Webware

Okay so Sleep.fm, the browser based "social alarm clock" won't actually help you sleep, but it's got a brand new way to wake you up that's straight out of a science fiction movie. In this case it's this past summer's blockbuster hit Iron Man, where Tony Stark's journalist friend wakes up to a local weather report spoken by computer butler Jarvis.

Sleep.fm now offers something similar by waking you up to the local weather conditions and temperature with with a computer-generated voice and soft bell sounds. All you need to do is drop in your zip code and what time you want. It lets you stack up as many alarms as you wish, and they'll play as long as you've got that browser tab up and running.

Going forward the service plans to offer a call-back service that lets you delegate certain alarms as phone calls, so you'll be able to get it beamed to your handset in case you've got one of the few cell phones without its own alarm feature. It could also be a fantastic way to get out of an awkward blind date.

We got a ping earlier today from Tom Churm, the creator of Germany-based Online Alarm Clock, who wanted to let us know about his Web based alarm clock that's quietly been humming along since early 2006. The service's claim to fame is its two-click alarm selector, which lets anyone set a wake-up call or alert without too much complication (note: while Churm says it's two, you still have to select each hour and minute you want with a second button press, so it's actually four clicks). Users have to trudge to their machine to turn off the very annoying chirping sound, which won't cease without user interaction.

The service is scant on much else, leaving YouTube and Last.fm integration to the competitors (see below). There are however some nice settings to change the coloration and size of the display, toggle between 12- and 24-hour clocks, and an optional stopwatch you can use if you feel like timing something. The service draws in about 6,000 users a day.

Like we've said before, if you're mysteriously without an alarm clock or any other sort of alarm device but have your laptop on hand, this can be a handy tool; otherwise you'd be doing the environment a favor by leaving your machine off.

See also: The Naked Alarm Clock (review) and AlarmD (review)

Here's another PC-based alarm clock: Naked Alarm Clock. It's just a little Flash-based clock with ringers. Things I like about it: It's easy to program. It has loud alarms, and you can turn them off by mashing the space bar. Second, although it's Web-based, it's a self-contained Flash application, so it will ring even if your Internet connection dies in the middle of the night. It's missing a snooze alarm, though.

I might actually use this as an alarm clock next time I'm in a hotel. Yeah, I could use my mobile phone, a $20 travel alarm, or the hotel's own clock, but I figure as long as I claim to be Mr. Webware, I should be living the dream.

See also: Alarmd (review).

Your computer might be able to help cure cancer, or run fancy shmancy high-end games, but let's face it, that high-resolution display would make a really great-looking alarm clock. User interface programmer Zach Leatherman seems to have had the same thought, and has designed a very Webby desktop alarm clock service called Alarmd that runs right in your browser. It gives you a few options to choose how you want your slumber interrupted, like music from Last.fm, a video from YouTube, or a hosted MP3.

Users can set alarms for any day of the week, and keep track of the upcoming ones in a small queue. Once an alarm goes off, there are two fairly simple ways to disable it. One is to click the large "Kill It" warning box. The far easier option is to mash at the keyboard, which is how you're likely to respond to something like this.

There are some obvious advantages to using a regular alarm clock over your computer, including cheaper batteries, less crashing, and the cost of replacement if thrown off the nightstand.

[via Lifehacker]

Dear Microsoft,

What the heck is wrong with you people?

Let me ask you the question another way. When I set up a birthday in Outlook, what makes you think that when the time zone changes, a birthday should move forward or back accordingly? But that's just what happened when I got my automated patch for the new daylight-savings time. Between March 11 and April 1, all my appointments moved back one hour. My father-in-law's birthday became a 24-hour event that takes place from 1 a.m. on March 21 to 1 a.m. on March 22. Since the event was changed everywhere it appeared on my calendar, not just on his 2007 birthday, I had to call my wife to figure out which date was actually correct.

All my appointments from March 11 to April 1 also moved, including repeating daily appointments that Outlook now wants me to be late for, and even air travel appointments that Outlook wants me to miss entirely.

The same thing happened to my wife's calendar. She's fuming. And I'm just waiting my dad, whom I do tech support for, to call me up, utterly bewildered by this change. I'm also not looking forward to what's going to happen to my calendar when I update the daylight-saving period on my Windows mobile phone.

Microsoft's official position on this? According to its own knowledge base, "Consider any calendar items in the extended DST period to be suspect. If you are not sure, verify the correct time with the organizer." This is in spite of a Microsoft Web page and a downloadable utility that's supposed to fix time-change mishaps. But the utility, in addition to being confusing to use, doesn't work reliably (it fixed the birthday problem for me, but not other meetings).

I've never liked the way Outlook handles time zones. It changes appointments around when you change the time on your computer, which is hardly (if ever) what you want it to do. Hello, Microsoft: Just because I adjust my clock, it doesn't mean I want you to rewrite all my calendar entries.

Now, I know that there are reasons for Outlook to try to integrate time-keeping with its calendar. In an organization that uses Exchange, for example, people in different time zones can set up appointments with each other and everybody will show up at the right time. That's very nice. Until, of course, someone gets on an airplane to come to a meeting they've set up in their home time zone, and shows up at the wrong time because they changed their PC's clock to the time at the destination, only to have Outlook move the appointment on them.

This is why Web-based calendars are so much better: Because they don't try to be clocks, too. The functions are different, and Outlook needs to be fixed so it's not trying to be both at once.

Enough already with the combo clock-weather stations. They've become as commonplace as the $6.99 digital alarm clocks behind the counter at Walgreens, next to the batteries and razor blades.

This uber-clock, by contrast, gives you the stuff you really want to know when you wake up: stock news, traffic bulletins, the Monday Night Football score and the latest on Britney's divorce and sex tape scandal. And you can set your MP3 tunes or Internet radio for the alarm. As its name implies, the award-winning "WidgetStation" displays your custom widget feeds on one of its two screens, according to Akihabara News; the other shows the standard time, date, temperature and tomorrow's forecast.

But we could do without that last part. Given the track record of most meteorologists we know, we'll take a chance on our own.