en Passant

With the resetting of clocks in the household complete, I am now faced with the harder reset of my children's internal clocks. Despite what the digital clock on my side-board says, my children still get up at the same relative time. Dude it's only 4AM PST! You need to sleep at least another hour. On the other hand, it was grandiose when they went to bed an hour 'early'!

All of this time talk got me thinking. Why does my alarm clock have a battery any longer? OK, I bought it 4 years ago, and haven't really checked the market, because I like it. Really though, I'd like to see an alarm clock that doesn't rely on a battery to maintain my radio and alarm settings. I'd love it to have a small flash memory to store these settings. Each time I change my alarm, it would write the setting to a internal flash drive. What's that, maybe 10kb of space required? Add a second alarm for those irregular trips and I now need 20kb. The clock could also store my entire programmed radio selections. 6 stations, at 10kb a piece, still under 100kb. I saw at Target, a clearance 32mb (or 32,768kb) thumb drive for under $10. Since it would change like once a month (or less), reaching the write-limits on flash would be minimal. It would be great!

A few other dream clock ideas.

• Atomic clock so I never need to set it.
• Motion sensor that can reach across room. Turn off or dim display when no one is in the room. Might also work nicely when I fall asleep.
• GPS to get my current timezone. (or maybe just ping a local cell tower or off my wifi?)
• Bluetooth or 802.11 to synchronize MP3 files from computer. Why wake up to radio when you can wake up to your personal library? Nothing like the sound of a running stream, to get you out of bed (and in the bathroom)!
• RSS Newsreader? There are some rather sophisticated voice analyzers out there. How about one that reads the latest RSS feeds to me.
• Web page to program it all. Since it will be on the wifi, how about an interal webpage (like my printer) so that I can configure these settings.
• How about the option to apply different "face" skins? This week it's an analog display clock, next week it's a giant smiley face clock!
• Lastly, it would need to be under $50 and look nice. Big, bulky or just looks like junk will never make it into my bedroom

Let me know if you know of or plan on making one. Just send me one and I'll blog about it!