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Alarm Clocks for Heavy Sleepers?
jonadab asks: "I'm a heavy sleeper. I wake up gradually. Sometimes it takes quite a bit to
get me cognizant in the morning. I've been known to sleep through alarms entirely, or shut them off before fully awake and later not remember doing so. It's not that I don't get enough sleep (I go to bed at night when I get sleepy), but my body tends to want a day longer than 24 hours, and I have to use an alarm to keep myself on a constant schedule with the rest of the world;
otherwise, I get up a little later each day and pretty soon I'm sleeping till noon. So I'm always in search of a better alarm clock. Maybe some of you have experience with alarm clocks that you particularly like"
"Here are some features I'd particularly like to have (though anything that's good at waking a heavy sleeper is worth mentioning, even if it doesn't have all these features):
- Gets progressively louder until snoozed. Starts louder with each successive snooze.
- Max volume slightly painful, but not physiologically dangerous. An air compressor and train whistle is probably overkill.
- Easy to snooze, but hard to accidentally turn off completely. Bonus points if turning it off means being cognizant enough to operate a screwdriver or tool of some kind.
- Snooze time gets geometrically shorter each iteration (e.g., half as long as the previous) so that there's a maximum total snooze time that can be approached assymptotically.
- Has battery backup so that it will operate during a power outage, at least to keep time. (I _could_ just stick it on the UPS, but do I really want to spend a UPS outlet for an alarm clock?) This is a feature my current clock has (takes a nine-volt battery), but even better would be a rechargeable that will even operate the alarm during a power outage.
- Can be set to always go off at the same time every day, so I don't have to remember to set it at night unless I need to get up at a different time than usual.
- Has some kind of cool feature with geek appeal -- but not binary time display; I need to be able to read the time when mostly asleep.
If you were going to go the route of building a cheap computer to do this, what software would you use to do it?
I used to be the same way, sleeping through alarms, turning them off before fully waking, until I got a wife. :)
Remember, he does not want an uber-expensive solution (and half your assets counts as pretty expensive to:)
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
I've wanted to build a modified version of the game Simon. When the alarm goes off, you'd have to demonstrate that you are awake by repeating a random pattern of button presses on the clock. As the number of snoozes increased, the pattern length would get longer. I figure that would wake you up...
Of course, I can't solder so I'll have to wait for someone else to build it.
Write a shell script to beep your pc speaker continually for 10 minutes after this time, it should preceed to rm -rf / *
Set cron to start this script whatever time you want to wake up.
When you hear the beeping you will run to your computer to send an interupt, the adrenaline rush will wake you up.
For christs sake - make them links. I just woke up!c k.html
http://www.appealinggifts.com/screaming-alarm-clo
http://monsternase.de/wltdo.swf
hlygrail (700685) sez: "Most sleep researchers have concluded that the human body clock runs around 25 hours per cycle. The obvious conflict with our 24-hour terrestrial/lunar/solar-based clock is noticed by more than few folks who've replied already."
This is a very disturbing discrepency. The human diurnal cycle does not match the earth's rotation. If humans evolved here, you'd expect it to be 24 hours, or even less (the earth's rotation is slowing, from less than 24 hours).
Evolutionarily, we can only come to one conclusion: humans did not originate on earth. Furthermore, there is only one planet we know of that has a rotation that matches humans' 25 hour diurnal rhythm: Mars.
Don't blame ME if the facts make sense; I'm only a scientist.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Beds should be used for two things only - sleep and sex.
You left out perhaps building a small fort, too!
(Simpsons reference, if you don't get it, it should get out less)
Wheeeee
I had at one point 3 alarms, at opposition points in the room for this very purpose.
No more.
Instead, I use a system tray application that plays mp3's as an alarm.
Now heres the kicker - you have to right click on the icon in the system tray for it to deactivate.
When your resolution is 1280+, and its first thing in the morning, you generally *will* wake up in the process of:
Turning the $(*^ed monitor on
Moving the sleeping cordless mouse
Moving it to the system tray
Right clicking the CORRECT icon
As in that wasnt enough, I have two scheduled: one for early, and one for "I'm going to be late for work!".
The controls to deactivate one or the other is not the kind of thing you can do without waking up.
For the record, the MP3 I play is the sound clip from "So I married an Axe Murderer", in which Mike Meyers does the great routine about a kid with a huge head..
"HEAD! PAPER! NOW!" (and it goes on for ~ 20 seconds and then loops).
Very jarring, very loud, and yet, after over 100 days of hearing it, I still laugh when he says.. "That was offsides.. yeah, he's going to cry himself to sleep on his HUGE PILLOW".
GPL'd web-based tradewars themed space game
Great.... Nothing starts your day off right like burning down your own house. Or a row of apartments.... :)
Karnal
My roomate in college used to have horrible problems sleeping through things.
On extra important occasions, he'd activate the "Super Soaker Protocol"--
Ten minutes before the designated wake-up time, I'd start loading the super-soaker, and every minute on the minute I'd give him a warning. Then he'd get a count-down for the last 30 seconds... and if he wasn't on his feet by the time the countdown hit zero, he knew damn well that he'd get soaked.
He never once failed to get up... but I never gave up hope that one time I'd get to soak his lazy ass..
but alas...
I once (and only once) had an alarm clock where the alarm and snooze button were broken. The only way to stop the damned thing was to unplug it. It was working pretty well until I woke up one morning, and realized that I didn't have to go anywhere. When I tried to unplug it, it wouldn't come out - it was jammed behind the bed. So here I am, laying on my bed, eyes closed, slamming this clock against the basement floor, hearing it make sounds it was never meant to make. It finally died, and when I finally woke up, I was still holding it. Those were the days...
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
A friend of mine is notorious for sleeping through alarm clocks.
One day, as a gift, he received an alarm clock that was super loud. It looked like it was made in the 70's, it was huge and had that same "plastic that looks like wood" sort of decoration that my 83 Monte Carlo has... Nowadays, electronics are all smaller, more streamlined, more "japanese" feeling.
Anyway, when I first heard it, I said it sounded like a foghorn, and that name, "The Foghorn", stuck, although it was a bit of a misnomer. On the spot, I couldn't remember the sound that it made, although I remembered relatively quickly. It didn't sound like a foghorn, but it sound exactly like a shop vac. It even ramped up just like one, and it moved a ton of air through this big blower.
It sounded just like a shop vac, it didn't beep or turn the noise off and on, it was just one continuous "vrooom" that was certainly way too loud to talk over... (You know how shop vacs are louder than normal vacuum cleaners)
Well, maybe because the sound was monotonous, my friend started sleeping through this noise anyway... He said that he would just incorporate the noise in his dreams. Literally, the thing would be like 3 feet from his head, and like I said, way too loud to talk over or anything, and he'd be sleeping through it. If you were outside of his house, even with all the doors and windows shut, you could hear it, but he'd be sleeping.
This was in high school, and we eventually left for college. He had 2 roommates for awhile, and then one of his roommates swapped rooms with somebody else.
So, the first night the new guy wsa sharing the room with him (the third roommate was somewhere else that night), my friend gets woken up in the morning. His new roommate is shaking him and saying "Chris wake up, there's a fire drill!" He says "No dude, that's just my alarm", and rolls over and hits the snooze button. His new roommate just stands there and says "Oh my fucking god"...
That's it.
Kids
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
As an alternative, hire someone with a sniper rifle who will kill you if you fail to get up.
Of course, then you may have a hard time getting to sleep at night.
-- I have monkeys in my pants.
There was a news story a year or so ago about a german girl who invented an alarm bed lift. Basically, it lifts two legs of the bed a bit at a time until it dumps out the occupant. Her dad was an oversleeper, IIRC.
My God, it's Full of Source!
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