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The World's Most Devious Alarm Clock
wired_parrot writes "If you have trouble waking up, try this: MIT media lab has created an alarm clock that, when you press the snooze bar, runs off into a corner, a different hiding place every day. Try hitting the snooze bar again now!"
"Just don't press the snooze button and keep your current alarm clock!"
"Why not just get up when the alarm goes off the first time? I always wake up and face the day with a smile."
"I disabled the snooze button on my clock so I always have to get up"
Where was that when I was bashing, throwing and generally destroying all the alarm clocks of my youth? I remember I had one that played "The Macarena" (what better way than to wake up to a HORRIBLE song) for a few mornings until I threw it out the window. Now if it hid, I would find it, but at least it would've lasted a *little* longer.
shop.envescent.com - Computer hardware and more.
It wouldn't take me long before I broke that fucker's legs off (no, I didn't RTFA but I'd bust it's wheels if that be the case)
harmonious design
Or I'd have 9 of these things roaming my house.
Should I buy myself one of these, this means I just end up finding a way to fall back asleep with an obnoxious sound coming from some random corner of the room every day.
Maybe if the clock rolled its way onto my bed and started harassing me that might do the trick, but I'm far enough from being a morning person that having the alarm going off won't stop me from snoozing, no matter where it is or how long it keeps going.
will it run to the ceiling ? Now that will wake me up
http://www.winchesterguns.com/prodinfo/catalog/det ail.asp?cat_id=535&type_id=973&cat=001C
My rights don't need management.
If the inventor is around, I bet I will never sleep. Geek girl folks .. there is a hope for all of us.
Programmable automatic coffee maker.
The smell of fresh brewed coffee makes me want to get out of bed to get my fix.
if you lose it? It's like those faabs you attach to your keys. What if you lose the faab?
Software is like sex. It's better when it's free. -Linus Torvalds
My room has so much crap in the corners anyway, the thing would never make it. I can't even get to the corners of my room.
Got Extra Money?
the corners that could hurt it? Would it kill it's self to get away from me, like certain other people? That would be sad.
-Tim Louden
I don't get it, why don't they just make it roam around before the alarm sounds...
That way, you don't get a chance to hit the snooze button.
Heh, or make it run around WHEN it's alarm is on..
That would be very annoying and would wake you up faster with moving sound
The more annoying the alarm clock, the eaiser they tend to... mysteriously break...
I reckon this here alarm clock would mysteriously shatter into many pieces after one to many attempts to try and hit the snooze button again
Excuse me, I don't mean to impose, but I am the ocean
Who was it that said, "Those who fight and run away live to fight another day"?
Seems strangly apt here.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
A javascript site, they want me to be asleep by the time I get to the last frame to test out their new alarm clock I guess
Setec Astronomy
put in in a shoebox under your bed and it will never go anywhere! phewww
Glad to see MIT researchers are dedicating their sharp minds to something like this. :P
Seriously, though, this could really come in handy after a coding marathon on the night before a midterm. Hell, it's probably the reason these guys even considered making something like this...
Wouldn't it be easier to just set the snooze button to give you a slowly increasing electric shock?
Nihil Illegitemi Carborvndvm
I can guarantee I'd be bringing it in for repairs every day.
Me: "It uh... broke"
Clockly Repair Man: "it rather looks as if it was smashed with a hammer, repeatedly"
Me: "well it fell... into... a bag of hammers"
You've now created a robot that opposes the will of carbon-based lifeforms by design.
It's sole purpose, bringing suffering to humanity.
AND THEN YOU BOOBY-TRAPPED THE OFF SWITCH.
Buncha friggin' geniuses./P
Yahoo! Pipes are awesome. How awesome? http://pipes.yahoo.com/jesdynf/slashdot
downloadable alarm clock buzztones
I have the same problem with my girlfriend. If I make any attempt to touch her in the morning, she runs off and I can't find her the rest of the day.
*blinking cursor*
Not only will you not hit the snooze button, but you get to hear the doppler effect each morning!
The baby's fine -- please stop sending business cards.
Admittedly I can't see the meat of the article since their site seems to be slashdotted already, but if you got that sort of a negative reinforcement for hitting snooze, why wouldn't you just learn not to hit snooze? I don't mean you actually get up, but you start just adjusting the time for 10 minutes later instead of hitting the snooze bar. I used to do that all the time anyway since my clocks had very short or very long snoozes.
Perhaps if they made it where the alarm time is only settable from a docking station on your PC or something...
Cryptic Allusion - New Mac and Dreamcast Games!
You have to remember to close the door or else it might roll out of the room and into who knows where.
Down the stairs.
Into someone else's room.
ect.
With the moo and the cow and the fish. Minesweeper Record: 7 sec
Does this remind anyone of Hap's "smart" Alarm Clock from Michael Marshall Smith's One Of Us ?
If you've never read any Smith, I definitely recommend it - One Of Us is one of the funniest books I've ever read.
"And then I visited Wikipedia
pic: http://web.media.mit.edu/~vmb/gauri.jpg
homepage: http://web.media.mit.edu/~nanda/
could this idea only come from a girl..?
but what happens on mornings when the sound of the alarm clock gets into your dream?
I could only imagine the laughter that would ensue with switching out someone's alarm clock with this while they're sleeping.... (if they're a snoozer and aren't awake enough to notice the changed clock)
It just goes and hides from the person... hhahaha
Excuse me, I don't mean to impose, but I am the ocean
This would be perfect the first day. On day 2 I'd just smash the @#$^ing thing to bits.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
We're all going to chip in and get you the "1812 Overture" alarm clock. Or the slightly cheaper "Iraqi 'go BOOM' Insurgent" model.
Well, I really don't have anything interesting to say about this particular article. I gave up on snoozing.
Instead, I figure I'll talk about what I do use for an alarm clock. I have a Nokia 3650 that I have retired. (Battery is toast...) I set up reoccuring appointments on it so it wakes me up on weekdays. Okay, that's pretty boring. However, when I have to wake up for special circumstances, I set up an alarm with a text message telling me why I need to get it. (i.e. You've got a flight at 6 am!!!) Why does that matter? I always read the message. If it's something really important, I simply don't snooze.
Again, not sure if anybody really cares but I thought I'd share anyway. Knowing why should wake up helps deal with the whole snooze problem.
"Derp de derp."
Whoa, this is the first I've seen of this hardware colour scheme. How long has it been like this?
Looks great!
Still asleep, with eyes closed, my body will pull itself out of bed, drag itself toward the source of the noise, grab it with one hand, and slam it against the hardwood floor until the noise goes away. Six hours later I'll wake up, and wonder why I'm lying on the floor with my new alarm clock in pieces.
The dust bunnies in the corners would eat the bots and grow larger, eventually producing a dust bun-bun. Be afraid.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
I prefer to wake up gently and kindly. I have a CD player alarm clock and I burned a custom CD that wakes me up gently and kindly with music of my choice.
I change the CD every few months. Right now the play list is:
1. 2/2 by Brian Eno from Music for Airports
2. Aguirre by Popul Vuh
3. Ode to Hats, by yours truly
4. Autumn by Wendy Carlos from Sonic Seasonings
by that time, I'm up and out of bed, grumbling about the day, and getting my daughter fed and dressed while she watches Clifford The Big Red Dog and eats breakfast and I make her lunch.
Life - don't talk to me about life....
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Sooner or later one of these will crawl off into a traffic path and the alarm's owner (stumbling out of the room in a drowsy fog) will trip over it and break his/her neck. The liability insurance alone will be more than the projected $20 cost!
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
"Wouldn't it be easier to just set the snooze button to give you a slowly increasing electric shock?"
I much prefer the Darth Vader model. Now there's a clock you dare not ignore.
Finally, the Gods have given me a way to make sure that I actually wake up for class. Wait, Scratch that. Sometimes I forget that I'm in college.
Last year I bought something that does this at the local pet shop but it doesn't have a snooze button. Its also seems to be permanently set to about 1/4 hour after sunrise or whenever the traffic starts picking up in the morning, which ever is earliest.
For an project for an Engineering class, I built an alarm clock based on an a 6811 board. It could decode a signal from WWV so it never needed setting and it had some advanced alarm features such as figuring out when the lights went out to decide how much to advance the wake up time. It also could cope with the later classes on Tue and Thur and beep in a non threatening way around noon or so on Sat and Sunday.
It also had a temperature sensor and a humidity sensor so it if it was very cold or raining then it would go off about 10 minutes early. If it was real dark and wet and cold, then it wouldn't go off at all. For some reason, the professor didn't like that feature.
It looks like from the url that one of the "inventors" (and I use that word lightly) has the name/alias "nanda", which in Japanese means something along the lines of 'What the hell?' ^_^
Hero of Allacrost, a FOSS RPG for *NIX/*BSD/OS X/Win
When I lived in Anchorage Alaska for a winter I found that I was really affected by the lack of day light. I had to put a second wind up alarm clock on the top shelf in my closet across the room.
Even then I woke up one morning on the floor in front of my closet with the clock in my hand, late for work again.
Not long after that I moved back down South.
I heard about something similar years ago. Instead of roaming around, it had this key part which was also a bouncing ball. It would eject the ball and you needed to find and replace said ball to turn off the alarm. Now, if such a device were, say, built into the wall behind a polycarbonate guard (to prevent hammer smashing) it would be more reasonable. Need to make sure you add the functionality of this watch, which detects when the "best" time to awaken you would be. Yeah, then you'd be really damn close to ideal...
Reinvent the wheel only at either a lower cost, greater effectiveness, or your own personal enrichment and satisfaction.
My alarm clock's snooze button only works if you get up and make her a bottle. By that time you're wide awake, but after you feed her SHE goes back to sleep!
HexaByte - he's a square and a half!
...only has four corners.
Wow, I never would have guessed at the technology behind Spencer's. I'll be more thoughtful next Halloween when I pull out my smoke machine. {flame away}
http://www.spencergifts.com/
made by a nice girl
I live in university accomodation, I have about one square foot of floor space in my room, is there a version that jumps or something cus I'm guessin this thing can't role over multiple cables and beer cans...
All we need is another robot with a stungun that chases the alarm clock. Problem solved!
They should make cheap disposable alarm clocks that are environmental friendly instead of trying to add legs to the damn thing. It's bad enough I spend half my month's wages buying a new clock every week after I tear the damn thing apart for waking me from my beauty slumber.
That looks like a domo-kun, but shorter and fatter. I bet I can scare my cats with it.
I place my alarm clock on the opposite end of the room so I have to get up to turn it off.
for about 5 seconds... then you imagine yourself chasing this thing around. then again you could always put a leash on it or glue it to something.
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
A really annoying idea would be to have it play that new horrid sounding All-computer orchestrated music as well as start to make creepy scary noises randomly before its time to wake you up. Then you can wake up ready to crap your pants.
I know how you can stay lazy! EMP the thing! (Just make sure you don't have any important electronics in the room =P)
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
there is not a lot of info on the internal of this clock, but i wouldn't be surprise if it's entirely built from lego mindstroms system. hell, let me break it down for ya, it's a damn clock with segway like propulsional system and a line of random num generator in the programing...wanta see some thing a bit more advanced? check out this page: http://lego.dongzr.com/
This Sig is removed due to factual inaccuracy
I, for one, welcome our new devious rolling clock overlords.
I want an alarm clock that injects me with caffine. Maybe a little door can open on the clock and caffine-soaked misquitos can be released which then inject me.
Oh the wonders of a Rube Goldberb Alarm Clock store.
Table-ized A.I.
"MIT media lab has created an alarm clock that, when you press the snooze bar, runs off into a corner, a different hiding place every day"
Something tells me the creators of this bastardized piece of technology are going to have to emulate the same behavior after this thing hits the marketplace.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
I had an idea for an alarm clock that couldn't be ignored. First, in addition to the normal annoying buzzer, hook up an air horn to blast in unison with the buzzer. Secondly, rig the lights of your room to flash in unison with the deafening noise. Now try to ignore that!
What you reap is what you sow
For those of you who say their time should be spent developing something "great for all of humanity", or something reasonably similar, let me ask you this..
/., like a lot of people do while they are at work (Ooooh, yeah.. I went there, just like every 5th poster :))
Have you ever been burnt out from working on projects non-stop? I'm sure the people at MIT spend a LOT of time working on serious projects - sometimes you need a break. Be greatful they are spending their time developing something that is fun for them and somewhat useful, rather than wasting it posting on
"Better to be vulgar than non-existent" -Bev Henson
that sucks. i wanted to read the article
thank you.
The most devious alarm clock is not covered in carpet. It's my mother.
Keep the faith, share the code
Why not make the snooze button a combination or puzzle of somre sort. Trying to figure out the puzzle wakes your mind up. Hook a Game-Boy to the clock.
Table-ized A.I.
Could you imagine a Beowulf Cluster of these?
And you know what, when I see projects like this flourishing, it just makes me think there is hope for a better world. ;-)
you, sir, are a useless prick. your use of the word "fag" in a derogatory fashion labels you as an ignorant redneck. please also note that the inventor was a woman, and thus the use of "him" is incorrect.
RTFA, then please drink some bleach.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
I'd just go back to sleep like I already do anyway. What I really need is an alarm clock that will attempt to set my bed on fire if I refuse to wake up.
Warning: Could be fatal if taken seriously
Or you could hit the snooze button and then proceed to hide your self in a new location everyday! No microprocessor involved and 100% enviromentally safe!
if you absolutely HAVE to get up - the most reliable
alarm clock is a glass of water before bed.
j.
"You've hit my snooze alarm again and haven't updated to Longhorn service pack 2. It looks like you are in a purely vegetative state; prepare to have your tubes removed."
OMG, looks like they were hosting their web server on one of these, LOLOLOLOOLOLOLOOLLOOLOLOL.
While an alarm clock that hides is, admitedly a lot more fun, the same effect could be achieved with only electronics.
Have an alarm clock with a keypad and a multi-digit display. When the alarm goes off, display a randomly generated multi-digit code. The user must enter the correct code to stop the noise.
I think the ability to read and correctly key a code requires a level of consiousness similar to searching a room. The complexity of the code could vary depending on the user's ability to handle numerical data entry when half asleep.
Make a clear case out of a rather sturdy material that would then house my alarm clock and be able to be locked. There would be holes so I could access the necessary buttons (changing alarm times, etc), and vents for the speaker to allow sound to escape well enough. There would be no external access to the snooze button, and my roommate would hide the key every night so that I would have to literally get up and locate the key.
Then I realized that there would be ample access to the wall-socket where the thing would be plugged in at, so it was all a thought in vain...plus, I'd really hate to have to hold my roommate hostage for a key every morning.
"How like you to drag your keyboard to a gun fight." - Aaron Bedard (BANE)
When can I buy one?
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
I didn't see this one (a friend told me about it, and all that), but it didn't require MIT people to design, and sounds just as effective and rather more robust: an alarm clock in the shape of a ball. To snooze it, you throw it against something.
MIT almost on it's knees from a /.ing !
Now that's power baby!
I sleep with a Glock under my pillow. ;-)
Have gnu, will travel.
Certainly not the heady days of the mid 80s anymore, are they?
This is pretty much something that Hoyt Axton's character in Gremlins would have invented.
I guess you could say that i am one of those people who have a problem waking up in the morning. Instead of using some crazy contraption, I just keep my alarm clock on a table across the room so I have to get up to shut it off.
Why does the clock look like a chia-pet that no one has watered in a week?
BANG... I'll need more than one. Why doesn't it just bring me coffee?
The award for most annoying alarm clock has to go to a story my grandfather once told me: Seems that when he was a student at LSU, some acquaintances of his had somehow gotten ahold of a horn that goes on a train engine. He assured me that he had nothing to do with it. You know the kind of horn I'm talking about, the kind that trains blare at ungodly hours of the morning and can be heard for miles. Anyway, these devious students hid the horn in the top of one of the dorms and rigged it up to a timer. So early that morning, at around 2 or 3 o'clock as I recall, all was calm and peaceful until the horn went off. It shattered the early morning calm for about 20 seconds, and then shut off. From what my grandfather told me, it was simply SO LOUD that the sound seemed to come from everywhere at once. After about a half-hour, everyone had more or less recovered and were settling back into their beds for the rest of the night. However, the horn had been set to go off once every hour after the first time. So once again, everyone was rudely awakened by this earsplitting blast! This cycle repeated itself several times before anyone figured out what was happening.
10100111001
Still no hope for you...
umm... and me.
party18.jpg
annoying toaster on Red Dwarf
WTF. That this is hideous. From what I can see, all it does it make noise. Can it even tell time? Wtf is the point of having an alarm clock that cant tell time? Better question is... Where is the snooze button? Its like a giant fur ball that is most likely will be useful when I run out of toilet paper. I should add confortable too. No offense to the person who designed it, but I wouldn't buy it. It seems to be more of a pain than a benifit. After it falls onto the ground, and rolls under the bed, I'll probably have to move the entire bed just to turn the thing off. This will result in increased amounts of crankiness in the morning and probably will end up getting rid of it instead of changing my habits. The real question that she failed to answer is: How durable is? Obviously it has padding, but is it enough to protect it from breaking after I decide to throw it across the room into the wall?
XeRo
...has got to be a curious 2-6 yr old child.
First they yell at you. "Daddy, it's time to wake up!"
Then, they start beating on you.
Finally, they pry your eyes open.
Just dandy fun at 6am on a Sat or Sun morning.
Get your Unix fortune now!
of about 1 day.
The evaluation of an action as 'practical' . . . depends on what it is that one wishes to practice.
I was thinking of an indestructible little PDA/clock, that will play lousy MP3s or radio at high volume, and display an arithmetic or algebraic equation to solve. Once the answers been entered, it shuts off.
Thats enough to wake anyone up..
Better idea is a punching bag, which must be punched twice real hard to shut the alarm off. It only makes sense to smack things in the morn, but it wakes you up. Just keep all knives away
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
..when I don't even want to get up in the mornings. Ok, It is good for me, but I never want to.
><////>
Eeee! Clocky looks like segway for Ewoks
I could swear my keychain already exhibits similar behaviour, clearly MIT stole the design from me.
Non, je ne veux pas coucher avec toi ce soir.
How about moving the switch from "Alarm" to "Off?"
--<Mike>--
When I wake up and hear the alarm go off, it ends up somewhere in the room.... ...Now where did I throw it...
When I lived at home I hated breakfast on saturday my sister was assigned to wake me... she'd pull on my covers and my feet until I would get up and chase her ... she'd run to the kitchen and I'd be forced to eat.
This encouraged me to never sleep nude.
The given link displays a blank page in Firefox on my computer, unless I disable the style sheet (View / Page Style / No Style). This link works fine and has more information anyway.
Do you have any idea how annoying it must be if this thing runs into a corner, say, under a bed, where it is absolutely out of reach and you have no way of turning it off until the battery finally dies.
That's a pretty serious design flaw, IMHO. They should come with a remote control which let's you make it blow up from afar.
Come on folks, where're the other OS X users out there?
Personally, I have my trusty G4 tower about nine feet from my bed. It's hooked to a fairly decent set of Altec Lansing speakers.
iTunes + 10-line AppleScript + iCal event associated with said AppleScript = best wakeup system ever, complete with volume fadein. A nice big shuffled playlist called "Wakeup" with suitable music, and you're good to go.
All you Linux folks out there, it might not be quite as straightforward (I don't know what calendar/alarm programs are available on Linux), but it should be pretty easy to do something similar.
Heck, I've never actually gone this far, but if you knew your daily computer use schedule, you could even have iCal events opening the documents you want when it's time to work on them, that sort of thing.
Anyway, the G4 alarm works nicely, because it wakes me up pleasantly, slowly, and it's far enough away from my bed that I actually have to get up to turn it off.
"Oh, I like geeks way better than I like humans." - Mari Sarris
Apparently a company just released a watch that monitors your sleep cycles and wakes you up when you're at the lightest point in your sleep cycle.
Does anyone know if there are other implementations of this? Devices which are designed to wake you up when you hit the lightest part of your cycle?
The ______ Agenda
It's a great idea but probably already patented. I mean I've always wished for electric shocks from my alarm clock (on those days that matter such as my finals), but given such a common idea, I doubt that no one's tried yet or maybe because it's already patented and the patent owner is asking for a hefty price for it.
HD Trailers
mitch
This is kind of creepy, the other day I was thinking about getting 4 different alarm clocks and setting them to go off at different times (cause i always turn the alarm off in my sleep, and the clock is way on the other end of the room). It's really creepy seeing something like this afterwards.
Provigil.
How can I get one of these?
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
Sometimes it seems like if I get up immediately, I feel out of it all day. Are there any downsides to instant awakening, or is it all just in my head?
I call it a "wife," but at least I don't whack her on the top of her head in the morning. Or as hard or as often as I used to hit my Timex.
Let's play Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. I'll be Pestilence.
My alarm clock is almost 6 months old and has piercing tones and a foul odor at random times in the morning. He's guaranteed to wake you up at least 4 hours before you absolutely have to be up.
It is called a "wife".
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
Then sticking my alarm clock on the other side of the room would work... oh yeah it doesn't.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
Wow... the inventor is a girl. I love geek girls, and that too Indian...:)
You pay $75. I learned that the hard way like two days ago :(
"When the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation...but when the atomic bong goes off there's celebraaaaation!"
When I was in school, I used to put a cup of water next to the alarm clock before I went to sleep. When the alarm went off, I would notice the cup and decide to take a drink. If I was awake enough to sit up, I would drink the water and get up. Most of the time I would be too groggy to do that. Instead, I would grab the cup and try to drink while lying on my side, and wind up spilling the water on myself and the bed, which would get me up in a hurry.
Overall, this method worked pretty close to 100%.
Perhaps you should consider the paint-peeling alarm that John Varley describes in Millenium.
Years ago, I remember seeing an alarm clock embedded in a softball. You hit snooze by throwing the ball against the wall so it would bounce under the bed, or somewhere inconvenient to find, so the next time it went off you had to get up to find it.
Gluing a thumbtack to the snooze button is cheaper and easier. A bit low tech but it gets the job done and as Pavlov realized after a few days you no longer have any desire to hit the snooze button. Just the strong desire to hit the moron that glued the thumb tack to the button in the first place. Roommates have no sense of humor.
Look look look
girl girl girl
*slobber*
Girl!
Look, they are real!!!
Woww!!!
Girl!!!
fucking hell.
I would just stand it up on it's side on one of those big wheels and go back to sleep. If it beeped i'd just hit the off button.
...unless it is weighted onthe bottom in which case the spinning would knock it onto my head. Or you could design some kind of rotating weight system inside which would off-balance it and make it roll forward or backwards...not quite as versitile though, and probably much slower and less agile...
Either way, I want one!
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
I usually set my alarm to the Mexican mariachi station. That usually wakes me up because they are so annoying. Either that or wake up to my computer with my 5.1 system cranked up, that'll get you up in the morning.
It was a spherical droid type thing with weights and motors and motion/proximity sensors and all sorts of things inside it, and some way of telling if you were asleep or not.
As soon as you dropped off, this fucker would run away and hide, rolling over as much junk as possible. When it was time to go off, it would screech with a 120dB siren from a rape alarm, and as soon as it saw you approaching it would try to escape, by thwacking down a pneumatic thingy to jump around the room, possibly attack you, electrocute you, and yes, turning the fucker off was gonna be hard.
How pissed was i when i read about this in the newspaper the other day. That, and in this thread, everyone else has come up with pretty much the same ideas I did, although 2 years later.
should have patented that fucker. Has this sort of thing happened to loads of other people here, or am i the only one?
Drill sergeant.
It moves - right up in your face. After a couple days, everyone jumped right out of bed when Reveille played over the crappy intercom in the hallway.
Nothing like bleeding ears and a faceful of spit to start your day.
Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach either, do tech support.
Hey, thanks a lot for another useless invention that won't help me worth a damn! What about the people that sleep so deeply, we don't hear the alarm clock at all???
Wanted: a vibrating alarm clock that I can velcro-cuff to my leg. Perhaps it could deliver a mild electric shock too. And if you want to make an ultra-effective version, shape it into a dildo that creeps slowly towards my ass. ~(:O)=
"Daddy. Wake up. Wake up Daddy. Daddy. Wake up.... Wake up! DADDY. DADDY!!!! WAKE UP!!! DA-DEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!... WAKE UP DADDY!!!
Then, he starts hitting me. I've had my alarm clock disconnected for months. Waste of electricity.
Musicians don't die. They just decompose.
Not only do I know the problem (I used to need almost an hour to get out of bed), I also was wasted for the first 2-3 hours of every day.
Until I bought a "dawn simulator". here's one, there are many others.
Essentially, it's just a bright light, with a matte glass so it spreads out a little (you can actually look into it without hurting your eyes, even though it's bright enough to light up the room).
What it does is dim it up slowly. Really slowly. Mine can be programmed to start at 90, 60 or 30 minutes prior to "wakeup time".
So I need to get up at 7 am. At 6:30, it will start to slowly dim up the light, reaching full brightness at 7 am, at which time it also sounds a soft alarm. By that time, however, I'm usually already awake.
I was a bit reluctant until I said "what the heck" one day and just tried it (found a vendor with a 21-day money-back-no-questions-asked policy).
The concept is that it simulates dawn, triggering your natural processes of waking up. A normal alarm clock just shakes you out of bed, and leaves it to you to become awake over the next few hours or so.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
That would start playing the currently tuned radio station 10 minutes before the set alarm time if you have the switch clicked on "Radio/Alarm".
I'd wake up slowly, listening to the soft, dulcit tones of a warmly-spoken female DJ on 4ZZZ - local Brisbane community station - and be about ready for the alarm when it went off.
I was woken up gently and alerted when it was time to get out of bed and get ready for work, and I found it quite unannoying.
Anyone know where I can get a clock radio like that again? The old one just stopped working properly one day and now it'll only turn on and off manually, buggrit.
His name is Robert Paulsen...
I'd rather use this elegant solution.
Plus, this hanging one wouldn't try to kill my cat every morning like Clocky would.
When the alarm clock goes off and the snooze button is pressed, Clocky will roll off the bedside table and wheel away, bumping mindlessly into objects on the floor until it eventually finds a spot to rest.
:P
My floor? It'll make it all of two feet before getting caught at the Ephel Duath of papers, books, and clothes on the floor.
Minutes later, when the alarm sounds again, the sleeper must get up out of bed and search for Clocky.
I think not! They really should look at the habits of people who *need* a devious alarm clock and hurry out an all-terrain model
-- I prefer the term "karma escort."
Subject says it all really. Never listen to the advice of people 6 feet under.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
So would that be a beowulf cluster of Clockys?
Fetch Text URL - Firefox Extension
Why? Take one alarm clock. Tape a bag to it. Insert some socks and your keys. Enjoy searching for the extradimensional space to which it has dissapeared, yet can still be heard from.
Not a sentence!
what if my room is round? will it run in circle just to find a corner? if it starts to ring again, will it be like testing 3d sound system?
You just haven't been hitting it hard enough...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
If you've spent more than 15 minutes doing that, it should sneak up on you and put your finger in 37C warm water, at which point every human naturally wets themselves.
That'll teach them.
....I want to wake up with that clock in my room, but I definitely would like to wake up with its inventor: http://web.media.mit.edu/~nanda/
Or I'd have 9 of these things roaming my house.
Robert
Bastard Operator From 193.219.28.162
Replace "hit the snooze" to "Jump out of bed a kick the living sh*t out of it"
Already done. This alarm clock shoots the pieces of jigsaw puzzle up in the air when it goes off. To turn it off, you have to find the four pieces and then reassemble them on the clock.
I have a very hard time getting up in the morning. I came up with the following solution...
I synched my 2 cell phones (1 personal, 1 work) with my alarm clock. The alarm clock is in a backpack with the zippers tied together with a keyring. All three devices go off at the same time. I call this "Confusion". Every morning, all three devices sound at the same time. I get all CONFUSED! Which one to silence first? It should be noted that I live in a house where I am the first to wake, and therefore risk waking the others prematurely. Even in my morning fog, I do not wish to cause others a disturbance, so it is in my best interest to silence these alarms as soon as possible. BUT WHICH ONE FIRST!?! By the time I've gone through the mental gymnastics required to figure this problem out every morning, I'm wide fuckin' awake!
I do have to resync these devices every other week or so.
Libertarian: label used by embarrassed Republicans, longing to be open about their greed, drug use and porn collections.
and I'm probably being redundant by saying this, but...
Um, you're a virgin, aren't you?
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
Why not use a display that shows a random number of sheep. The alarm clock only stops when you enter the right number of sheep, so you must be awake by then!
Then it just clicked a few weeks ago - one of those "duh" moments. ( As blogged on my site ) I threw out my digital alarms, went out and bought an old-fashioned Westclox wind-up alarm. You wind it up every night, adjust the little lever to allow the hammer to move between the bells at the alarm time, and that's it!
Then it goes off and you get up.
It really is that simple. I wish I'd thought of it 10,15+ years ago!
It doesn't have a snooze function, so you know you have no choice in the matter... you can't "just return to that dream for another 10 minutes" - you have to get up. And there's nothing like a hammer striking a couple of bells to make you jump out of bed, much more effective than some little buzzer.
About 3 weeks using it so far, haven't snoozed once ;) Best "gadget" (traditional clocks are actually pretty cool IMO) that I've bought in a long, long time! And they're so user friendly... ok they're not millisecond-accurate but it's fun adjusting them to get as reasonably-accurate as you can.
I tell ya, the snooze button was the worst design decision ever made. Alarm clocks are designed to be evil, to give you a sudden kick to get you out of bed - then they went and put a "shut up" button on it! Evil, evil idea and so many of us now waste up to an hour of our days just fighting that damn button because we all sit there and accept it. I'd love to meet whoever invented it so I could bring along the biggest "snooze button" I can find and hit him around the head with it.
If you want never want to fall asleep after hitting the alarm, simply place it on the other side of the room so you have to get up. It's that simple really. No walking alarm clocks are required at any stage of the process.
Or the horrible horrible dream of being in your bathroom taking a whiz.
Now I have to pinch my leg every time I take a leak JUST to make sure I'm not dreaming of being awake and thinking about dreaming.
For some reason, my alarm clock's snooze button only temporarily turns off the alarm. For a while, I just kept hitting the snooze button, an O(n) operation where n is the difference between the time I wake up minus the time the alarm went off over the snooze period. Then, I realized that by reaching around to the back of the clock and turning off the alarm, I could turn off the alarm permanently, which has O(1) operational complexity. Turning the alarm back on is also constant time.
just don't leave your bedroom door open...
// I ate your lunch
First time I woke up to "Prison B---" was the last time I let the local DJ select my wake-up song.
looking at it, I'd say it'd be a challenge to find the snooze button when it's still sat on your bed-side table...
sweet, now you can wake up to something hidious turd looking thing, which ever side you wake up.
"Alarm clock? What alarm clock?"
It's nice having flexible hours. Of course, my cat won't let the hours be too flexible. Maybe I'm actually in the "I don't have a snooze button" camp...
runs off into a corner
So what happens if it's in a circular or elliptical room?
Wouldnt make her webpage load loads of 30-40kbyte jpegs and scale them down dynamically to 20*20 pixel thumbnails. At least not 15 per page...
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
I just showed "clocky" to the GF, who I allowed to buy a alarm clock that sounds with the very-electronic chirping of birds. We hate dose boids.
She had only one question: "How much is it?"
She wanted to get one to torture me.
Ever dream you could fly? Get up from the Flight Sim. I Fly
thats pretty cool. the brilliant minds at mit do it again... now all they need to do is make it make little skittering/whimpering noises after you hit it. -skud
I kept an alarm clock in college. But I didn't keep it anywhere near my bed. I put it up on a high shelf where I could still see and hear it, but it made me get up and go across the room to hit the snooze. Well, it worked for a little bit, but then I started getting up, hitting the snooze, and laying back down for another 7 minutes until it went off again, and it still took me about an hour to get up like that.
your name is Snooze Button?
You can't handle the truth.
My subconcious often does a very good job of being an alarm clock. Example: The other day, I had to wake up early to receive a delivery. My father woke me up about 30 mins before it was due to arrive, but I was so tired and just went back to sleep. Then, 1.5hrs after it was supposed to arrive, I woke up, checked the clock and started to panic. Seconds later, the delivery guy rang the bell. I figure I must have heard the truck, and I got woken up thinking about the delivery.
Ok, so I just tried it, I put a glass of water before my bed, but in the morning it didn't even make a sound, you liar!
You can't handle the truth.
Dawn Simulator. I call it a window.
Derive Politics
I'm deaf. Yes really I'm deaf. I have a serious problem sleeping through vibrating alarm clocks - paid £50 for this super duper powerful alarm clock and while the first couple of months was terrible (wake up with a nasty shock) I've started to get used to it, and it won't be long before I start to sleep through that one....
Hmmm now what about that washing machine I junked a while ago - take out the motor, put an unbalanced weight on it, and then tape it to my bed's leg....?
for(;;){}
You can't handle the truth.
Some people have the alarm clock from Hell, some the alarm clock that would wake-the-dead, but a friend of mine had or had the alarm clock for the-end-of-the-world. It would wake anyone up with in earshot. Earshot could be the entire neigbhorhood (OK maybe I exaggerate a wee bit).
I cannot describe the toodling buzzing, distorted horn noise it made. If you heard it you'd know. When I'd visit him and stay overnight I could hear it in the next room. The thing is he wouldn't wake up. He wasn't dead or drunk. No one else I knew was immune to the sound. Not even his room mate. Now that my friend is married I don't think he has that alarm clock any more. But I'm sure we'll all hear it again someday...
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
It pains me to say it, but mine clearly wasn't big enough either.
Have your alarm clock placed far enough from your bed that you have to get out of bed to turn it off?
DUH!!!
it is only after a long journey that you know the strength of the horse.
Move your clock (and hence the snooze button) away from reach.
nothing woke me up better than the bash script I wrote once, I called it the chaos generator. Basically it went like this.
I set that up as a cron job and the kicker was that the file was created by root so I hade to be conscious enough to login as root and find the file to delete. It was called the chaos generator because it would sound like war with random gun shots and screams.
Assume I was drunk when I posted this.
so quit peeing in hot tubs!
Ah yes, you can recognize great ground-breaking research immediately ... and this isn't it. Another example of the sheer pointlessness of the MIT media lab. A bunch of women who can't do math or science but are great at self publicizing some techno-gibberish guff.
The world is everything that is the case
party girl needs special alarm clock after late nights of hot, drunk girl on girl action:
Smart idea now. see her party fotos:
blonde tongue wash
boob sqeezah
don;t look down my shirt, naughty boy
MIT swim team
I wish go to MIT for hot girls too,, but I get 430 combined on my SAT, so stay home on computer. I rule!!!
I use to be able to go to bed at 1 am or later, and get up by 7:30 without any problem....in my late 30's I had to start going to bed by midnight to get up by 7:30. Now that I'm in my mid 40's, if I don't get to bed by 22:30, you don't want to be around me the next morning until 45 minutes AFTER the Mt. Dew takes effect :)
Here's a new one which sounds very promising.l t.aspx/. It monitors your sleep patterns and wakes up up at the right time.e eptracker_watch_review_03221147// which gives it 10/10. I am waiting for more reviews!
https://wx15.registeredsite.com/user1041215/defau
There's a review at
http://www.gearlive.com/index.php/news/article/sl
I once had a small, spherical alarm clock with a small flat spot on the bottom. I was constantly knocking it off the nightstand, listening to it biddy-biddy-beep as it rolled across the room and under my dresser. It didn't live a long life.
Since often I find myself waking up 4 hours too late, with the alarm turned off, though I was very certain I turned it on the night before.. I could only conclude I kept turning off the alarm and then falling back to sleep without remembering doing it.
So, now when I HAVE to get up, I set both the alarm by my bed, as well as set the alarm on my cell phone that I leave clear across the room.
This gives me a a backup to fall back on.. it forces me to get out of bed, to turn it off.. which usually manages to keep me out of bed too.. I set my cell phone alarm to go off 5 or 10 minutes after the alarm by my bed goes off.
Anyway, sometimes when I HAVE to get up, I end up sleepless all night.
I still think the most effective way to get up in time in the morning, is a nagging wife to replace your nagging mother. But it may not solve the sleepless nights problem.
I guess the second option is too simple and elegant and thus not flashy enough for MIT. Whatever - I know that good engineering is found when there is nothing left to remove.
Software piracy is victimless theft.
First, make the thing run under the bed instead of letting it get hung up on the clean-clothes-pile or dirty-clothes-pile or the throwing-away-pile. Then build a "thumper" into it that beats the bottom of the mattress like it owes it money when the alarm goes off the second time.
With those two changes, it might work for me. Right now I still sleep through three alarm clocks, my stereo on a timer, my cell phone, and my PDA - and these are all pretty loud (it's a cheesy-crappy little stereo).
My own idea for an alarm clock involves a car battery and a toe-ring, but I haven't figured out how to keep from getting burned by it yet...
Dammit, I meant to post that anonymously!
What about this? kekekeke ^______^
Joseph?
C'mon, REAL DAWN doesn't wake me up. Why would some "dawn simulator" work?
Hang a bucket of water over your bed, and rig it to tip over when the clock goes off. Aside from being messy, it's work every time, guaranteed.
Yesterday called, It wants it's news back.
My usual method is, set the alarm so late I can barely make it even if I don't snooze. Then I won't have any illusions about using the snooze button. Plus, I get maximum sleep.
And if it turns out to be not enough sleep, I just sleep through the alarm anyways. And if I'm late, I'm late, and it doesn't matter if you're late by 10 minutes or 2 hours - I still have to lie about dog ate my homework, or buy new plane tickets, or whatever, right?
Life is short. I don't have time for snooze buttons.
Leave your bedroom door open.
Hopefully the lil bugger would run out of the room, find the stairs, and then just be an annoyance to the cats until the batteries ran out.
Yeah, I was trying to imagine it in my daughters' room, with her mounds of clothes, books, and whatnot everywhere. The thing would either need a burrowing feature, or some serious tracks, to get around in there.
In college, we had sky racks in pour room (you know, the bunk is up near the ceiling). I didn't use a ladder; I had to get up onto my desk and climb into mine. I put the clock radio on my desk, and set it to the most obnoxious station I could find. That way, I *had* to get out of bed to shut the steenking music off, and it was harder to get back into bed than to wake up.
Then again, one morning I fell asleep sitting up on the couch while putting on my socks. I missed a final...
So the solution worked, but the subject didn't!
It is called a dog
I would need a beowolf cluster of these things to get me out of bed before 9:30.
;)
It's not like a go to bed horribly late...in fact, I have tested it. I can go to bed at any time (even 10:30pm) and my body will vehemently deny consciousness until well after 9am. One with legs or wheels would be a simple nuisance...now, 15 or 20 flinging/flying/whipping around, that would likely wake me up.
I guess it's a good thing I'm a consultant.
inject.
BTW, there is a set of busy train tracks outside my window. Sucks.
While this invention has a certain "cool" quotient, it's not enough for me to want to part with my cash. Here's what's always worked for me: Put the alarm clock far enough away from the bed so that you have to get up to shut it off. My current clock has two alarms that I set about 5 minutes apart and a volume control that makes the alarm louder the longer it's going off. I have the thing sitting in the bathroom. Once you get out of bed twice to shut it off, you're awake and ready to roll.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Depends greatly on how hard you hit the snooze bar.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
In the old Pink Panther cartoons (not the goofy newer ones where he talks), there was a sequence in which he responded to the alarm by flattening it with a hammer.
Then, still asleep, he dropped it into a drawer full of silmilarly flattened clocks.
Now, if he *knew* about the hammer, would this Clocky contraption *really* stick around for the first snoozing???
hawk
1)In Korea, only old people use robotic alarm clocks
But then the robotic alarm clocks eat the old people's medicine for fuel
1 mp3 player + Slayer's "Reign In Blood"
If you can sleep through that album, chances are you've slipped into a coma.
I have no dirt, you insensitive torso! :)
hawk
I want one. This is a two-phase product for me and my cat.
Initially, it will scare the beejeezus out of my cat. Then, my cat will get used to it and use it as a scratching post.
An alarm clock with a ping-pong ball launcher. While shooting at the sleeper might be a good idea, the inventor aimed it out his bedroom door. The catch? The alarm refuses to go off until the ball launcher is reloaded, meaning you have to get up and retrieve the ball from another room. You might even have to play hunt-under-the-desk/dresser, depending on aim and floor plan.
If you're electrically minded you could do it artfully. Otherwise, you could tape over it or just smash it so it doesn't work.
Honestly, I suspect you don't actually want to solve the problem, because if you did, eliminating the source of your problem (the snooze button) is not exactly an Einsteinian logical leap.
I had the snooze button taped over on my alarm clock for about 4 years when I was younger because of the same problems you speak of.
If only they could make one that rebuilds itself after I bust the bastard apart with a hammer!
There are 24 hours in a day. /3
We spend 8 hours a day sleeping.
8/24 = 1
We spend a third of our lives sleeping. Why? Who cares about alarm clocks, what we should be caring about more is living life instead of being sleepybutts.
Tried one of those. Stopped working after one night. First morning I hit the snooze button and it ran off. Cat ran after it. Clock turned on cat. Cat jumped on bed and peed on it. I lept out of bed and kicked cat. Clock went off a second time. Unfortunately it had chosen a poor hiding spot. I kicked clock downstairs and it hasn't worked since.
Squirrel!
http://humboldt1.com/~zerdo/
This fellow in one of the foggiest/rainiest corners of California has been improving -- and lowering the cost of -- sunrise simulators for several years, and I've been giving them to friends who didn't know they needed them for quite a while.
I'm using his current -- $25 -- model; simple, not adjustabled like the $160 research-grade model made by PiSquare, but it works fine.
"Trouble in mind, I"m blue, but I won't be blue always, sun's going to shine in my back door some day." -- meaning, sun starts to rise north of east after the equinox (it's just started shining in my back door on the north side of the house) so I won't need the dawn sim til late August.
If you get winter blues READ UP and try one of these. It saved my life, it might help yours.
is a BFH.
I think that a rechargable battery-powered alarm clock, which won't stop beeping until I take it into the shower with me is what I want. After the thing gets wet, it should play the news until it dries off.
I like the idea of the wheels, where the thing can roll off the night-table (S390, 670MP, etc) and hides is great, but some practical purposes ontop of just being an alarm clock would really be useful to me. News in the morning is important. Making me take the alarm clock into the shower in order to get news might be best.
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
When I moved to Sweden, I lived for a while in an apartment with a huge (1 square meter) window in the ceiling. Without blinds or anything. It was late spring and nice weather, so I was actually wide awake at 6 or 7 every morning. I almost thought that I had become a morning person.
Too bad. I soon learned to pull the blankets over my head while sleeping.
Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
...to have your girlfriend wake you in the morning. No alarm clock needed, nor snooze button. She knows how to get me up.
Yes, I stand up and face the day with a smile.
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
use the 38 revolver loaded with snakeshot. It won't make holes thru the wall
Sig..Saur
...the sale of baseball bats has hit an all time high!
Talk about planned obsolescence...
Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself; but talent instantly recognizes genius. -- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
....to be replaced by corn-dog jealousy?
After the Lappy 486 and Compy 386, Clocky should be right up his alley.
I already solved this many many years ago in college - I just plugged my alarm clock into my 200W guitar amp (yes, I had to wire a custom jack into my alarm clock) which was on the opposite side of the apartment (after my Physics prof threatened to flunk me if I didn't start making it to my 8:00am class on time). The guitar amp didn't have to run away or hide - by the time I reached it, I was quite fully awake - Fortunately, my apartment was a shack that shared no walls, floors or ceilings with anyone else - otherwise, the sound might have become a problem. On the other hand, if "Clocky" gets more than a few feet from the bed, the volume necessary for awakening might well be enough to annoy quite a few neighbors in apartments with paper-thin walls...
Instead of Melatonin maybe try Sominex. In my pharmacy they recommended me this instead of Melatonin. Apparently its milder but has the same effect.
The best alarm clock I've found is my cat. It sleeps in my room and always wakes up at about 5:20am, which is fine for me. Obviously most people would need a cat that gets up a bit later. The wonderful thing about it is how unobtrusive it is. It wakes me up very gently and slowly; it's hard to describe but I just gradually become aware that it's moving around a bit and scratching or jumping onto the table or whatever. It doesn't sound like much but it never fails to wake me up, and I have to get up because it starts to get annoying real quick and I have to let it outside. I'm never shocked out of sleep like an alarm clock buzzer or radio does to me. And it never fails! My cat is highly reliable for some reason. I hope other cats are like this because I'm going to need another one some day.
I had a similar problem when I moved to a new apartment a while back. After a long and tiring weekend getting stuff in order, I knew I wouldn't be able to wake up easily on Monday, so I wrote a short shell script that alternated a standard alarm-like sound (beep-beep-beep) with the first couple seconds of /proc/kcore, and also disabled SIGINT/SIGQUIT so the only way to kill it was to log in on a different virtual console and give a "kill" command. I then climbed up to the loft and went to sleep.
Well, when I woke up the next morning it was a lot brighter than it should have been for 6:30. I groggily climbed down the ladder, and saw that (1) it was almost noon and (2) there was one failed login and about three misspellings of "killall alarm" on the screen. My boss was not amused.
I also recall having a dream where I was listening to a radio, when all of a sudden a phone started ringing somewhere--and oddly enough, in between the phone rings the radio gave off bursts of static . . .
Or is she NOT going to be graduating anytime soon...This "invention" looks like something my 6 year old would come up with.
I don't know about the moderators, but I think that's funny.
You know what has helped me? Age.
Want something better? A son. I wake up ALWAYS at 6:45, being not yet 25 years old. The kid seems to have ntp installed, he never drifts...
When still in my former job, I used to get up at 8:00, and he used to woke up at 7:50-8:00. It took him less than a week to get used to my new schedule. Now he wakes up 5 minutes before the alarm clock sounds.
I'm sure I'm not the only one that's done something similar, but I've got a crontab entry that runs a shell script that I wrote that plays random music very loudly, which forces me to get up, log into my server, and killall randommusic.sh. You don't have to be awake to hit a snooze button, but typing in your password ensures some coherency :)