I've been struggling to wake up on time for some time now. I could never wake up to alarm clocks - I tried iHomes, phones, etc.
Then I went out and purchased a Sharp SPC800 Quartz Analog Twin Bell Alarm Clock (Silver) from Amazon. That too failed to wake me up (it also had problems keeping time). Still struggling to wake up, I purchased a Sonic Boom SBB500ss Sonic Bomb Loud Plus Vibrating Alarm Clock. The alarm clock is quite loud and vibrates my whole bed... Still, no luck.
Recently, however, I have had success with a system I put together myself. I hooked up my MacBook Pro to a Pioneer Elite Shelf System and added a cronjob to raise the system volume to 100% at a certain time and play an audio file. The Pioneer's volume is always set to 100%.
My crontab currently contains this
00 08 * * * osascript -e "set Volume 10" && afplay Train1.mp3It starts to play Train1.mp3, a recording of a train I found online, at 8 AM.
Needless to say, not only does it wake me up, but my neighbors can
hear and feel it
It shakes the room...
The alarm can be "turned off" by muting the computer for the length of the audio file or by running
pkill afplayNow I just need to stop going back to bed after turning it off.