So, about a month ago, I complained in here about my alarm clock having particularly poor behaviour with respect to DST changes. A few days later I was ranting to some friends about this, and tangentially about how alarm clocks always irritate me anyway because their user interfaces never quite do what I want, and for decades what I've really wanted in this area has been an alarm clock for which I can write the software myself.

My main annoyance has always been how you turn the alarm on and off. On traditional analogue alarm clocks, you manually enable the alarm when you go to bed each evening, and turn it completely off in the morning as a means of shutting it up. This has the obvious failure mode that if you aren't paying attention when you go to bed, you won't get up on time. The standard digital alternative is that you turn the alarm on and then it beeps at the same time every morning until you turn it off again; that has the slightly less obvious failure mode that if you're unexpectedly elsewhere it goes off anyway and irritates anyone nearby, and also that if you wake up early and decide to get out of bed, you still have to come back and stop the alarm beeping, or alternatively shut it off completely and (again) have to remember to switch it on again that night.

So my solution involves an alarm clock with three basic states: alarm on, alarm off, and ‘you haven't told me yet’. In the last state, there's a big visible indication of some sort on the display which you'd have to be extremely absent-minded (or drunk) to miss. So essentially this is the analogue model – you have to manually enable the alarm every evening that you want it to go off the following morning – but with a big reminder making it nearly impossible to forget to do so. This seems to me to manage the best of both worlds.

(In addition to that, if I was writing the software myself anyway, I wanted a number of other minor tweaks; for example, the ability to set a one-off different alarm time and have it automatically reset to the standard one the next day. Or the ability to use the snooze function as a countdown timer at any time of day instead of only being able to activate it when the alarm is actually in mid-beep. But the tri-state thing was by far the most important point.)

So I ranted this at post-pizza a few weeks ago; this turned out to set in motion a chain of events which involved me and Ian getting about half way through designing an alarm-clock-shaped custom computer peripheral before someone pointed out that a Chumby might be just what I wanted: http://www.chumby.com/. Essentially, it's a small computer with a touchscreen, in an alarm-clock-sized package, able to synchronise to the correct time over a network, and (relatively) conveniently programmable by the end user.

The Chumby Store won't ship outside the USA, but with a little help from my friends I was able to arrange for one to be posted to me anyway. It arrived two days ago, and since I'd been able to write most of the software in advance, it is now sitting on my bedside table acting as a nearly ideal alarm clock, and successfully woke me up this morning. Hooray!

(I say ‘nearly’ ideal because there are still a couple of annoyances, most notably that the sound output is glitching in a really annoying way and I haven't yet worked out why. I'm sure it's in my software, because everyone else's Chumby applications sound fine. But as ewx pointed out yesterday, having your alarm clock make a really annoying noise is not necessarily a bad thing!)

For any interested geeks in the audience, here's some more technical detail on the Chumby and my use of it as a high-tech alarm clock.

( geeky geek geek )