It sets up recurring events for the beginning and end of street cleaning hours, with an SMS reminder 10 minutes before, and excluding any days listed on a user-specified "holidays" calendar.
So, almost fine. I'll still need to remember to run the program after I get home and park my car, whereas with the mobile application I could have done it right from the phone. But text reminders and not having to set alarms twice a day on street cleaning days gets me 80% of what I wanted.
Something I definitely want to look into is the possibility of using an SMS web gateway to control a similar program running on a web server. I don't know if there are any free web hosts that allow you to run .NET or Python programs...you'd think that kind of thing would be de riguer in this day'n'age, but you could fill a wikipedia with what I don't know about internets hostering.
Update: I forgot to specify that when I wrote "sets up recurring events" that I meant it adds them to a Google calendar. That's where I got the idea to exclude holidays, because there's already a public calendar I subscribe to with all the street cleaning holidays. I also neglected to include the name of the project, which is "Cleanendar" and makes perfect sense.
2 comments:
Why can't it just tell you when street cleaning is going to occur and then you just remember where you parked to decide if you need to move? I guess I don't know the ins-and-outs of NYC street cleansing socialism.
Alternatively, GPS might have just enough resolution to tell you which side of the street you are on.
It's weird that your Nokia phone doesn't already run Lunix. My Nokia palmtop (now comes in a phone version) does. (My device also supports GPS, but only barely.)
Just because it's annoying to have it go off every day when I only need to move the car half the time.
GPS would be awesome...it might be a little tricky, since I don't always find parking on my block, but even it just used GPS to pre-select the side of the street it would be pretty handy.
Although it happens to be moot in my case, since my phone is from 1973 and has no GPS, let alone Lunix.
(My Linux comment was also not really on point since the Java program I wrote worked fine, it was just that my phone was locked down by my mobile provider, which they would presumably do with Linux-based devices as well.)
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