New Alarm Clock

I have had a crappy 1970s drugstore clock radio on my nightstand since, well, the 1970s. It's difficult to set, impossible to adjust in the dark, sounds bad and gets bad reception. It only plays two minutes a day five days a week though so I've never been motivated to replace it.

Until this weekend.

I've been complaining lately that when I think of something in the middle of the night, I have to get out of bed to write it down. I could keep a pad of paper and pen on my nightstand, but I'd need a light and that would disturb Mrs NoCoPilot.

I use my iPhone during the day for note-taking. At night it's plugged into a charging cable on top of my dresser.

Why not charge it on the nightstand? So I went looking for and found a charging base that also acts as a clock radio. Both problems solved!

Plus it recognized the end of Daylight Savings Time all by itself!

When I was working I kept a pad and pencil on the nightstand, because I sometimes woke up in the middle of the night with the solution of a programming problem in my mind. Sometimes it was something that I had been struggling with for weeks in my waking hours. When I awoke in the morning, I could remember that I had come up with the solution, but I could remember absolutely nothing about it, so the notepad was a necessity.

Your solution might not work for me. For some reason, I have a great hatred of wake-up machines of any type. I have thrown more alarm clocks across the room than most people have owned in their lives. I'm afraid I would do the same thing with that expensive setup. Do you think AppleCare would cover it?

I think the last clock radio I had was in about 1958. As far as I can tell, they haven't improved.

My mother used a digital sound generator alarm clock, in addition to AM/FM it had several digital recordings of crickets, a waterfall, birds singing in the trees, wind blowing through the trees, etc.  She liked to wake to the gentle mooing of cows in the field.

Never once tossed it into the wall.

Of course, she never had to wake up early and go to work either.

I've been on an alarm clock for so many decades that 99 times out of a hundred I awaken 2 minutes before the alrm clock goes off, and quietly turn it off before it disturbs Mrs. NoCo.  The funny thing is, I can set it for a half hour before hers, or an hour before, or even the same time as hers -- doesn't matter.  I always wake up 2 minutes before it goes off.

My wife gets up very early and has her alarm clock set. But every morning, five or ten minutes before the alarm clock goes off, the cat comes and wakes her up; feline breakfast time. When my wife is out of town on business, the cat never tries to wake me up. She found out it doesn't work so no longer makes the effort.

That would explain the hairy dent in the wall.

   

NoCoPilot wrote:

 The funny thing is, I can set it for a half hour before hers, or an hour before, or even the same time as hers -- doesn't matter.  I always wake up 2 minutes before it goes off.

I do that. It's weird. I don't like it. I feel gypped of my two minutes.