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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.
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.
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?
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!
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
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.
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
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
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
Perhaps he drives a Sob?
"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?"[emphasis mine]
Like what? Setting it to receive both the conservative talk radio station and the Ranchero music station at the same time?
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
That looks like a domo-kun, but shorter and fatter. I bet I can scare my cats with it.
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
Could you imagine a Beowulf Cluster of these?
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
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."
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.
When can I buy one?
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
I sleep with a Glock under my pillow. ;-)
Have gnu, will travel.
...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!
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.
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
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.
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%.
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?
"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.
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
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."
So would that be a beowulf cluster of Clockys?
Fetch Text URL - Firefox Extension
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?
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"
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.
Or this Puzzle Alarm Clock, that will shoot out jigsaw puzzle pieces, and only stop ringing when you found them all and managed to put them back in.
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.
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.
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
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
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!"
What about this? kekekeke ^______^
Joseph?
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.
Or, if you don't like the idea of potentially waking up wet, rig it to dump on your wife or most expensive computer if you don't disable it.
...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