Ryanware

Several years ago (3? 4?) I wrote a tiny little Windows application that plays an MP3 file at a specified time of day. That’s all it does. Nothing fancy. You have to select an MP3 file, type the time of day precisely (eg. “6:00 AM”), and check a little checkbox. I’ve opened up to 50 instances of the little app at a time and set them all manually to play some MP3 file at different times to ensure I’ll wake up. It works.

There are many applications out there that do alarms much better than this little thing, but I recently got an email requesting it so I thought I’d share. Heck, notwithstanding all the fancy alarm apps out there I still use this excruciatingly simple thing. The simplest solution isn’t always the best solution, but is often the most used.

Download the self-extracting exe file - 288 KB

I’ve received quite a bit of feedback on Time Thingy lately. A lot of people really like it and have some good ideas for it.

All of my applications started from something I wanted. A lot of new feature ideas come from things I need or want. So since I don’t use Time Thingy anymore, I’m not really sure what other people need or want. So I’m completely open to ideas. Do you have any suggestions? Comments? Jokes?

So why did I name it “Time Thingy” anyway? The reason is a great one. Really. Okay okay… I just couldn’t think of anything better. Actually, I probably gave it that name thinking it would be temporary, but never thought of anything else so it stuck. I wrote it beacuse I had way too many programs running in the system tray and wanted to get rid of the Microsoft clock, but still have a clock visible somewhere. I didn’t think it would be as popular as it is. People use it in ways I never would have thought of. No, nobody uses it to time how many bags of cheetos they can eat in 34 minutes. At least not that I know of anyway. Do you?

By the way… Real Passwords 1.5 was released a few days ago. I’ve buried it’s announcement with more posts so I might as well add another shameless plug in for it!

Real Passwords 1.5 has been released today!

Real Passwords was born of the frustration I found while trying to find a password generator that gave me not only good passwords, but passwords that weren’t impossible to remember. I’ve also tried to keep a lot of the confusion out of it. Because of this, it’s super easy to use for even the computer illiterate, while still powerful enough for advanced users! Oh yeah, it does those impossible to remember passwords as well. Just in case you miss them. Real Passwords works on Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP and requires only the minimum RAM and CPU power that your operating system requires (in other words if you have Windows and are reading this, you’re okay).

What’s new in version 1.5:

• Word Combination passwords
• Automatically copy to clipboard option
• Append to list option for generation multiple passwords
• Speed of password generation has been improved greatly (approx 30 seconds less on 10,000 passwords)

Read more about Real Passwords
Download Real Passwords now - 328 KB
Order Real Passwords now - $19.95