OK, so I've had a big problem lately with remembering to drink during the day. I teach at a university, but we don't have offices right now (long story involving poor planning/over-deadline building construction). So I don't have a desk right now; instead I live a bag-lady existence hauling a laptop, packed lunch and large bag of student papers in between several buildings on two different campuses. I do carry a water bottle, but given all the distractions, I often forget to to pull it out of the bag, and so by the end of the day end up dehydrated and cranky. (To top it off, we're in the desert, and humidity hovers around 25% most days!)
I was looking around for reminder apps for my phone, but I have it turned off and put away most of the day so it doesn't ring in class. I do use my laptop a lot during office hours and class, so I thought about setting an alarm, but that's so intrusive, and a repeating alarm like that is kind of a pain to set up to go off so frequently. So I was messing around with the Date and Time setting, and saw that you can click a box to speak the time aloud, on the hour or half hour. The Macs have a wide range of voices which have been part of the Apple software for years; they are normally used for text-to-speech helper apps. I hadn't played with them in a long time, and had completely forgotten there is a "bubbles" voice, which sounds like someone speaking in a gurgly way underwater. So now my computer makes a water-cooler gurgle every half hour, which is not too noticeable in class, but I think will be enough of a reminder for me....
