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"Go to bed!" script
May. 19th, 2017 11:53 pmI sometimes have trouble getting off my computer at night. Or, more to the point, staying off it. There's always something I'll want to look up when I'm getting to bed.
I wrote a little program for my old machine that would fill its monitor with a full-screen window in obnoxious colours with a big message, telling me to go to bed. I made it as "stubborn" as I could, though there were still ways to minimize it. It was triggered as a scheduled task to go off every 10 minutes from 10 p.m. to 10:30, then every 5 minutes to midnight, then every 2 minutes until around 1 a.m.; every time it was triggered, it would stay up for a minute. The intention was to be annoying without making it completely impossible to look something up if it was really important.
It wasn't as effective as I'd have liked, because it was possible to make the nag go away -- too easy, really. And it didn't run under more recent versions of Windows.
So I've come up with a better version, which should run under any versions of Windows. It's a script using the AutoHotkey "language". One can change a variety of options: the message text, the colours, etc., as well as set whether it should be stubborn about keeping its windows in place. The configurable options are at the top of the file.
Please feel free to try it, and let me know what you think. All you should need to do is install AutoHotkey, copy the following text into a file with the extension ".ahk", and run the script.
I wrote a little program for my old machine that would fill its monitor with a full-screen window in obnoxious colours with a big message, telling me to go to bed. I made it as "stubborn" as I could, though there were still ways to minimize it. It was triggered as a scheduled task to go off every 10 minutes from 10 p.m. to 10:30, then every 5 minutes to midnight, then every 2 minutes until around 1 a.m.; every time it was triggered, it would stay up for a minute. The intention was to be annoying without making it completely impossible to look something up if it was really important.
It wasn't as effective as I'd have liked, because it was possible to make the nag go away -- too easy, really. And it didn't run under more recent versions of Windows.
So I've come up with a better version, which should run under any versions of Windows. It's a script using the AutoHotkey "language". One can change a variety of options: the message text, the colours, etc., as well as set whether it should be stubborn about keeping its windows in place. The configurable options are at the top of the file.
Please feel free to try it, and let me know what you think. All you should need to do is install AutoHotkey, copy the following text into a file with the extension ".ahk", and run the script.
( Here's the script... )
