Happy eff you Bluetooth alarm clock day
If you’re a fan of Bluetooth clocks today’s the day (in the United States at least,) that more of them get a projectile experience according to research from the King’s Institute of WTF Clock!?!?’s the I needed up 40 minutes ago study.
The biggest problem is that most Bluetooth alarm clocks don’t have time change logic built in to the firmware (most don’t even know what day it is let alone when the time change is supposed to be.)
Many devices rely on a Bluetooth control to change the time, and since many alarm devices are aimed at low light situations there’s a really good chance you’re not going to see that the time hasn’t changed.
Also many Bluetooth apps just simply get terminated from your phone’s running task list either due to a task killer, a crash three weeks ago, or an update from the manufacturer that disables it until you manually run it again.
I thought I was smart yesterday and made sure to run the two apps that control my bedside alarm clock and my smart sleep wakeup light. But even so the smart wakeup light didn’t kick on, and the bedside alarm clock never kicked the radio on even though the time is properly set (yet another logic problem appears to be that the alarms are based off of some other time and the thing needs a reboot).
My kid’s smart wakeup routine I wrote with IFTTT worked flawlessly and she was up and getting dressed which was one less thing I had to accomplish with 35 minutes less time to handle things than usual.
My phone’s last ditch alarm went off (this is the one that signals to me and the kids that there are about 8 minutes left until we need to be out the door,) and that’s what got me up.
I write this quick piece after a mad dash to get the kids ready and to school, coming into work with next to no traffic, pouring myself a hot cup of hot slightly brown water because the person who makes the coffee is a tad spaced due to lack of sleep and did not add the coffee grounds to the equation.
I also managed to watch as someone shuffling out of his car packed two cell phones in a bag, flung it over his shoulder without securing the lid, and watched as his cell phones flew high and met the pavement shortly thereafter.
Happy time change! Be careful on the roads today, from the looks around here the time change zombie factor is high this year.
