Manage your Chumby’s alarms via E-mail
Spending almost half of my nights away from home, I’ve been making my roommate a little frustrated, so I decided to spend a few minutes coding up an easier solution for turning off my alarms while across town.
Using the below solution, you will be able to turn alarms off and on, edit various alarm details, and do all of the things you might need to do from afar by using any e-mail client. Previously, I had written something similar that relied on synchronizing the alarm file with a WebDAV share, but that was (obviously) considerably less elegant; I could never convince myself to open up an SSH session to turn the alarms off at 2AM.
What I said about this then:
As it turns out, I’ve been having quite a few sleepovers at the significant other’s abode lately. My alarm is as loud as the sun is bright; during the depths of the dark, rainy Portland winter, I decided to pick up a new and innovative alarm clock. After looking through alarm clocks that shock you, roll around the room, fly up into the air, and donate money to the Republican Party if you press ‘snooze’, I settled upon the most innovative of them all: The Chumby. Running a version of embedded Linux named BusyBox, it’s really more of a tiny computer than an alarm clock— the guys at Chumby Industries like to call it an Internet Appliance.
As I was saying, this alarm clock is loud; after initially being woken up by the oddest selections of Pandora at 5:00 AM, I decided to just send one of my favorite relaxing wake-up songs (‘Hibernating‘ by Console, if you must know) to the device, but enable something called the ‘Backup Alarm’— just in case for some reason it cannot find any MP3s on its generous internal storage.
If I fail to turn my alarm off within five minutes of its first peep, I’ll risk being be terrified to death by the shrieking hellfire of electronically-synthesized waveform doom that the Backup Alarm will let loose upon my bedroom. Since I’m often not home, this shrieking noise may awaken (and potentially piss off) my roommate, neighbors, city— especially if it is going off for a whole hour before I arrive home in the morning to dismiss it— and I generally try to be as considerate of a person as is practical.
Note: Back in the day, I wrote a brief overview of how to manage one’s alarms via WebDAV, but by now it’s out-of-date and should only be used for historical purposes.
The steps below walk you through the (~30 minute) process of setting this up for the first time.
Apologies, but the instructions have been moved to a repository on Bitbucket
1 year, 6 months ago
