This is sweet. Now, my wife uses Apple's Find My's "Play Sound" as I'm perpetually on Silent DND and I sometimes do not see her calls (she is in the whitelist and is allowed to use voice calls).
I would like to narrate a personal story from the late 80s. I grew up in a multi-family where my uncles own a lot of vehicles, including the left-handed drive Jeeps from the World War era (India uses Right-Hand Drive). Our siblings were raised by our grandmother. After she finishes cooking lunch, she always have the problem of gathering us around to eat. We would have all gone to the locality and the neighbors to play. She was always frustrated and furious about our lack of timing.
So, I repurposed a truck's horn so she can just press a switch and blow the horn loud enough for us to hear across the neighbors. I had it on the roof-top for quite a while, even after she passed away the next year. Thinking about it now, I know it was pretty reckless. It was so loud, that other families would remind their kids that -- that is the Food-Time-Horn.
This may be the same thing as what you call the whitelist, but in case it isn't: on iPhones, you can mark some contacts as "Emergency Bypass On." Even in silent mode, you will always hear calls and texts from them. You can also choose sounds unique to that person. I have the bypass on for my fiancee, and I chose a pleasant, unobtrusive sound for her texts. I have found this works quite well.
Something I've found is that, in particular for calls, Apple isn't able to retain object permanence around contacts.
If I assign a contact a custom ringtone, I expect all devices to know that, especially if they're going to do the insane Apple thing where every.single.device.I.own rings at the same time.
I swear Apple thinks any call which hasn't been pre-selected for voicemail has world changing importance.
This is brilliant. I was today years old learning this trick. I will still maintain a whitelist for in-laws, business partners, and others (limit of 20). However, I will add this to the core family (wife, daughters, and home).
My mom used a referee's whistle. There were 5 of us and the number of toots indicated which of the 5 she wanted (two toots for me). If we were outside playing in the neighborhood, we'd get alerted directly or indirectly from someone who was tired of hearing the whistle.
If it was dinner time and she needed us all, she'd blow 'Shave-and-a-haircut-two-bits'.
My dad whistled between his teeth. He was a prodigious whistler. As I recall, it was two tones alternating. Too bad we never measured how far away we could hear him whistling, because now I’m wondering. I’d guess half a mile though.
We had a 6" bell hung next to the back door. The same type as in churches where a rope pulls to get the bongs. It could be heard from a looooong way off. If it rang and we couldn't hear it, we were too far away from what was allowed.
In the French countryside where my father is coming from, every house had an external bell for the diner/lunch whatever important call. You quickly learnt to recognize the different tones and ways to ring the bell.
My parents had also the bell at the bottom of the stairs... and as a father of 3, I understand all the parents having one!
My mother had a heart-shaped "triangle" (about a foot across, so much larger than an orchestral triangle) that she used to call us in when dinner was ready. As a kid who did not enjoy hauling wood, my hearing was exquisitely tuned to hear that bell.
We had a metal tube/pillar supporting the top floor of our self-made summer house and a piece of metal to strike it with. You could hear that for miles!
Here is a rudimentary alerting system I could write quickly in shell and execute on my laptop:
while true; do echo ok | nc -l 8000; for i in 1 2 3 4; do printf '\a'; sleep 1; done; done
While the above command worked fine on macOS with the default /usr/bin/nc, on Debian 11.2, I had to modify the above command as follows to make it work:
while true; do echo ok | nc -q 1 -l -p 8000; for i in 1 2 3 4; do printf '\a'; sleep 1; done; done
Now anytime someone connects to port 8000 of my system by any means, I will hear 4 beeps! The other party can use whatever client they have to connect to port 8000 of my system, e.g., a web browser, nc HOST 8000, curl HOST:8000, or even, ssh HOST -p 8000, irssi -c HOST -p 8000, etc.
If your port 8000 is already occupied, I recommend port 41327 as an alternative for this alerting service. After all, 41327 reads "ALERT" in leetspeak.
Indeed I am! HN readers are a fun group. I am receiving beeps almost every second, so I updated my previous shell script to keep a record of the connections netcat receives. Also, converted the beeping loop to a background job, so that the outer netcat loop does not have to wait for the inner beeping loop to complete before handling the next connection. Notice the '&' before the last 'done' in the improved alerting service below:
while true; do (echo ok | nc -q 1 -vlp 8000 2>&1; echo; date -u) | tee -a beeper.log; for i in 1 2 3 4; do printf '\a'; sleep 1; done & done
I use a wife alert: She Never picks up her phone, that is until I use Home Assistant to flash the lights and have the Sonos say (via HA's tts): "Pick up the Phone!". Very handy.
I know a family where the kitchen table lights turn green when their (temporarily) disabled son needs something and he is upstairs. My mom used to hit the radiator pipes with her wedding ring for that (in the opposite situation).
Remember the dude whose garage port opened and closed seemingly at random because his /toggle endpoint ended up in his browser's "most visited" list: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16964907 ?
I have a feeling the same thing could happen here.
That's why you have to use a POST request. GET should be read-only and a browser will not re-issue a POST for things like most-visited, tab restore, pre-fetch, etc.
Yeah, that's what the guy in the linked post is talking about. Various services (Skype/Teams, Slack, Twitter, etc.) will also send a GET if the URL is shared there. I once saw an accidental hotel booking triggered by Skype because the booking was performed through a GET request with a brazillion parameters.
Someone just moving by 1 centimeter in the corridor next to me or coughing in any bedroom (if I don't wear my headset) will do.
OH, a bird at the window!!
I'm still able to concentrate. By the way, what was I doing already?
(more seriously, I can progress and I am able to get things done and recover from interruptions quite easily, but almost never focused at a point I can't notice what is going on around me. Which suits me well actually)
I have the same thing, I can easily break out of code and get right back in to where I was, I can even pretty much do it with hours break, unless things are going very badly with the code in which case I cannot handle being interrupted.
I wonder if it's my ADHD that does it actually, I can handle quick changes of attention because after all that is what I do, but if things are a problem I need all effort to not switch attention and lose what I am doing.
Apple Watches have a cool Walkie-Talkie concept that could have worked well for this scenario.
I call it a concept though because the app as-implemented is unreliable and gets stuck in "Checking availability," "Trying to reconnect" every time you launch it. If you lower your wrist while it is trying to reconnect the app gets suspended and starts again.
So imagine standing there for sometimes up to a minute with your wrist extended while the Walkie-Talkie app tries to reconnect, all to hypothetically save time. It isn't workable. Which is a real shame because great concept on paper.
It's a feature used once and then disabled. It seemed cool back when we got our Watch 4s, but as pointed out, it seemed like someone's side project that somehow made it into production. Turns out, you could have just called in less time.
If it dings occasionally, it means your girlfriend is trying to reach you. If it dings continuously, it means she's breaking up with you.
Yes, I'm trying to be a little funny but the point is that (outside perhaps work?), you should probably be a bit more engaged with the people that mean something to you.
I really wouldn't assume too much about his situation.
My girlfriend has autism and when I want her attention I need to ask for it like 5 times over a space of 20 seconds, if I don't ask multiple times she will literally forget I even asked in the first place. Sometimes it literally takes a minute. This isn't because she doesn't care about me, it's just how her brain works.
Maybe this is just a better form of communication for him while he's focused on work. Please don't assume ill-intent, it just seems unnecessarily rude.
Out of curiosity, how does your girlfriend react if you just start talking to her without asking attention? (Reason I ask, occasionally I think I might be on the spectrum, and my SO has a habit of just starting to talk to me. Most of the time I miss the beginning, which annoys to no end my SO...)
I'm very happy that the people I care about don't require me to engage with them constantly. Engaging with them in chats are not the right type of engagement if you ask me. Maybe I'm old.
> you should probably be a bit more engaged with the people that mean something to you
If someone is neurotypical and fully functional... maybe? For someone who isn't, this is basically "try harder to be normal", with all of the guilt and judgement that implies.
For example: Telling a person with chronic clinical depression they have no reason to be depressed and are being ungrateful for having a successful career.
When I don't answer my wife just calls me through the Alexa which is the creepiest ring ever. The sound is so foreign and my hackles rise whenever Alexa does anything on its own so it gets my attention instantly.
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I would like to narrate a personal story from the late 80s. I grew up in a multi-family where my uncles own a lot of vehicles, including the left-handed drive Jeeps from the World War era (India uses Right-Hand Drive). Our siblings were raised by our grandmother. After she finishes cooking lunch, she always have the problem of gathering us around to eat. We would have all gone to the locality and the neighbors to play. She was always frustrated and furious about our lack of timing.
So, I repurposed a truck's horn so she can just press a switch and blow the horn loud enough for us to hear across the neighbors. I had it on the roof-top for quite a while, even after she passed away the next year. Thinking about it now, I know it was pretty reckless. It was so loud, that other families would remind their kids that -- that is the Food-Time-Horn.
If I assign a contact a custom ringtone, I expect all devices to know that, especially if they're going to do the insane Apple thing where every.single.device.I.own rings at the same time.
I swear Apple thinks any call which hasn't been pre-selected for voicemail has world changing importance.
For those looking, check this out https://www.igeeksblog.com/how-to-turn-on-emergency-bypass-o...
If it was dinner time and she needed us all, she'd blow 'Shave-and-a-haircut-two-bits'.
My parents had also the bell at the bottom of the stairs... and as a father of 3, I understand all the parents having one!
I had this exact problem until I scheduled my DND to automatically turn on during work hours and off afterwards. That has helped immensely
Your recommendation, depending on apps installed, could lower their quality of life. Proceed with caution, here.
If your port 8000 is already occupied, I recommend port 41327 as an alternative for this alerting service. After all, 41327 reads "ALERT" in leetspeak.
By the way, visit http://susam.net:8000/ right now to send me some beeps! :)
Am disappointed and my day is ruined
while true; do echo Coming! | nc -l 8000; for i in 1 2 3 4; do say "Lunch time!"; sleep 1; done; done
If you are on the client end of the equation and have ssh access to their mac: ssh user@host say "get your ** here right now"
I know a family where the kitchen table lights turn green when their (temporarily) disabled son needs something and he is upstairs. My mom used to hit the radiator pipes with her wedding ring for that (in the opposite situation).
I have a feeling the same thing could happen here.
OH, a bird at the window!!
I'm still able to concentrate. By the way, what was I doing already? (more seriously, I can progress and I am able to get things done and recover from interruptions quite easily, but almost never focused at a point I can't notice what is going on around me. Which suits me well actually)
I wonder if it's my ADHD that does it actually, I can handle quick changes of attention because after all that is what I do, but if things are a problem I need all effort to not switch attention and lose what I am doing.
I call it a concept though because the app as-implemented is unreliable and gets stuck in "Checking availability," "Trying to reconnect" every time you launch it. If you lower your wrist while it is trying to reconnect the app gets suspended and starts again.
So imagine standing there for sometimes up to a minute with your wrist extended while the Walkie-Talkie app tries to reconnect, all to hypothetically save time. It isn't workable. Which is a real shame because great concept on paper.
Yes, I'm trying to be a little funny but the point is that (outside perhaps work?), you should probably be a bit more engaged with the people that mean something to you.
My girlfriend has autism and when I want her attention I need to ask for it like 5 times over a space of 20 seconds, if I don't ask multiple times she will literally forget I even asked in the first place. Sometimes it literally takes a minute. This isn't because she doesn't care about me, it's just how her brain works.
Maybe this is just a better form of communication for him while he's focused on work. Please don't assume ill-intent, it just seems unnecessarily rude.
If someone is neurotypical and fully functional... maybe? For someone who isn't, this is basically "try harder to be normal", with all of the guilt and judgement that implies.
For example: Telling a person with chronic clinical depression they have no reason to be depressed and are being ungrateful for having a successful career.