Two weeks ago I purchased my first wake-up call. It was late at night and I had a particularly important meeting the next morning that I really couldn't afford to miss. So I slapped "wake-up call" into Google and hit the first site that popped up. If I'm not mistaken, it cost me $1.20 USD for that call.
The second time I wanted a call I did a little more research and turned up a site that offered calls at $0.75 USD with a "snooze package" of three snoozes for an additional $1.20 USD or something. I used this site several times trying to work out how the different options work.
Then (as usual) I got frustrated by the fact that I was essentially paying to use somebody else's script when I could write one myself. I spent and evening getting cozy with the Skype API and finally (after quite a bit of hair-pulling) figured out how to get SkypeOut to call my home phone and play a sound file (in WAV format) to me.
This weekend I put the finishing touches on my new wake-up call script. I can now set a date/time and have my computer call me to either remind me of something or to wake me up. I could also do other, wacked-out things like have my computer monitor an inbox for an important email while I'm at the country and then have it call me and read (via Text To Speech) the email's contents to me over the phone. This morning I used the scheduling to wake up and it worked like a charm!
The only problem now is that Skype charges me $0.024 CDN per minute for each call as well as a $0.05 CDN connection fee for SkypeOut. Still, it's much better than the $0.75 USD which was the cheapest I had found before (that is, without a subscription).
The second time I wanted a call I did a little more research and turned up a site that offered calls at $0.75 USD with a "snooze package" of three snoozes for an additional $1.20 USD or something. I used this site several times trying to work out how the different options work.
Then (as usual) I got frustrated by the fact that I was essentially paying to use somebody else's script when I could write one myself. I spent and evening getting cozy with the Skype API and finally (after quite a bit of hair-pulling) figured out how to get SkypeOut to call my home phone and play a sound file (in WAV format) to me.
This weekend I put the finishing touches on my new wake-up call script. I can now set a date/time and have my computer call me to either remind me of something or to wake me up. I could also do other, wacked-out things like have my computer monitor an inbox for an important email while I'm at the country and then have it call me and read (via Text To Speech) the email's contents to me over the phone. This morning I used the scheduling to wake up and it worked like a charm!
The only problem now is that Skype charges me $0.024 CDN per minute for each call as well as a $0.05 CDN connection fee for SkypeOut. Still, it's much better than the $0.75 USD which was the cheapest I had found before (that is, without a subscription).
