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When the Alarm Clock Runs and Hides
bbbbryan writes to tell us about the commercialization of the elusive alarm clock prototyped at the MIT Media Lab a couple of years back. This alarm clock actually runs, hides from you, and beeps to ensure that you'll be awake enough not to go back to sleep by the time you find it and get it shut up. Detroit News has a writeup on the device, which you can buy from the inventor's site for $50.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvNGnkY_S6I
Enjoy!
wouldn't it be cheaper to wire a capacitor to your snooze button?
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Given that I've missed 3 classes in the last week because I didn't want to get out of bed.. I'd say I'm an idea candidate for one of these, though I feel like it'd get lost enough in the mess of my dorm room that I'd never find it. Another trick that works though, is to get a LOUD alarm clock and put it across the room from you. This works especially well if you have a bunked bed, and FORCES you to get out of bed to shut the damn thing off. Putting your alarm within reach of your sleeping body is a good way to ensure a late morning.
appleguru.org
A very valid reason for preserving the second amendment.
It sounds like the one from 12:01, which moves and insults the user at the same time.
Rather make one out of Lego Mindstorms. At lest then when you smash it, it only de-bricks and you can build it back together again!
Engineering is the art of compromise.
before I punt that motherf**ker out the window.
"To be is to do." -Socrates
"To do is to be." -Jean-Paul Sartre
"Do-be-do-be-do." -Frank Sinatra
MMS' sentient alarm clock.
I was in a bar in Ensenada, drinking a warm beer quickly and trying to remind myself that I hadn't murdered anyone, when my alarm clock caught up with me. Little bastard.
More
"And then I visited Wikipedia
I have an alarm clock for when I really really need to get up. There's no going back to sleep afterwards because you're either in cardiac arrest or wide awake, it lacks any concept of gentle wake-up and is only slightly less annoying than the smoke detector. To avoid the former I use my regular cell phone first, so I'm only slumbering or in light sleep when it goes off.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
...I had my very own elusive alarm clock. It resided at the opposite end of the room I was sleeping in. I turned it up really loud so when it went off BOOM I was awake and I had to get up to turn that damned thing off. It was the most effective alarm I've ever used.
Maybe I should profit from this by selling instructions online...
Seriously though, alarm clocks these days have a snooze button for a reason - most people want to use it. I wouldn't buy one without it.
For that matter, if anyone has that much trouble getting up, wouldn't it be more productive to actually go to bed some 8 hours before having to get up? I dunno, just a crazy idea.
;)
And, much as I'm a gamer myself, the excuse better not be, "but my guild needed me for a raid"
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
This might be more practical than strapping my alarmclock to my cat.
A combination of this idea could be combined with a prank a friend of mine pulled not too long ago.
He was studying computer engineering and doing stuff with embedded devices. He took a chip, a light sensor, and a small speaker and hid it in the room of one of his roommates. He programmed the device to sense when the lights went out and then it would sound off at full volume. The device would continue to sound until the lights came back on, at which time it would go silent. After the lights went out again, the timer would reset and the alarm would go off in another ten minutes...
-br
Similar ideas have been in production for a while...
A flying alarm clock accomplishes the same task, plus: IT'S FLYING
Some toy company made something similar a decade ago. It had a bunch of buttons on the top. Some of these would pop up in random order, and you had to memorize it and push them down in the right order to turn it off. To be able to do it, you were supposed to be too awake to be able to go back to sleep...
Nothing easier than to get out of bed for a crying baby.
I gots me one!
XatioN
I CAN'T WAIT to buy a bunch of these things, and modify them!
Can you imagine the mischief potential?!
Modify it so it goes at high speed, and NEVER STOPS moving...
I can't wait to unleash a bunch of these annoying little bastards in the nearest shopping mall!
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
This thing had better be mallot-proof and bullet-proof, cause...damn.
But did you see that tote bag with a laptop pouch?!
Yes, this is a great concept. When I absolutely, positively need to get up for something that can't be missed, like a critical morning meeting or to catch a plane, or at an ungodly early hour when I normally couldn't possibly stay awake, I cannot use my normal snooze alarm, which I will hit and ignore.
Instead, I set the alarm on my cell phone, at a loud volume, and I place it on the floor at the opposite corner of the bedroom, or in the hallway with the door cracked open. My rule is then to never get back in bed after going over and turning it off.
This device is along the same lines. You don't want to use it every morning, but when you can't afford to stay asleep, you really need it.
Whoa. This is cool, no more tardies to school. Wonder if there's a way to program it to follow a certain path so I can run past my clothes while chasing the fleeing clock.
How long before, like the flaming mouse, one of these knocks a candle over or runs into a fireplace, and burns a house down?
Sooooo very confused.
How hard is it to wake up in the morning? Ya pretty much have to do it every day, so how much practice do you need to do it on time?
...falls off the bedside locker and rolls about aimlessly more like.
/. I was expecting some real smart features such as:
This being
o Learns the layout of your bedroom
o Jumps off the locker before it goes off
o Hides in the optimum place
o Doesn't hide in the same place twice
o Has a proximity sensor - runs away as you try to pick it up.
Based on the Yew-Toob clips, I reckon this gadget would last about 5 minuted in my house. It's simply too easy to hit with a stick.
Backward%20compatibility%20is%20over-rated
even the title says it'a "a couple of years" old. and the clock seems dumb as hell :D:D. or tie it with a rope, so with just one swift move of the hand, the clock will be flying out the window
the lazy ones will just put it in a bucket
funny pics
Looking at those little wheels, I'm not sure that it could get very far to hide in my house.
Which is the very reason I don't need to spend $50 TO lose something, when I seem to be doing a damn fine job myself.
1. Buy a set of speakers (nothing fancy needed here, standard shitty stereo speakers are fine). If you already have one, skip to step 2. /., you have one if it responds to ping) and set desired alarm.
2. Note that the on/off/volume knob is on precisely one of the two speakers, not both. Put this speaker FAR away from your bed. Put the one without the knob near you as you sleep.
3. Connect speakers to computer (this is
4. Sleep.
In the morning, once you figure out that pummeling the speaker next to you won't do you any good, you will have to get up and fix the problem at the other end of the room. Added bonus: the damned thing doesn't have to be loud since it is near you.
Maybe I should put this on my site for $60...
The Inventor, Gauri Nanda is damn hot! Hot geeky girl inventor :)
http://www.media.mit.edu/events/movies/video.php?i d=clocky.rm
In our room it would fall straight into a pile of clothing and stay there. This will be great for the sorts of people who have a hard time getting up but somehow manage to keep their bedrooms 100% tidy, but I suspect that the intersection of those two sets is small.
Xenu loves you!
A Segway for my parakeet.
What?
"which you can buy from the inventor's site for $50."
But only if you live in the US or Canada.
Any Australian resellers?
ISO certified == THX certified
does that thing come back to where it belongs after I am awake or do I have to find it everyday to put it back on the nightstand? In other words: does this thing more than any wind-up toy would be capable of?
Just asking.
Don't put your alarm clock next to your bed, but at the other end of the room. But of course, useless gadgets are cool.
>>This alarm clock actually runs, hides from you, and beeps to ensure that you'll be awake enough not to go back to sleep by the time you find it and get it shut up.
Also known as kids. Though mine tend to scream rather than beep.
What happens if I put one of those next to my bedside table?
Yes, a couple of years old invention seems about right. At least, it was on slashdot back in 2005...
Assembling etherkillers for fun an profit
...seeing one of those go off in an air-port check-in.
Somehow, it reminds me of this - http://junkfunnel.com/sld/ - possibly one of the most irresponsible products on the market!
throw new NoSignatureException();
After all, they have somewhere to go in the morning also, no reason to stay home and keep trying to wake your ass up...
Put a normal alarm where you can't reach it, such as by the door. Thus you have to get out of bed to reach it. Then spend the $50 you saved on a pointless gadget on something useful like beer.
Know about this.They will start chasing thier alarm clock bombs everywhere. No telling what they might blow up.
1 - Imagine a beowolf cluster of these!!
2 - May I be the first to welcome our mobile, noisy, disruptive but arousing overlords?
3 - 1) buy alarm clock
2) add wheels
3) ???
4) profit!!
A simple improvement would be to include a mechanism to make the bot move in the direction of least light. This could be done by putting two photoresistors on either side of the bot, calculating the lighting differential (a trivial calculation, could be done with a differential amp.), and moving in the appropriate direction. This would make the bot seek corners and the bed underside.
Made me think of the one from "One Of Us" by Michael Marshall Smith.
I am not sure how much I would really enjoy appliances with too much attitude...
Optimist: The thumb drive is half empty! Pessimist: The thumb drive is half full...
We've had this at least twice before.
If you must moderate, please moderate as irrelevent, not something bad, because I'm sure someone will find this interest
I once bought a pack of jacks, you know the old jacks and bouncy ball, from the dollar store. I would put my alarm clock on the other side of the room and throw them down on the floor around it. When I would get up to turn off my alarm, I'd either have to wake up enough to step around them or suffer the bloody feet consequences.
Why not be nice to yourself instead?
A good cup of coffee is, IMO, a far better (and nicer) way to start the day:
http://metalab.at/wiki/TassimoHack
It is called a 2 year old.
The clock is typical of the kind of nonsense that came out of the Media Lab, but my girlfriend (yes, real) is very interested in the tote laptop bags. I can see why - the bags you usually get for laptops are about as dorky as it gets.
A colleague and I once discussed rigging a bucket of water over the bed, with a rope that would be somehow pulled to tip the water over the unsuspecting user at the appropriate time.
It seemed promising, but the lawsuit potential killed it - what if the pilot light on the central heating had gone out overnight, and you actually tipped a block of ice onto the user's head? He'd definitely sleep in, then.
It's perfectly normal to have schedules that don't match your best working hours. What I think generates the silliness that this clock taps into is the mini "game of hit the snooze". Pseudo forcing yourself to be brutalized before one gets up is indicative of subconsciously needing faux excitement.
Put a coffeemaker and headphones beside your bed. If you're torched in the morning, drink some triple strength BeanJuice with the light on. Might as well get some good tunes in - skip the silly robot clock.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Damn, I wish I had mod points today. That's really funny!
Deliver yesterday, code today, think tomorrow.
Clock chases you!
My friends in college ran their alarm clock through a guitar amp during finals. They would practically get into fistfights as they both scrambles to the other side of the room to shut it off.
This reminds me of a certain Pink Panther cartoon episode. Pink Panther goes through all sorts of things to try to eliminate his annoying cuckoo alarm bird. The bird escapes every attempt to eliminate it. After nearly killing it, he finally reconciles himself with the bird and accepts the nasty interruptions from his sleep. I don't remember the title, but I take that bird to be a prior art, hence blocking any patent possibilities for this invention :)
... Has a review of this clock:
http://www.the-gadgeteer.com/review/clocky
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
I already use the "put the alarm where you can't reach it" trick, and when I'm tired I just ignore the alarm
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
....at the shopping centre (mall). They're called children.
not around here
Sorry for OT
Those who can, do.
I usually dream about hitting the snooze button. It's quite a frustrating dream, and it takes about an hour before it goes away. How would i ever find such an alarm clock again?
nanda home is saying int'l availability will be in june/july. get on the mailing list.
Heh. Not really. I've been called many names, but "morning person" is pretty far off the mark. My ideal day would involve working at night and sleeping from 6 AM to 2 PM. But, alas, you can't always have a pony.
What it has to do with, is, well, discipline and accepting your fate. If I must wake up at a given time, you know, I must. I might as well accept that and go get a cup of cofee. It takes less time than playing silly chase-the-clock games.
Plus, there's this little detail that there is no such thing as a biological "morning person". The human internal clock actually is set for 26 hours, and reset each morning. (A principle surely familiar to anyone who's studied hardware design.) There are no people pre-programmed to be up at 6 AM and others pre-programmed to be up at 2 PM.
So if you consistently find yourself having to put a super-human struggle to get up in the morning, you have some other problem. Either you're not getting enough sleep (the most common), or you need to see a doctor.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
the robots will rise.
When I first saw this clock's prototype, which I believe was covered in carpet or something, I said wow, I really want to have this. Although I'm not sure of the value now, other than amusement, since I keep my non-moving alarm clock on the other side of my room. I have to get up and walk across the room to turn it off. I know that getting up and searching for this clock is one of the big selling points, but I noticed that a lot of people seem to keep their alarm clocks like right next to their heads where it's no problem to just reach across and turn the thing off while they're still half asleep. How about people try moving their alarm clocks to some remote location. That works just as well, right?
Put the alarm clock out of reach so you HAVE to get out of bed to turn it off. Well, if you want to waste money on an over complicated solution then go ahead and buy this alarm clock.But honestly, you'd be better off investing in a wallace and gromit style tilting bed and trapdoor.
I'm a fan of alarm clocks for the deaf that vibrate you awake. They don't quit so easily and the effect usually gets me from sleepy to alert faster.
Yours sounds somewhat like the one I've had for the last two decades. I call it the heartattack alarm clock due to how loud the beeping is. I hate the sound, but I know it's an absolute necessity, as radio music won't even phase me. I'm not a morning person by any stretch of the imagination, despite the fact that my distant job requires me to get up around 5 a.m. I never get much more than a few hours of sleep at night anyway, so it's a lost cause.
Back in 1999 when I struck out on my own, and no longer had a mother in the house to bitch at me to get up, I had a horrible habit of oversleeping. (I still do. Hate, hate hate getting up. Hate it.)
I was living in an apartment complex that was perpetually under "renovation", and by "renovation" I mean they would routinely dig up the parking lot and make you park on the far end of the complex, a good two city blocks away.
SO my solution to my oversleeping issue was to lock the alarm clock in a foot locker, and put the key in my car. To turn the fucker off, I had to wake up, shower, get dressed, trudge to the car, get the key, schlep back, open the locker, and turn off the alarm.
Sounds good on paper. In practice it only took a week or so before I was able to do this while still mostly asleep, and get back, turn off the alarm, and go back to sleep.
Anyway, I don't see this alarm clock working for me either.
mirrorshades radio -- darkwave, industrial, futurepop, ebm.
Spend 3 minutes knocking the wife up (2 if you don't hug afterwards)
Wait 9 months
Place newborn baby in a crib in your bedroom
Let your alarm go off one morning.
Use the pain from the beating serve as a reminder to ALWAYS wake up before your alarm clock.
I'm a heavy sleeper and from what I heard on the videos, the alarm isn't loud enough, I'll still end up sleeping right through the battery life. Speaking of battery life, this thing needs a charger to sit on, and a lithium battery instead of a couple of copper tops. My last caveat would be that it's motion is a little too random, it should instead have random higher level functions (which, it might have to some extent, might just be some needed configuration), and maybe some advanced configuration options.
:P .
You know what, fuck it, I'll make my own
A libertarian shat on my carpet once. Claimed the free market would sort it out. -Ford Prefect(8777)
Why rely upon an elusive sound to wake up when one can simply awake by vibrations? Granted, this scared the hell out of my Chihuahua puppy the first time the bed vibrated but it's more fun than an alarm which I can't hear anyway which is why the audible portion of the Sonic Boom alarm clock isn't used. Check it out! http://www.harriscomm.com/catalog/product_info.php ?products_id=18980&hcCsid=8bc2e170f131cc826dcd0e48 80865470
Gauri Nanda won the Ig Nobel prize for Economics in 2005 for this invention.0 5
I'm happy to see that she's final brought this to the open market.
http://www.improb.com/ig/ig-pastwinners.html#ig20
I solved this problem a long time ago. I just put my alarm clock on the other side of the room. It's loud, and I have to get up to turn it off. By the time I get there, I'm too awake to go back to sleep.
Maybe it only works for me though...
How is this news? You tosser.
Well, here's how it worked for me: keep at it.
If you're used to staying up until 6 AM, yeah, you won't immediately switch to going to sleep at 10PM or 12PM or whatever you have as the new schedule. It will involve some laying in bed and not being able to sleep, because your internal clock is set for another hour.
The worst thing you can possibly do there is just get back up and sit at the computer. (Or whatever else) Then smack the clock in the morning and get back to sleep. That's the way to just prolong the problem.
So go to bed at, say, 10 PM and rise and shine at 6 AM. (Or 12 and 8, or whatever schedule you decided.) Do rise and get your morning coffee at that hour, even if you only slept 3 hours. It's ok. It'll make it a hell of a lot easier to fall asleep early the next night. Keep at it.
Eventually you just get used to that new schedule.
Don't start shifting it, no matter how tempting it is. As I've said, the average human clock is actually set for 26 hours and reset each morning. It actually works somewhat like a PLL. It's damn easy to start shifting a bit forward every day, and end back at the starting "I'm not a morning person" square. Essentially that's how I ended up with a 6AM to 2PM sleep schedule back then. You just shift forward until you hit a limit where you can't shift any further. (E.g., your boss would _really_ start minding it if you show up at 5 PM, when everyone else is leaving.) Then you stop at that, and start making excuses as to why that's somehow your natural schedule.
And don't start finding "oh, I can live on just 6 hours sleep at night" excuses, no matter how tempting it is to prolong the day that way. A lot of people who have trouble waking up are actually in this category. No, you can't live happily on 6 hours a night, not in the long term. Not unless you're very old, anyway. You just start being a bit more tired each day, and it piles up. Your body (or rather, brain) is trying to tell you something if you're having to roll for willpower to wake up. You're still tired. That way lies the temptation to start shifting your bedtime, too.
Basically, it just takes discipline. Yeah, it's an ugly word, but that's what everyone else has to do. Don't think it's some nerd-only gene that makes only you have trouble keeping the schedule. A lot of those poor buggers at the assembly line would start shifting their schedule too, if they had a chance (e.g., flex time.) But they already hit the forward limit, their boss complains if they're not at work at, say, 8 AM. So they just apply a bit of discipline, and go to bed at the right hour so they can be up and running at 6 AM. That's all.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
You run away from Alarm Clock.
let's get smart and apply this 'technology' to some other places..
1. To the fridge or mini-fridge; for your new diet when you walk towards it, it starts scuttling around your house forcing you to chase it down before you get your grub on... The inevitable damage that it causes to the walls and appliances it bumps into and destroys is actually a feature not a bug; as the construction labor will help burn additional calories
2. for the evercrack/wow fiend in your life: mount his/her computer on it and make it take a path that leads him/her to sunlight outside on the little chase. comes with a warning label that their retinas may instantly melt..
3. to your wallet so that when you get home you have to run around and think before you buy crap you don't need on tv
4. to your car keys on weekend nights... if you approach them and you are drunk you'll have to catch them first if you want to drive. and the exercise may do some good to jumpstart your metabolism.
5. why cant we apply this to some random dog toy that fido can chase around.. it would have to be made out of that same stuff the unbreakable rulers are made of... but preferably stronger since those tend to break a whole lot.
6. and last but least, the practical jokers model, with adhesive, so you can stick whatever it is you need to put on it to annoy someone with.
thanks for orders operators are standing by at 555-5555 dont be alarmed if they cant pick up right away... there phones runa round the office whenever they ring!
"Jazz isn't dead, it just smells funny" ~Frank Zappa
EdelFactor
I can just see it, A guy wakes up in the morning with the new alarm clock and starts calling it: "Here larmmy, larmmy, larmmy. Here larmmy, larmmy, larmmy. Come out where every you are you ringing little thing." "Oh! their you are?" Then takes his sledge hammer and hits it. "Now stop ringing!" "Good, I can go back to bed now!"
A site cowboyneal will like http://www.freewebs.com/atpa/