Hacker News Reader

Comment by war1025 | Hacker News Reader

Not nearly as nifty as this, but it reminded me that in college my alarm clock was cron job on my desktop that would launch a program every day at 8am which beeped the system bell once a second until I leapt out of bed and hit Enter.

Making that sound stop was a great motivator for getting out of bed.

View on HN

For a long time I had a similar setup, but I was just playing Thunderstruck by AC/DC. It stars quietly, the volume of the song increase slowly, and you have like a minute to get up and turn it off before they guy start to cry and wake up all your family.

I used 'To live is to die' by Metallica. It starts with a nice tune, and you have less than one minute to turn it off before the music changes (slowliy) with the drums and distorted guitars ;-)

Dies Irae or nothing

My high-school alarm clock was a power amp on a hardware switch that would activate roughly around 0630, plus a Windows timer on the desktop that would wake the computer from sleep and proceed to blast an mp3 through the (now powered) speaker columns.

The motivator for getting up was as much to stop the mp3 as it was to prevent the rest of my family from killing me. I eventually retired the system, after my half-awake brain developed an acrobatic routine, where in one smooth movement, I would raise, hit the power button on the power amp, and fall back to bed.

I've heard a story about one guy who tried everything to wake up to go for college on time. He even got to surround clocks with some pans and cutlery, so that when clock started ringing and he got to turn it off, he would be awake enough to not fall asleep again. One morning he was found by roommate snoozing on sofa, but already half-clothed for exit.

My 8:03AM cron job wipes the MBR on my test VM. And the alarm clock is set to 8AM. Been using it since 2016.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com