Damn, I burnt my oatmeal again.
The concept of time is not something I have a great abundance of (anyone that has heard me play music can probably attest to this) and, quite often, I fail to be mindful of the time whilst cooking some delicious steel cut oats for breakfast.

If only there was some way to be reminded to check the stove after a certain amount of time; without having to purchase a Talkie Toaster. Yes, I know all about wind-up egg timers, but mine broke a week or four ago.

The Software Solution
In a nutshell, I needed a timer that will alert me when a set amount of time has expired. The easiest way to do this is to ssh into my (almost) always on media player machine and run

sleep 240; espeak "Hey Jezra, it is time to check the oatmeal"

Yea, it works, but what if I don't want to maintain an ssh session? It would be so much nicer if ,on my local machine, I could just run a script to send the time and text to the media player machine. Espeak, by the way, is a nice text to speech application.

Enter the Python
Using Python socket programming I wrote two pieces of software; one to listen and parse commands, and one to send commands from a user.

First is the code for the listener, which is launched at system startup

#!/usr/bin/env python
import socket
import subprocess
import sys

HOST = '' #we don't care about the specific hostname              
PORT = 5000 #pick a port      
'''define the Server class'''        
class Server:
    def __init__(self,host, port):
        #create and bind to a socket
        self.sock = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)
        self.sock.bind((HOST, PORT))
        self.sock.listen(1)
        
    def run(self):
        waiting = True
        data=""
        #get a connection created when the socket accecpts input
        conn, addr = self.sock.accept()
        print "connected"
        while waiting:
            # read a 4K of data from the connection 
            data = conn.recv(4096)
            if not data:
                # if there is no data, then we end the loop
                waiting = False
            else:
                print "received %s" % (data)
                #parse the data we have received
                result = self.parse_data(data)
                #send a response to the sending client
                conn.send(result)
        #close the connection
        conn.close()
        #run again to create a new connection
        self.run()
        
    def parse_data(self,data):
        try:
            #split the data into the seconds to delay, and the string to speak
            seconds,string = data.split(":")
            #what command do we need to perform?
            command = "sleep %s; espeak \"%s\"" % (seconds,string)
            #run the command
            subprocess.Popen(command,shell=True)
            return_string = "OK"
        except:
            return_string = "Error with data: %s" % (data)

        print return_string
        return return_string
        
        
if __name__ == "__main__":
    server = Server(HOST,PORT)
    server.run()

On to the sender

#!/usr/bin/env python
import socket
import sys
#what happens where there is an error?
def quit( message ):
    print message
    sys.exit()

#do we have enough args?
if len(sys.argv)==2:
    string = sys.argv[1]
    seconds = "0"
    
elif len(sys.argv)==3:
    string = sys.argv[2]
    seconds = sys.argv[1]
    
else:
    quit("sender requires 1 or 2 arguments, you passed %i" % (len(sys.argv)-1) )
    
#if we haven't quit, connect and send the data
HOST = 'player'  #what is the name/IP of the server we need to connect to
PORT = 5000  # what port are we connecting on?
#create a socket
sock = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)
#connect to the host:port
sock.connect((HOST, PORT))
#format and send data
sock.send("%s:%s" % (seconds,string) )
#get some data back
data=sock.recv(4096)
sock.close()
print data

The sender script was named ttsend and it resides in my ~/bin directory. Now when I'm cooking my oatmeal, I enter the command

ttsend 240 "It is time to check the oatmeal"

Since I will probably be more interested in timing things by the minute than by the second, an update to take minutes as input seems to be in order.

Now stop reading, and CHECK THE OATMEAL!