Start your holidays with a meta-alarm

15 Dec 2024

Back in 2022 I wrote about how annoying it is, with all the built-in smarts in a smartphone, they still wake me up even when there are like a hundred ways they could detect that I don’t want to be woken. I now have a solution!

If you work, or have children to get to school on time, or otherwise just need to be up and about before you naturally wake up in the morning, you have doubtless got a scheduled, repeating alarm. Calendar apps obviously allow quite a bit of control over repeating appointments, but the alerts from those aren’t the same as the sound of the alarm app on my iPhone. I don’t want an appointment in my calendar “wake up every weekday”. I guess I’d have to turn on notifications for calendar appointments, and make them loud enough to wake me up. Do they have a snooze function? I don’t know. Anyway, I wanted a better way. Also, our family like to be woken by an overlapping combination of phone alarms, Alexa alarms, Hue lightbulbs and I have a watch that vibrates so I wake up first, silently. All need adjusting, and not all are programmable.

The solution - which I’m calling Meta Alarm™ - is a mixture of code, automation and normal online calendar use.

• First, I created a calendar in Fastmail called “Mozz family holidays”. Into this go all the school holidays, days off, bank holidays.
• Next, I shared the calendar so its contents are available on a secret URL.
• Finally I wrote a bit of python code to parse the calendar and send me an email if I might want to adjust my alarm clock settings for the next morning.

The code runs daily, and it compares the set of appointments at midday today with the set at midday tomorrow. If there’s a difference, then I either want to consider cancelling my alarm clock or I want to consider switching it back on. I don’t worry about weekends: they’re organised through the normal features on my alarms (works for me, my life is so conventional).

It’s like an edge detection for calendar appointments: I get notified ahead of the beginning of the appointment and ahead of the end.

Early days - I have cancelled my watch’s alarm for tomorrow because I’m off to London on a day off. But I’m confident the system will work because it’s monitored with a tickbeat.

Let me know if you want the same superpower and if you think I should commercialise this and make a million pounds quid 💰

Tags: geeky, meta, family, code