Living on the 20th floor of a highrise you would think reception of radio waves would be superb, but unfortunately that is not the case.  Our alarm radio has a serious case of schizophrenia, in that it doesn’t particularly care what station you set it to at night; by morning, it has chosen something else, something it perhaps felt would be more fitting for wake up music.  This usually means the crap they play on WREK 91.1, which is some kind of eclectic string percussion peices and rattling chains tied to screaming babies.

So, considering I haven’t done anything cool with a computer in quite a while, I decided to build us an alarm clock.  I had an older IBM Thinkpad P2-366 sitting at work that I’d intended to sell, but even at $50 it didn’t have any takers.  So I’m going to hook a cheap pair of speakers, put a fresh copy of xubuntu on it, and stick it in the bedroom with a chron job set to 6:50 am monday through friday I’ll fold the LCD back over onto itself and prop it up like a picture frame, then just turn on a screen saver that flips through my catalogue of digital pics, or perhaps just cycles through some kind of waving psychadelic pattern of lines and shapes.

This way I can set it to play anything I want at 6:50 am… it’s going to be glorious tomorrow morning.