Future Tech - Alarm Clocks
| Curtis |
Sunday, April 9, 2006 at 3:08 PM |
Every once in a while I get to thinking about things, specifically about products that should exist by now, but don't. I'm not talking about flying cars or jet packs, but simple things that ought to be here by now, considering we're well into the 21st century.
Today, I was thinking about alarm clocks. They are still amazingly primitive. Once, about 10 years or so ago, I spent an entire weekend searching for a clock-radio that had an adjustable snooze. At the time, all alarm clocks had a nine minute snooze. Why nine minutes, I have no idea, but that's what they had. After the entire weekend I finally found one that gave you a choice between five, ten and fifteen minutes. Not exactly what I had in mind, but better than nothing.
For about as many years I've been saying clocks ought to have a built-in radio receiver so they could automatically synchronize with the atomic clock radio signal out of Boulder, Colorado. I am somewhat pleased to see that they finally got around to doing that.
Now, to my point. There is no good reason there couldn't be an alarm clock that you could program to only go off on workdays. In fact, you should be able set the alarm time separately for every day of the week. The fact that we still have to manually turn off our alarm clocks on the weekend, and turn them on again before Monday morning, is absurd. I mean come on people, it's the 21st century for Christ's sake. Where are the smart alarm clocks?
I'm pretty sure there's at least one bright electrical engineer out there reading this, so listen -- I'm talking to you now. Get to work on that already.
| Guest |
Wednesday, April 19, 2006 at 10:31 AM |
My 15 year-old Sony DreamStation has the ability to set 2 separate alarms, and each could be tailored as to which days of the week it would alarm. No adjustable snooze, though.
