I just had this weird thought, provoked by the recent time change, and I went browsing through apps to see if anyone had thought of it before. Nothing jumped out at me.
What I want is an alarm that can be set off at a time relative to sunrise…so, for instance, instead of setting it for 6:30, I’d set it to go off one hour before sunrise. Anyone know of such a thing, for an iPhone?
I was just wondering if it would make more sense to map one’s sleep schedule relative to the solar day, rather than some arbitrary bureaucrat somewhere telling you that this week, you’re expected to get up precisely one hour earlier than last week.
I was also thinking of my fish colony, which usually gets a little irate at these twice-yearly abrupt changes in the light schedule.
A quick Google search turned up this, which seems to be aimed at photographers: http://www.juggleware.com/iphone/sol/
There are “clocks” — I cannot think of what they are called right now — which do measure stuff like time-until or time-of astronomical events at a given point on the Earth’s surface. Whether or not there is an smartphone app which does so, I have no idea (if there is, I can easily imagine it being tied to geolocating, such as GPS…).
You might check for apps that photographers use to keep track of sunrise/sunset. Luminous Landscape had an article about a very expensive watch that might do it, but since they are now behind a paywall, I cannot access it.
I think it was the yes watch, which has a sunset alarm:
http://www.yeswatch.com/
There is the yes watch:
http://www.yeswatch.com/
Cockerel?
I searched in the iTunes App Store for “alarm clock sun rise” and several. At least two of them have alarm features.
Only if you want to be woken at some random point from +5 to -5 hours before sunrise (or is that just my neighbours bird?)
Could be worse: you could be a government employee in western Tibet, and forced to open the goddam post office in the middle of the night just because the whole country runs on Beijing time. Trust me, you do not want to trudge to work in the middle of a winter Tibetan night. But at least you get off before sunset!
My wife has an iPhone, so I asked her to see if Siri could do that.
Wife: “Hey, Siri, could you set an alarm for one hour after sunrise tomorrow?”
Siri: “Okay, I’ve set an alarm for 2:48 PM.”
I have a timer on my house lights that can be set to switch on and off at sunrise/set. I got it at home depot. The brand name is Defiant (no kidding). If you’re going to use it to switch lights on and off on your fish tanks it might be just the ticket. For something more complex, perhaps an Arduino project is in order.
This could make for a non-productive winter for Alaskans…
John — Maybe I think about search queries too much, but I can kind of see how Siri might get that. 2:48PM is “one hour,” or more precisely “an hour,” sometime after sunrise.
@15 (Big Boppa):
For the fish, Belkin WeMo switches also have the capability to do actions wrt sunset/rise. Included is a smartphone app for programming and remote control. WiFi connections are required.
Ooops – read the wrong number: @9.
14:28 your local time is “one hour after sunrise” someplace else on the planet.
Whether or not you will get an angry e-mail / SMS from someone on about that line of longitude who was woken up too early is not entirely clear. And would be a little bit creepy…
I plopped this into Google and found a few apps.
https://www.google.com/#q=sidereal+clock+app
Well… Someone might get energetic and program some mathy stuff using the link below but I have to admit my brain isn’t functioning that well at the moment (need more coffee).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunrise_equation
Looks like if you puzzle out the math it wouldn’t be too difficult to program a computer to make noise at the right time.
Anyone living above the Arctic Circle (or below the Polar Circle) would have a grand old time with an app like that. I’m not quite there, but I’d love the extra sleep in winter. Unfortunately, summertime would be spent in a blear of sleepy exhaustion.
My house lights have an on off timer switch into which you put in a zipcode. The timer extrapolates from that data when to turn the lights on at dusk and off at dawn. DST is also programmed in there.
I want an alarm clock that ties to local weather.
If it has snowed overnight (more than X amount), I want to wake up 30 minutes earlier so that I have time to clear the driveway. I’ve found a couple iphone apps that are *almost* there, but nothing that quite fits the bill. (They tend to be ones that are designed for runners who don’t want to wake if raining.)
Ought to be pretty easy to parse it out of http://www.sunrisesunset.com/ then pop a relay to trigger a switch.
For applications like that I use the USB relays you can buy on ebay for about $40.
There are sleep cycle alarms, which are supposed to measure your sleep cycle. You give them a window of time, and they wake you at a point within the window when you’re not in REM or deep sleep, or something. How accurate or helpful they are I don’t know.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/brain-babble/201310/sleep-cycle-app-precise-or-placebo
You could in the meanwhile just check tomorrow’s sunrise time and reset your alarm every night. But I think a clock that tracks astronomical stuff like sunrise, sunset, moonrise, etc., and can provide alarms based on those, would be awesome. Invent one.
jennyjfwlucy @18 – What is the brand/model of that timer? That sounds like just the right thing for my house. Thanks.
No, because the “Intelligent Designer” screwed up again. The length of sunlit day varies in Morris from 8:26 to 15:33.
Search the app store/iTunes/Google for Sunrise Sunset alarm and there are plenty. Below is an example and a link to one that allows you to offset from sunrise/sunset whatever time you want and uses GPS for location data. In the UK it is £1.49 and $1.99 in the US. There are plenty of others so there is likely to be a free one there somewhere if you don’t want to pay.
http://appcrawlr.com/ios/sunrise-sunset-alarm
For those interested, there are plenty available for Android as well using the same search phrase, both free and paid for.
I’ve always opposed Daylight Savings Time. The extra hour of sunlight fades my drapes.
You can use https://ifttt.com/ to set up recipe that will call your phone in a 15 minute window around sunrise. You can also set up a recipe that will turn on Phillip Hue lights in the same window.
I do this with a WeMo switch and a light. It can turn its outlet on/off based on sunrise/sunset. I find waking to a light instead of a noise to be easier. Might work for your fish lights too.
Not only photographers but also true beleavers:
I look forward to reading the argument you use to convince your university to let you lecture at “two hours past sunrise”…
As a pedant, I feel that I should point out that a solar day is midday one day to midday (the time the Sun is highest in the sky) the next. It isn’t sunrise to sunrise the next day. Sunrise moves around too much on the clock. Midday is much more fixed – it varies because the length of a solar day is on average 24 hours – around the Summer and Winter solstices it’s around 20 seconds longer than 24 hours and around the equinoxes it’s around 20 seconds shorter.
Wanting a clock which has an alarm determined by sunrise has little to do with the solar day.
devnil @25
One can always dream…
Welll… I use a Raspberry Pi (Model Pi2B) as an alarm clock streaming a local Classical radio station over the internet, starting it up using cron. I don’t see any reason why it would be at all difficult to write a program that would do this based on local sun time.
Much as I dislike DST–and someone in the CA state legislature has put in a bill to have a ballot measure to put it to a vote–the Pi does have the advantage that it changes on to and off of DST by itself with no manual intervention.
Well, a window with no blinds or drapes pulled over it would tell you when it’s dark outside and you should go to bed, and if you left the blinds up the sun would probably wake you in the morning. All free. Though if you lived at higher latitudes you’d probably be pretty grumpy in high summer.
John @8
Little known fact. They tried to put Steve Jobs consciousness into a computer before he died but it went horribly wrong. They didn’t want to write off the research costs so they named it Siri and sold it anyway.
Rabbitbrush — it’s a Sylvania product but I can’t find it on the web just now.
I don’t know if my comment got put in a spam filter, but google yes watch, it seems to do what you want.
PZ, you have a cat. She will determine when you get up, not some silly human clock device.
I have a timer to replace the wall switch to help the half blind dog navigate the way to the dog area at night.
Honeywell RPLS740B1008
It seems to work well.
The siri solution sounds easiest — I’ve already got that. Siri didn’t seem to understand “Set an alarm for one hour before sunrise”, though — it went searching for an audio track title “one hour before sunrise”. But I can ask it what time the sun rises and then tell it to set an alarm for a specific time.
WeMo sounds interesting for maintaining the fish, especially with IFTTT.
I must be one of the few people who really loves DST. I like it much better when there is still lots of daylight left when my husband gets home from work. It makes it much easier to take a walk after dinner.
I already feel better and have more energy every day. I would be quite happy if we did not change back to standard time in the fall.
I love the extra daylight as well, more time outside in the sun after work and extra gardening time for the veggie garden.
Marcus Ranum #20:
You can buy USB relays from the Chinese web shops starting at €1.50 with free shipping to wherever.
If I had a project like PZ’s fish I would probably build something with a cheap Arduino clone, a wifi or ethernet addon and some relays. Total cost: peanuts – but you have to a bit of a tinkerer to make it work.
For those that like DST…why not just get up an hour earlier and leave the rest of us alone?
Weather websites list the time for sunrise each day. An app could set the alarm based on it.
Or, as the Earth moves around the sun, the difference in sunrise changes by a measureable amount, a minute or two per day. A program that starts at 5AM on the spring equinox could be programmed to gradually set the alarm earlier each day.
But having lived for fifteen years where there is no DST, I am wholeheartedly in favour of dumping it. Maintaining the same time year round makes more sense, especially when it would mean getting up “an hour early” (relative to everyone else) during winter. With less than twelve hours of daylight, you’re still going to be awake and able to use it all, going to bed after dark.
@magistramarla # 40:
In reality, wouldn’t it just be easier to live in standard time all year round (no DST) and just have your husband request to work an hour earlier? In many cases that would make more sense for most businesses anyway. The whole 9 to 5 schedule makes no sense from most standpoints anyway.
As for why I don’t like DST, not only does my sleep schedule get messed up twice a year, but every business I’ve worked for has some critical overnight processes (I’m in IT) that get messed up horribly twice per year no matter how meticulously we set them up.
There are several alarm clock apps that are designed to wake you ahead of time for fajr, the pre-dawn first obligatory prayer of the day. This should be the easiest option.
I live at 56 degrees North. DST (or rather BST as we call it here) means that it doesn’t get properly dark until nearly midnight during the summer. Sunset at midsummer is at 10pm. I really don’t feel we need that extra hour.
People who mess with clocks really dont understand the problem. In the UK we fuck with the clocks so children dont get run over in the dark walking to school. Its OK for them to get run over walking home, or it would be if anybody actually walked to and from school any more.
The Spanish have (or had ) the right idea – get up early. Have a siesta. Get back to work. Go home and stay up late.
Some research seems to agree this makes sense – many people are awake for periods during the night and I think even in Chaucer there are mentions of 2nd sleep.
I can confirm that getting rid of DST would be a short-term pain for programmers, but it would save us a lot of pain in the long run. The problem isn’t so much DST itself as the way that the rules vary over time and region. Each region has different rules for start and end dates, different rules for start and end time ON the days in question, and these rules can vary from one year to the next. And NEW regions can pop up whenever some locality decides it wants to do things different.
Fortunately most robust programming languages have a standard library that will take care of all of this for you, but the programmer still needs to be conscious of these library functions.
I’ve always wondered, my whole life, (all 6 decades) why the clocks aren’t synchronized so that
sunrise = 6am, all year. During the summer, sunset is much later for all the after work outdoor adventures,when one wants to be outside and not huddled round the fireplace during winter. Synchronizing clocks to sunrise would provide the benefit of DST without the abrupt one hour loss in the spring and the equally abrupt one hour gain in the fall.
Then, this sounds alot like a sundial, but then again, a sundial time will track annual migration of the sun on the horizon, so my proposal is kind of a hybrid of mechanical-clock and sundial.
I know I could configure my ‘puter to do so, but “personal” is not sufficient. It gotta be universal; the SOP for all clocks everywhere. (at least all businesses in the usa [ack, then coordinating time of phone meetings twixt east and west coast would remain an issue, the simple timezoneA-timezoneB calc would be more difficult])
oops gotta tweek my sundial again…
People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint – it’s more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly… time-y wimey… stuff.
@50, but that’s not digital! As best as I’ve been able to ascertain, analog isn’t even taught any longer.
OK, it’s taught, but everyone seems to love more complex digital circuits, where an analog circuit would be simple and reliable. My life, like yours, spanned both eras, digital and analog.
@51, that one got away from you, huh?
Where I live, that would put midwinter sunset at 1pm.
As someone who is not a morning person (to say the least), that would basically make me nocturnal. (OK, even more nocturnal…) I’m sure that would do my SAD a world of good.
@53, indeed, I have a rather varied sleep schedule, as we run a 24/7/365 operation and I’ll not ask others to do that which I would not do.
Hence, we rotate shifts quarterly. That means, I can go from 07:45 – 16:15 shift (local time, 06:45 – 15:15, as I’m in central time zone and our operations HQ is eastern time zone) to 23:45 – 08:15, as I also tend to take the more extreme shift changes. I’ve learned how to adapt to a change in circadian rhythm in the military, when I could be at Ft Bragg one day and literally, halfway around the world the next.
The twins keep us on Centaurian time, standard thirty-seven hour day. Give it a few months. You’ll get used to it… or you’ll have a psychotic episode.
My first thought is that sun time would appeal to those who don’t have regular schedules DST or otherwise. Academics & retired persons etc. Among the retired some use nothing and some the morning birdsong.
Big Boppa’s idea, 9, about the light switch is probably the cheapest and easiest. I presume you have the equipment to record the action for a week or so since since the experiment is both valuable and important.
On a rather remotely relevant subject I would be interested in your opinion of Steve Gibson’s healthy sleep project and with consideration of the article in the March 2016 Scientific American “Brain Drain” page forty four.
“For those that like DST…why not just get up an hour earlier and leave the rest of us alone?”
Because the rest of the world runs by clocks, and we can’t ignore the whole system. The standard work day is 8 – 5. Even if I woke up an hour earlier, I can’t simply shift my office work day an hour earlier, because my boss would expect me to be in the office during normal hours to interact with other workers and other offices. So, if my choices are wake up at my normal time and have an hour less daylight after work, wake up an hour ealier and have only a short period of daylight before work, or shift the whole clock so that I can have an hour longer uninterrupted period of daylight at the end of the day, I’m going to choose shifting the clock. If you can get the whole system to change, then I’d be fine with doing away with DST. But as long as my work day is defined by the clock, DST seems like the best option to me.
Found “Sunrise Alarm Clock” in the google play store. The pro version (+$0.99) gives you an optional up-to-60 minute offset either direction.
We’ll see
And as a result, I have to get up an hour earlier than the time that I already regard as far too damn early, so that I can “enjoy” daylight until after 11pm. Thanks a bunch. Did it ever occur to you that other people might have different preferences?
@58, it’s called majority rule. Some even call it the tyranny of the majority. Regardless of the label, the majority decided that daylight saving time is a good idea and we’re stuck with it.
As for fairness, when I had midnight shift, it was unfair that the morning and afternoon sun was streaming into my windows at bedtime.
I’ll have to either go back to sleeping in the windowless room again or pick up blackout curtains. As the latter also help me conserve energy, the latter will be my choice.
I think that’s more fair than my turning off the sun while I’m trying to sleep. After all, it’d be totally unfair to someone trying to get a suntan. ;)
It’s light by 3AM in the summer here anyway. And the birds are always up a half-hour before that. That one extra hour doesn’t make much of a difference in the evening, and it’s dark pretty much all winter. I wish we could save some daylight and open it in the winter, like a jar of preserves. That would be awesome, because chances are it would be sunny daylight and none of this overcast, extra-dark quasi-daylight currently experienced in December.
@slithey tove #50:
Because then the trains wouldn’t run on time.
@50:
Above the Arctic circle that would be interesting. In Kiruna Sweden the sun rises on 28 May and sets at 16 July that is 50 days of no sunsets or sunrises. It would be quite impractical when the the sun rises at 01:03 on 28 May. If it is then 06:00 it will be 1229:45 when the sun sets 00:18 on July 16 50 days later.
And when the sun sets on Dec 9 the sun wont rise until Jan 1.
The difference in length is because the sunlight bends in the atmosphere.
It is longer the father north or south you go and on the north and south pole the sun rises and sets only one time a year. It would be something like 8760:00 on Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station
This is an actual problem for Muslims living far north during Ramadan
The fast is between dawn until sunset.
That is even worse because the the Arctic circle with no sunset or sunrise is at 66°33
with civil dawn 59°20 or nautical dawn 54°30′
the circles is 798 or 1337 km to the south.
With civil dawn for example all of Finland, most of Sweden including the capitol and large parts of Russia including St. Petersburg, Anchorage Alaska will have days with no dawn/dusk.
Search for “ramadan north of the Arctic circle” read about it.
I think i a big mistake for a god to specify what believers should do when travelling far north or south. Or in orbit, fasting between dusk and dawn in ISS would not be a problem with 45 minutes between each.
Well, having lived in Persian Gulf nations for five years, I’ve learned a lot about the faith. I’ve also read the Qur’on (English transliteration).
Allah sucks at math, orbital mechanics, biology and geography.
Oh well, that version sucked as bad as the Judeo-Christian version at the very same things.