HPR1838: Waking up with Windigo

Hardware

My preferred hardware platform is a Dell Mini 9.

Software

My alarm clock is an embarrassing combination of bash scripts and Audacious, my favorite media player. Any media player will do, as long as it's scriptable.

How It Works

There are currently two bash scripts in my crappy alarm setup. One script is called "wakeup" and the other is called "wakeup-at".

wakeup is simply a wrapper that adds some error handling around audacious. It launches audacious if it can't find an instance running already, waits five seconds for it to get itself together, and then causes it to play. It is also currently broken, so the 'launching audacious' part doesn't work. I have to manually start audacious myself. FAILURE.

wakeup script:

#!/bin/bash
audacious &

sleep 5s

audacious -p &

You've noticed that the "wakeup" script doesn't actually have any timing involved; If you want to use it as an alarm, you get to combine it with the bash "sleep" command. This is not a failure, this is by design! An example alarm:

sleep 8h; wakeup

One problem with this methodology is that it requires math, and is prone to errors. If I'm going to sleep at 10:46:33 PM and need to wake up at 7:00 AM, I need to chain sleep commands together for each unit of time:

sleep 7h; sleep 14m; sleep 27s; wakeup

Get some of that math wrong, and you wake up at the wrong time. FAILURE.

"wakeup-at" is a wrapper around "wakeup" that uses the "at" utility to schedule the wakeup script. So, instead of using multiple sleep commands, it accepts any of the time formats that at accepts:

wakeup-at 7:00 AM
wakeup-at 6:00AM 2018-02-02
wakeup-at teatime

Here is the wakeup-at script:

#!/bin/bash

## Make sure we have enough arguments
if [ $# -lt 1 ]
then
  echo "Usage: `basename $0` <time>"
  exit 1
fi

echo "$@"

## Add custom time keywords
case "$1" in
"eternaldarkness")
	echo wakeup | at 3:33 AM
	;;

## Catch-all; send all arguments to at
*)
	echo wakeup | at $@
	;;
esac

If you make a syntax error, "at" tells you about it immediately. Its only failings are what it inherits from the original "wakeup" script.

Comments

More Information...