Tired of having the power go out without warning? Now you can get warnings about predictable load-shedding sent to the Jabber account of your choice – including Google Talk accounts. Unfortunately, at the moment the warnings are for the City of Cape Town supply area only.

To set it up, ask your Jabber client to subscribe to loadshed@frith.co.za – in Pidgin that’s the “Add Buddy” command, in GMail it’s “Invite to chat”. The loadshed bot will accept your subscription, and reciprocate with a subscription request to you. When you accept it, the bot will send you instructions about how to proceed.

You can search the list of suburbs by sending the message “search [text]”, which will give you a list of suburbs in the City Council’s list with a name matching “[text]”. Then you can subscribe to warnings for a suburb with “subscribe [number]”, where [number] is the number that was listed next to the suburb in the search results. There’s also a “list” command which shows what susburbs you’re subscribed to; and “unsubscribe [number]” which works in the same way as “subscribe”.

The bot will send you warnings 15, 10, 5, and 2 minutes before the load shedding period is scheduled to start. A planned future development is to make the warning times configurable.

[via: Adrian's Thoughts]

Expand this idea somewhat and get your mobile phone running a jabber client and you’ll always have your load shedding alert handy :)