Debugging my wife's alarm clock

I remember this happening in Belgium, where they detected it quite like a month after the fact.

Everybody got a letter in the mail (yes, snail mail!) explaining when they were going to run the system fast for a couple of hours to catch up.

It may not be used so much for clocks now, but you can still buy cheap timed power switches that use this method.

For example: https://www.argos.co.uk/product/5440524

I have used dedicated alarm clocks until the death of my parents, and then I have retired the clocks. One of them was a Sony clock/radio that might have been similar to yours, which I had given to my mother because it had very big digits, so she could see the time clearly from a long distance.

Another alarm clock had been built by my father, some 50 years ago, from medium-scale integration TTL circuits, before the apparition of dedicated integrated circuits for clocks. It still worked perfectly, and because it used a thermo-compensated quartz oscillator it had a much higher accuracy than the cheap quartz clocks or watches that can be bought now.

Since then, whenever I need an alarm or to know the time, I just use a smartphone or computer. I was born much earlier, so I have used dedicated alarm clocks for several decades, but I do not like to use superfluous things, so I no longer use dedicated alarm clocks (or wrist watches or TV sets etc.).

That does not mean that I do not like clocks, either mechanical or electronic. I like them, but I do no longer need them, so I like to examine them like I like to examine some ancient sword, which is beautiful, but for which I do not have any use in my daily life.

I do. Like many others, it's primarily so that I don't have to bring my phone into my room. I spend way too much time on my glowing pocket rectangle as it is.

It's some Sony radio clock, given to me by a relative 8-10 years ago, likely from Walmart or someplace similar. I have it set to the local classical station which is usually more pleasant to wake up to than the beeper. (Though occasionally, train horns in the distance will sound like trumpets, and I'll wake up and have to determine if it's a literal false alarm or not!)

One strange thing about this clock is, it seems to have a half-implemented support for dimming the display. You can get the display to dim by mashing the snooze bar, but once it's dim there's no going back unless you pull the plug and the backup battery. I saw a thread on a forum once about people discussing this odd behavior, but nobody seemed to have any explanation.

I use a dedicated alarm clock.

Recently, I have built my own: <https://masysma.net/37/dcf77_vfd_raspi_clock.xhtml>

Before that (and now for redundancy, I think my own one still has some minor bugs), I used a cheap one by "OK" <https://www.mediamarkt.de/de/product/_ok-ocr-310-2172968.htm...>.

I don't like that I have to mash some tiny buttons to set the "OK" up and also to stop it. The LED that shows that the alarm is active is also hard to read for me. Hence I tried to improve upon this in my own design. I also found a solution to avoid the backup battery, but it is probably not what the "general public" would like to have either :)

Born in 1983. I do, because I don't want my smartphone in the bedroom and I have more trust in a more trivial device. I got a Wake up light by Philips I wouldn't switch for a phone, and a very small Casio pocket clock when I travel. This device is LOUD and I love it ;)

I've got a wake-up light, probably 10 years old by now. It's a dumb machine, no wifi or QI or anything, but it's got a leg up over "old-fashioned" alarm clocks; the clock is red lights and dimmable to "barely visible in daytime", it's a very adjustable light from just enough to not stumble to burning out retinas (and comfortable reading in-between), it's got a radio and builtin "gentle waking up sounds" that are actually pretty horrible because of the tinny speakers. But preferable over morning radio that's usually announcers laughing or terrible music.

Downsides: Very expensive, it stopped working at one point but I replaced the power adapter and it was fine, tinny speakers like I said, and its design is round and on a very narrow base so it'll topple whenever you smack its touch sensitive surface to snooze it.

Before that I had a traditional alarm clock with yellow letters, radio, the works, had that for like 20 years before replacing it. The letters on that were stupidly bright so we stuck an unused photo film in front of it with tape.

We just went back to one. For a number of years we let a phone do this job.

Then on one super rough day, both my wife and I were just drained! We hit the bed and were gone, snoozing hard.

Well, neither of us managed to have a phone charged well enough to wake us up and so we just didn't! Kid late for school, late for work, late, late... total pig of a day.

I picked up a $10 clock almost exactly the same as our old one, which did not survive our last move.

Now it has a fresh 9V battery and is set a bit behind the phones. It is the backup.

And we both kind of like having it again. We get a time display at a glance and it does wake us up nicely without being brutal.

These things are simple tech, but useful, low hassle tech too.

I do. I have a Muji one.

I don’t allow anything more complicated than that, a light and a book in the bedroom.

I was born two years after you and I'm always using an alarm clock, which saves me from worrying about my phone before going to bed (I just worry about batteries once a year instead). Though it's a simple beeping model from 15 years ago, I've never tried to use radio as an alarm clock.

I use one, a General Electric clock/radio unit from 1982. I bought it about a year ago so I could use my FM transmitter hooked up to my computer to send audio at specific times. It's just nice to have a dedicated device sometimes.

I do! Bought one at Ikea for 5€.

I use one because the sound on my android refuses to work (I am pretty sure it's a software bug, not a hardware failure, but i have no proof).since otherwise, the phone works correctly, i am not replacing it..

I went out of my way to buy an old Sanyo radio alarm clock so that I don't have to rely on my phone or keep it on my bed side table. The neat flip digit display is a bonus.

One dial to set the time, another to set the alarm.

I have a handful of Realistic Chronomatic clock radios scattered about the house, including one at my bedside. The LED digits are large, and the alarms are loud - basically, exactly what I want in an alarm clock.

My wife uses a Radio Shack alarm clock that looks nearly identical to the one in this post. It broke recently and I fixed it by removing about 3 inches of the power cord where it attaches to the transformer.

Good riddance!

I never had the patentice to fuss with actually setting the alarm using the irritating multiple-mode/single-button controls and extra layer of complexity of multiple alarms, alarms for weekends, and whether you want a pre-selected radio station to play rather than the buzzer. To make it worse, when I did wake up groggy to the alarm I invariably hit the largest button to make it stop-- snooze, only to be further irritated when it would go off again as I was having breakfast.

I didn't check the date on mine... but also a Sony Dream Machine. Probably same or similar vintage.