and dryers. I got more thrill out of them than I have out of any piece of high tech in years.”
As a professional laundry engineer, I second this notion. If I'd buy Miele for our 24/7 80ton/month laundry plant, - I'd expect it (with tech on site) to start breaking up on start of 3rd year. With every other brand they start by start of 2nd year. The problem with them isn't the price (5x the usual) but how they lock up every little replacement part and force you to pay for service for everything.
I have one, and it’s an excellent machine (15 years old, no sign of wearing out), but the dryer is fairly lacklustre. It can only dry about half a full washing load, but I suspect that’s just physics: however much a machine can dry, it can wash more.
We air-dry everything anyway, so it’s not a problem for us, but I wouldn’t want one somewhere that relied on machine-drying a lot.
we generally have more space in the US than Europe/Asia so we don't need it and having them split means you can do more loads of laundry at once if you're the type to do all your laundry in one day.
Also early ones were much more failure prone and harder to work on (though manufacturers have pretty much abandoned that metric for consumer machines these days anyways unless you're spending lots extra for it).
Quite similar to what I wrote a few days ago to remind me when my water should be boiling. Decided to use swaynag(1) since my sound could be on mute or speakers off:
It's used not just for time-sensitive tasks but also not to over-engineer stuff during hyperfocus.