Long ago and far away, me and JL used to use the ‘at’ command to schedule alarms to wake ourselves. We both had disturbingly large stereos connected to our PCs, and the advantage was you had to remember waht the mp3 player command was called so you could do a killall on it – if you really wanted to torture yourself, you could log out afterwords and then you’d have to log in, run killall mpg123, by which time you were at least approximately awake.
Well, it’s been a while.
For a long time, I didn’t have any sort of audio at all hooked to my linux machine. THen it was doing audio in tasks so it had a sound card, but the only jack in use was the input, and I feared having the output driven to the mixer that was feeding the input because linux is not always the most reliable OS in its choice of volume levels on the audio hardware..
Lately, I’ve been staying up way too late.. I think I’m a touch manic.. and there’s no one to remind me to take my pills until Kayti wakes up at 6 am or so.
I think I have a solution – I need to work out some of the bugs – but..
I hooked the new file/mail server to the audio input of the machine next to it via a jumper (until I can get another RCA -> 1/8″ that is long enough to handle the task of hooking it up to the DJ mixer that drives my Mackies and the little Rokit speakers – I should really replace this thing with a Big Knob, it would be better suited to the task it’s doing, but anyway..)
Then, I submitted a job via at. Two, actually – one for a few minutes from the time I submitted, to test my syntax, and another for 3 am, to remind me to take my pills.
Then, I started thinking of other cool things I could do with a linux server hooked to my speakers.
The most obvious is a text command that will support some additional features. Below, I’ve typed out a example of behavior (I’ll write this command RSN – probably meaning never – but it would be fun):
audioslave>play some roxette next
OK
audioslave>stop playback
OK
audioslave>play some roxette now
OK
audioslave>play joyride now
OK
If only I didn’t have to work. 😉
Maybe some other night.