Here’s a way to do it.

You’ll need Skype installed, and some Skype­Out credit (which you only need to make a call to a real ‘phone, this won’t cost any money).

#!/bin/sh
osascript -l AppleScript -e "tell application \"Skype\" to get URL \"callto://+447967XXXXXX\""
sleep 30
killall -m "Skype"
exit 0

Save the above some­where handy in your path as ringring, do chmod 755 ringring so you can exe­cute it.

Now all you have to do to get your ‘phone to ring for 30 sec­onds is type ringring in the Ter­mi­nal, or, to make it even easier, you can set up a Quick­sil­ver trig­ger to run the com­mand when­ever you hit a key combination.

Mere words cannot express how happy this makes me!

Admit­tedly, wodg­ing some Apple­script inside a bash script, then killing Skype to stop it from con­nect­ing and wast­ing your money on a silent ansa­phone mes­sage isn’t very pretty. But I’m not clever enough to work out how to make Skype hang up after a set inter­val with Apple­Script, and this way works, so it’ll have to do.

Also, if you happen to be both a member of MetaFil­ter and some­one who writes fic­tion, the embry­onic MetaFil­ter Writ­ers Group may be of interest.

Update: and now I have a tele­phone again. Aside from being sort of scammed by Orange—to get a replace­ment ‘phone, I had a number of choices, the cheap­est involv­ing a one-​off pay­ment of £100 and a few quid on my monthly bill until the ends of time—I’m amazed at how slick a process get­ting a fresh Nokia N70 was. No faffing around wast­ing police time get­ting a crime number, all my web and email ser­vices just worked. After a quick blast of iSync, and installing Opera Mini, the new model is indis­tin­guish­able from the old (except it isn’t scratched to pieces and doesn’t crash all the time, yet).

Er, more inter­est­ing weblog posts to follow shortly: I’m having a meet­ing tomor­row about curat­ing a show, which I’ve not done before, and which looks likely to be an inter­est­ing little project.

It’s a free ser­vice that lets you syn­chro­nise your mobile telephone’s address book, con­tacts, cal­en­dars with the Mobi­cal website.

Setup is a cinch - feed the site your ‘phone number, and it texts you your pass­word and the set­tings required to start synch­ing. Start a synch from the ‘phone, and your con­tacts, cal­en­dars and the like wend their way via GPRS to Mobi­cal. Once there, you can view your cal­en­dars, add new con­tacts, or syn­chro­nise data with your ‘phone.

This is pretty bloody handy - it doesn’t matter now if I lose my ‘phone or fry the memory card on the same day my com­puter explodes and I forget to pay my .Mac sub­scrip­tion, as, even if I have to change ‘phone num­bers, all my con­tacts are safe and sound.

The only down­side is Mobical’s sparse doc­u­men­ta­tion - when trying to work out how to start my first synch, the only instruc­tion was, ‘Synchronization is started from your ‘phone’ and it was left to me to guess that I should prob­a­bly head for the Sync appli­ca­tion in the Con­nec­tiv­ity folder on my 7610.

Other than that, highly recommended.

(The ser­vice also makes me wonder why, if a free web­site can make the syn­chro­ni­sa­tion process so smooth and pain­less by using SyncML, Apple and Nokia haven’t yet given iSync proper sup­port for the protocol.)

This device is track­ing my posi­tion all day today by log­ging the WiFi nodes I pass. (I’m not entirely sure why.)

And, for added geek­i­ness, I’m post­ing this from my tele­phone. It’s like being in the future, eh?

This is the first photo with my new Nokia 7610, click the image above to see the whop­ping great 1 megapixel images it takes. Oh, and the pretty flower lives in my back garden, the only speck of pret­ti­ness in an oth­er­wise grim yard.