Using a laptop as alarm clock
My alarm clock died long ago. Since then, I use my cellphone to wake me up. Works ok, except that my current cellphone is total crap and, among numerous issues, its alarm software some morning just stays idle while, the others days when it actually works, a simple movement shuts it off. Believe me, I checked everything, made plenty of test, it’s just bad design and poorly coded software.
Not to mention that I usually wake up with no alarm; so when I use one, it means that I must wake up early, probably with not enough sleep at all. I need the real deal, high sound level and no shortcut to kill it, to actually get up.
Whenever I needed an alarm, I ended up running, on my laptop not to far from my bed, some `sleep XXh XXm && mplayer /path/to/a/song`, check sound volume, followed by CTRL-C in the morning.
Two days ago, I was über-tired, I needed to wake up early next morning and calculating tomorrow waking up time – current time just pissed me off, not to mention checking the volume level, mute setting and such. It pissed me enough to decide me to write a script to fix the problem. Here comes wakey.pl:
- it takes as argument the time you’d like to wake up in the form HH:MM or HHh MMm ;
- it can run as timer (as sleep), useful if you want to take 20min nap, with -t or –timer ;
- it wakes you up playing a random song picked in ~/.wakey ;
- it uses mplayer to play the song, so it can be in any format your mplayer supports ;
- it raises progressively the sound volume when trying to wake you up (you can set –volume-max, in case 100% on Master mixer is too loud) and reset properly mixer settings when finished ;
- it won’t stop playing the music until you type a 3 to 5 characters word randomly taken from the defaut dictionary installed on your system (/usr/share/dict/words).
I wanted it to deal with any powersave setup to make sure to forbid the laptop to sleep or hibernate, but I found not portable and clean way to do it (my laptop uses KDE with PowerDevil). I’d be happy to hear about any clue/lead in the regard.
# (this assume wakey.pl is executable and in $PATH) # wakes you up next time its 6 in the morning: wakey.pl 06:00 # the same wakey.pl 6h # wakes you up exactly in 15 minutes wakey.pl -t :15 # the same wakey.l 15m --timer # the same but make sure the sound volume wont exceed 70% wakey.l 15m -t -v 70
To run it, make sure you have debian packages libfile-homedir-perl and libterm-readkey-perl installed. You’ll also need mplayer and amixer properly set up.
