Weekly alarm that plays every hour in a set period?

[terrypin]

I may be making heavy weather of this, but although I've used MX Pro's neat alarm macros frequently for years, this one has me struggling to configure. I want a weekly alert every Monday at 1 pm and then every hour until 8 pm that day. Life's too short to re-invent stuff, so has anyone here set an alarm like that please and happy to share? Or is it only possible with multiple macros?

 

BTW,  is there still an internal 'sounder' in modern PCs? Like the one that I recall gave coded 'beeps' when boot-up failed due to serious faults? If so, can MX Pro play it, so that I'll still get alerted when my speakers are not switched on?

[Cory]

I'm on vacation so I don't have time to look more but I'll toss out what came to mind.

Whenever I've had trouble finding a way to schedule something in MEP, I've often found that I could do more with the windows scheduler from which, you can run a macro.

I did make a series of tones for an alert like you are describing once. It was a long time ago and I can't remember how I implemented it, probably command line batch file, but it used MIDI tones. 

Sorry I don't have more to offer you now.

[acantor]

Hi Terry,

I haven't messed with scheduling macros too much, but a quick look at the Macro Express user interface persuades me that you'll need two separate macros to pull this off.

When I first started using Macro Express, I experimented with scheduling macros, but my recollection is that the scripts sometimes failed to trigger at the appointed times. But Macro Express has come a long way since then. And I was probably using Windows 95 or 98, both of which had a lot of quirks. Hopefully scheduling scripts have become more reliable with the passage of two or more decades.

[terrypin]

Thanks guys, appreciate both fast replies. I'll take a look at Task Scheduler if MX doesn't cut the mustard.

 

Without sound (a serious downside) I suppose I could settle for leaving the alert message displayed for those hours. Surprisingly even that did not work on first attempt. I entered an arbitrary value of 18 in the 'Stay on screen for'  box, and assumed that the following two-liner would display the message for that time.

 

Sound File: Alarm-Beeps.wav
Text Box Display: Action

CODE
<SOUND FILE File="C:\\Users\\terry\\Sounds\\Sound Effects\\Alarm-Beeps.wav" Wait="FALSE" _PROMPT="0x0007"/>
<TEXT BOX DISPLAY Title="Action" Content="{\\rtf1\\ansi\\ansicpg1252\\deff0\\deflang2057{\\fonttbl{\\f0\\fnil\\fcharset0 Tahoma;}}\r\n\\viewkind4\\uc1\\pard\\qc\\b\\f0\\fs72 Action alert\r\n\\par }\r\n" Left="390" Top="485" Width="783" Height="421" Monitor="0" OnTop="TRUE" Keep_Focus="TRUE" Mode="\x01" Delay="18"/>

 

But no, it seems a delay of at least that duration is also needed:

 

Sound File: Alarm-Beeps.wav
Text Box Display: Action
Delay: 30 seconds

 

Maybe I'm being over fussy? But a regular Text Box Display needs to be manually dismissed before the macro continues. Yet with this option it apparently continues regardless.

 

Enjoy your holiday, Cory.

[acantor]

I've struggled when trying to close Text Box automatically after a certain number of seconds. This approach does seem to work:

 

Quote

Text Box Display: Hourly!
Delay: 1000 milliseconds
Text Box Close: Hourly!

<TEXT BOX DISPLAY Title="Hourly!" Content="{\\rtf1\\ansi\\ansicpg1252\\deff0\\deflang1033{\\fonttbl{\\f0\\fnil Tahoma;}}\r\n\\viewkind4\\uc1\\pard\\f0\\fs20 \r\n\\par \\fs14 \r\n\\par }\r\n" Left="Center" Top="Center" Width="278" Height="200" Monitor="0" OnTop="TRUE" Keep_Focus="TRUE" Mode="\x02" Delay="5"/>
<DELAY Flags="\x02" Time="1000"/>
<TEXT BOX CLOSE Header="Hourly!"/>

 

 

[terrypin]

Yes, both of those work, but to me they were not immediately intuitive.

 

However I suppose they have to support the situation when we want the message to be displayed for a certain maximum time, and then other commands run without the message. Including perhaps other Text Box Display commands.

[rberq]

7 hours ago, acantor said:

but my recollection is that the scripts sometimes failed to trigger at the appointed times. But Macro Express has come a long way since then.

 

I'm not sure the scheduling has come a long way.  I have a couple alerts:

 

The first one is scheduled much like terrypin's, to run at 18:30 Monday through Friday.  Once in a great while it does run at 18:30, but usually it just runs when Windows wakes up from sleeping, regardless of time of day.  However, wondering and watching for whether it will run or not is kind of a reminder in itself, so I guess it's not a total failure.😋

 

The second alert is very reliable, but only because the macro is scheduled for every 5 minutes and does its own date and time checking and either alerts or not depending on what it finds.  In fact, it should run any second now -- yep, there it goes, just like Old Faithful.