good morning, good morning - it's great to stay up late

July 18, 2006 11:43 AM

Web-based alarm clock

To encourage myself to put in daily work on a project at a time when I tend to be idly surfing the net, I'd like some widget that allows me to set an alarm that will activate only if I'm online at that time. Bonus points if I can customize the alarm sound with an MP3. I'm using Firefox on a Mac. Kludges acceptable if nobody has anything that fits my exact bill.

posted by nanojath to computers & internet (4 comments total)

Here are some previous questions that might help you out:

37919
19391
21128
36127

Hope these help!
posted by nitsuj at 11:48 AM on July 18, 2006

Greasemonkey, setTimeout, possibly windowOpen( "file://some/local/mp3.mp3") if Firefox is set to play mp3s rather than download them. Actually, Greasemonkey probably won't work here, as it would start a new setTimeout with each page load.

An extension would work (you'd get multiple instances with multiple browser windows, but you'd either go to the trouble of coding around that (I do this in an extension by having the first window communicate with all subsequent windows)), or more likely you'd just not care, given that the first browser window's alarm would go off first.

The code would be dead simple:
function doIt() { windowOpen( "file://some/local/mp3.mp3") ; )
var minutesUntilAlarm = 30 ;

setTimeout( doIt(), 1000 * 60 * minutesUntilAlarm ) ;

This is untested, of course. As you wanted more features, you could add them to your extension; once it got robust enough, you could let others use it too.
posted by orthogonality at 11:56 AM on July 18, 2006

Me too stupid for the greasemonkey, orthogonality... maybe not, but if I start down that road the productivity will vanish completely. It looks like this question is an orphan so for my own record, so far I've come up with one offline and one online solution. I'da expected at least one person to come out of the woodwork and tell me I just needed to man up and shut off the damn browser. Maybe I'll get an egg timer.
posted by nanojath at 11:06 PM on July 18, 2006

Check out Webolodeon (also GreaseMonkey, but with simple installation instruction)
posted by Sharcho at 1:20 PM on July 19, 2006