Comments on: geekiest alarm clock ever.

By: Jeff

Jeff — Tue, 01 Nov 2005 00:30:25 +0000

set dayofweek to (weekday of (current date)) as string

Hey, that’s good to know. Thanks, Brett.

By: RobPez

RobPez — Mon, 31 Oct 2005 22:32:14 +0000

I know iAlarm well, but I don’t have room for a Mac in my closet so i just hooked up powered speakers to an AirPort Express. Also a Bluetooth phone with Salling Clicker comes in REALLY handy!

I guess you could also drag and drop in Automator to make yourself a quick and dirty solution too.

By: Brett

Brett — Mon, 31 Oct 2005 21:01:56 +0000

You don’t have to invoke shell commands to get the weekday in AppleScript. This also works:

set day_of_week to (weekday of (current date)) as string

By: Jeff

Jeff — Mon, 31 Oct 2005 17:55:24 +0000

HOLY GOD. Thanks for the link, Randy; and OK, so, let’s retitle this article “second geekiest alarm clock ever”.

By: Randy Bond

Randy Bond — Mon, 31 Oct 2005 17:52:20 +0000

I have a bedroom Mac, an old B&W G3, hidden behind the dresser in the corner running iAlarm (http://www.xultrasoft.com/iAlarm/) with inexpensive multimedia speakers. It’s connected to my home network, which gives it access to the internet and the iTunes library on my server in the closet. It says “Good morning Randy,” reads me the weather and then plays randomly from my morning playlist. I need more than “something light” to roust me out of bed, so I greet the morning with songs such as the Fenderman’s “Muleskinner’s Blues” or John McDermott’s “Scotland The Brave.”

iAlarm puts me to sleep playing my evening playlist with songs like Keola Beamer’s “`Imi Au Io `Oe” or Sarah Brightman’s “Dans La Nuit,” During the rest of the day, it crunches numbers for Stanford University’s Folding@Home project.

iAlarm is simple to use, flexible and reliable. If you want, it can also read you your iCal events or To Do’s, read you the headline news or run applescripts. It will even wake your Mac from sleep to do its duty. It’s worth every penny of the shareware fee I paid.

By: Joshua

Joshua — Mon, 31 Oct 2005 15:55:26 +0000

Pretty cool, Jeff.

There’s an additional caveat: if you’re using your stereo, you have to leave it on and set to the AirPort overnight. If you’re watching TV before you go to bed, it’ll sink your big plans.

I’d say that the thing to do is to use a boom box near your bed, connected to AirPort Express.

Now, to actually wake you up, it might be best to have something like Clocky. But connected to your MP3 library… this could get to be the first useful house robot.

And no, I don’t consider Roomba to be a useful house robot unless you have serious problems with landmines in your house.