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This is a little C program I wrote that chimes out the time every hour from your internal speaker. You'll hear a series of 4 beeps representing 1..12 in binary; a high beep for 1, low for 0. It helps if you're also running ntpd, so that it always chimes exactly on the hour. I mostly use it to determine when my watch has drifted out of sync.

For the Linux version, you have to add a cron job to start it at 59 minutes after each hour. Then, exactly when the minute advances, it will execute the beep program to play sounds and terminate.

I also decided to make a Windows version so more people could use it. This one runs in the background all the time, and plays the chime using the 2000/XP Beep call. Earlier Windows versions (95/98/Me) don't have a good Beep call, so they might sound funny.

You can just extract chimer.exe, and put it in your Startup folder so it starts with Windows. Kill it from Task Manager if it gets on your nerves.

And it's GPL'd, in case you feel like improving it or something.

For the lazy: here's a recording of 9:00.
Created By Paul Marks