Poor-man's Bells

One of the things the Queen and I have been trying to do is get everyone on the same schedule and to have a family routine around that schedule... I stole a page from the monastic play-book and setup bells to ring at 0900, 1200, 1500, 1800 and 2100.  I had tried to find a simple little program that would let me do this, but there were none that didn't either cost $20USD or suck emensely, so I cooked-up a quick little batch file I run on our media-center PC:

@echo off
net use t: \\lnx-dc1\shared
t:\bin\nircmd.exe mutesysvolume 0
t:\bin\nircmd.exe setsysvolume 32768
"C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC\vlc.exe" --qt-start-minimized --no-repeat t:\sounds\bells.wav vlc://quit
net use t: /delete /y

So, all I do is have this little script execute via the Windows Task Scheduler at the desired times, and it works like a champ!

My thought was that the 0900 bell would be our official "start of the day" bell, the 1200 bell would be lunch time, 1500 would be mid-day, and 1800 is dinner.  At 2100, its time to head for bed.  One could easily use this method to create school bells for their home-school (to mark breaks, and such) or to mark the passage of the Liturgical Hours, etc...  And, its totally free.  I used NirCmd and VLC as well as a WAV of bells I found on-line.