Comment by xlii | Hacker News Reader

Comment by xlii | Hacker News Reader

Interestingly enough, nothing like this happened to me, and I'm using exact same features as OP. Bad luck I guess.

However, it reminds me about some other situation that I'd like to share as it amuse me to this day.

Some time ago I was traveling to my clients city. I was provided with a flat of one of coworkers who - at the same time was delegated elsewhere. So that was kind of AirBnB but it was all "paid" by company (in a way, that he got compensation and I had place to stay).

I went to sleep fairly late and barely shut my eye when at 2am his Android tablet started to ring. I have no idea what was up with it, was it default alarm or some custom one, but there was no way for me to disable it. None of the physical buttons worked and every touch interaction spawned the lock screen through which I couldn't get past. On top of it, the sound was getting louder and louder. It didn't ring for 20 minutes when the police came knocking. Someone complained about the noise. I said that the device isn't mine and I'm only taking care of friend's flat and that there is nothing I can do about it. Showed device to them, we fiddled together with it but couldn't turn it off neither. Police wanted to hand me a ticket, but that wasn't easy. I was foreigner so they had to collect on spot. Once they confirmed that they decided to not make me any troubles and asked me to try and to muffle the tablet.

After 3h of constant noise it seemed like device decided to stop ringing by itself.

Since I was awake full night, I took day of and notified the client that it's either hotel for me or I'm going back home, cause I decline to be in the same place as the dreaded device to which they agreed. That almost was the end of the story, but week later I learned it wasn't end of it.

Coworker, the owner of the device (who refused to provide me with the code, since it can't be that bad), came back to his door which kicked out by the firefighters. It seemed like neighbors called the police again day/days later. Police couldn't get in but they heard the alarm so they called the firefighters who assuming that one of the smoke alarm went off decided to break in to find only ringing tablet.

To this day I rather not being woken up than suffer through the Alarm from Hell.

I find it hard to believe you couldn't engineer a solution to muffle the sound. Assuming holding down the power button to turn it off didn't work (like, you know, every other phone and tablet ever) you could shove it under your mattress, in the freezer, put it in a ziploc and submerge it in the tub/sink, go throw it in the trunk of your car, stick it in a parcel and mail it to the owner...

Or since it's already a while back when headphone jacks were still a thing, plug in your headphones. Although they might take damage from that sound

Headphones don’t make a difference on iOS, both the external speaker and the headphones play the alarm. This might be the case for Android too.

Headphones don't work for alarms iirc

Yes, that’s true, however I was sleep deprived, after day long trip and I wasn’t at my top intellectual game at the moment. Also this wasn’t hotel room but instead coworkers flat which wasn’t prepared for guests. I literally was given a couch with a blanket. It wasn’t supposed to be like that nor I was supposed to stay there a lot since we worked pretty much 8-22 following days.

So yeah, it’s unbelievable story about my inaptitude at that moment. Could I handled it better? Yeah, probably. But usually stuff like this is matter of chaotic circumstances.

Police officers couldn’t turn it off neither and they fiddled with it for a 3 minutes or something like that so it’s not like I was the only one who failed ;)

I always think of this in these situations:

https://xkcd.com/530/

For what it's worth, holding down the power button no longer guarantees you're gonna shut down the device. On the iPhone X (at least, maybe earlier models, maybe later), you have to hold down a combination. It doesn't take long to figure out, but it's a really stupid change.

Is there a list of devices anywhere for which this doesn't work?

It's worked in anything I've tried (haven't tried latest iphones) with only a momentary power switch on it. I was under the impression it was some kind of legal requirement somewhere, and that's why it was so standard.

I have never heard of a decice - iOS, Android, or otherwise, that had an alarm that couldn't be toggled off through the lock screen. What kind of awful alarm app was he using!?

A lot of alarms can be configured to have barriers that prevent you from easily turning them off. The idea is it forces you to mentally engage and wake up a bit.

It might be the lock screen, simple or difficult math problems, visual puzzles, etc. Until you solve it, it won’t turn off the alarm.

It’s a neat idea until this happens, I guess.

My favorite was the physical alarm clock that would launch a propeller across your bedroom. The only way to turn off the alarm was to find the propeller and put it back on the base.

I was initially thinking Clocky, but Clocky was an alarm on wheels.

I don't think the propeller one had any name beyond "flying alarm clock" or somesuch, and the failure mode seems way worse: if the propeller shoots out an open window or wedges itself behind furniture you're hosed.

Plus finding a small propeller in the dark corners of your room while just woken up seems way too stressful a task, frankly.

I have a friend who had a dorm in college with 3 other guys, and all of them had problems waking up to alarm clocks. They each had an alarm clock that they placed in a different part of the room, so each of them would have to get up to shut it off. One day they discovered that they overslept, each of the 4 clocks had been turned off but nobody remembered doing it.

I swear I've posted this before:

I used to have a job that required me to be up at 4 or 5am. I am not a morning person, and this requirement was equivalent to a normal person being told they need to write their weekly sales reports using a pencil taped to their knee. Or something.

Anyway, I had this early wake up time, but a problem with shutting my alarm off without actually waking up.

So I took a normal alarm clock, cracked it open, and soldered a 5m length of speaker wire to the circuit board. I drilled a hole in my headboard and mounted an external speaker there. The alarm clock itself was placed in a backpack, with the zippers tied together with a key ring, and the whole thing stuffed in my closet.

So each morning, I was forced to get out of bed, go to the closet, fiddle with the key ring to separate the 2 zippers, then finally turn the alarm off.

I had roommates at the time; they weren't very happy with me. But they were my brother and a good friend, so to hell with them :)

Imagining this story from their perspective paints a pretty bad picture of you.

Don’t worry, OP left out the plot twist where they got a huge payday from that job. Their siblings forgave them and they’re now living it up in a sweet mansion in Hawaii.

Everything you wrote is true, except the huge payday and the mansion in Hawaii.

Nah, the plot twist was that we were all in our early 20s, and had mismatched schedules. Whatever annoyance my morning routine caused was matched with their late nights partying when I had work the next morning.

And I got pretty quick about silencing that alarm. (And getting a better job.)

There's a great way to get added to a national watch list if the deconstructed alarm innards were found or you were googling some specific keywords for the pin out schematics lol

I bought through Kickstarter a Ramos alarm clock which requires entering a code through a separate keypad (defaulting to MMDD) to turn it off. Unplugging the alarm clock doesn't turn it off. The only options are to turn it off before it goes off or enter the code.

After my kids were born, I stopped using it because we didn't want to wake up the kids (I've had my phone on silent mode for the last six and a half years now). All was well and good until one day the cleaning lady apparently turned the alarm on and I didn't notice. The alarm went off in the morning and I went to the keypad in the bathroom to turn off the alarm—and the batteries in it had died. I ended up taking the alarm clock to the basement and wrapping it in a towel until the battery backup gave up.

That's funny. If I had heard about that product when it was announced, I probably would have backed it.

I used to use an iOS app called FreakyAlarm. It had all sorts of features to enforce wake up time. You could set it to just require that you solve a math problem, or move the hands on an analog clock to "28/4:(36+15)" (Meaning, move the hour hand to 7 and the minute hand to 51.), and all sorts of "games" that you're unlikely able to do in a half-asleep state.

But my favorite was the barcode scanner. You scanned a random UPC (I chose my shaving cream), and in the morning the alarm would not shut off until you went and scanned it again. But that got me in trouble once when I was on a business trip, and didn't pack that particular brand of shaving cream.

Of course it's just an iOS app, so you can force quit it and uninstall it faster than doing any of the tasks. But I preferred honor to cheating that way.

I don't use any alarm clock anymore. I have dogs. They're remarkably consistent.

A bit tangential, but I had a tendency to just sleep through my alarm. I ended up getting an alarm called "The Earthquake", or some similar cliche. It had a module that you'd stick under your sheets or mattress and would violently vibrate when the alarm went off.

I quickly learned how to disable an alarm while groggy instead of sleeping straight through it.

yeesh. I'd have just thrown it into the freezer, or if that didn't work, I'd have filled the bath and put it in there!

I've had my own "alarm from hell" situations, mostly with smoke detectors (one was in a room with vaulted ceilings in a house with only stepstools. I had to build a mountain of furniture at 4am!) I understand the frustration and rage.

I am convinced that fire alarm batteries only go flat at 4 am.

protip: holding down the power button will kill all android devices after 10-ish seconds.

power + volume down is a hard off for most hardware that uses radios (tablets, mobiles).

You don't need to press down the volume button on Android.

I'm curious, what's the significance of using radios here? What's the correlation between having a radio and supporting that interaction? It just feels weird to me to think of a majority of hardware companies going "Well, this device has a radio, so I guess we need to add power+volume down as a shutoff trigger".

Not disputing what you said is true, just curious of the origins!

In most radio contexts it's used for doing a debug log... in case of a hard lock. If you do it on an Android device (depending on settings), it generates an error log and memory dump then cuts power to the chip. It's an old carry-over from radio testing (Former RF Validation Engineer here)

Perhaps it was a "locate lost device" situation?

I seem to recall one update that flip flooped snooze and stop on the alarm. That ruined a week.

You were sleeping on a pillow right? Shove tablet fully between two pillows or seat cushions on floor, place a table leg over it to absorb any sound and put heavy stuff on top of the table.

Problem solved.

This happened to me on an earlier release years ago.

Personally, I always update in August to the betas. I’ll take the new features with the bugs.

Alarm from Hell === Alarm from Earth

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