What's a good alarm clock?

I use an at least 13 year old nokia xpress music (5800?)

This pleases me, greatly.

I have a flip click clock.

Couldn’t recommend it more

https://gingkodesign.com/product/flip-click-clock/

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It doesn't meet the original requirement of not having a phone in the room, but a Pixel Stand Gen 2 (bought on Black Friday for £49 because the full price is stupid) works well for me and is the best solution I've found after years of having the same problem - I don't understand why nearly all alarm clocks are too bright!

You can set it to dim the screen to totally off when the screen is dark, but show the lock screen when there's any light at all or the screen is touched.

I've also got it set to go into do not disturb and greyscale mode if I put it on the stand anywhere near bedtime.

It does obviously require willpower, and a Pixel phone, but I don't look at it until the morning unless I want to know the time in the night, then it's just a quick tap.

Does a sunrise alarm too.

Only con is there's a fan in it! But it has a quiet mode, so very occasionally the fan runs very quietly but not enough to bother me (and I'm very sensitive to noise too).

so this works

In my experience I wouldn't count on this until you've bought it and slept with it for a few nights!

Brightness adjusts automatically based on the ambient light.

Lots of alarms do this but are then still too bright in my experience. Does it dim to almost nothing? Because one person's 'this is fine' in this area can be another's 'argh this is too bright I can't sleep'!

I have a Lumi alarm, apparently the daylight thing wakes people up.
It doesn't work on me or my eldest. Does on the other humans in my house.

Phone alarm works but I like the look of the braun thing.

I assume @Velocio is android but the latest iPhones (14 pro onwards) with iOS 17 are great alarm clocks with the standby feature.

Pop them on their side on a magsafe stand and they go to as little as 1 nit of brightness in a dark room with red text for easy visibility. They also use the front facing lidar sensor to deactivate / activate based on movement so for most of the night the display is off but if you move towards it or look at it (depending on how close you are) it'll turn on.

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I assume @Velocio is android

Yeah, I care about privacy

Lol, the irony.

Very true and therefore, difficult to answer.

I wouldn't say it dims down to almost nothing but it's not bright enough to bother me.

I found a review on Youtube when deciding my alarmclock - that might shine a light on it pun intented

Is it harsh to say that buying an iPhone 14 pro, locking down the privacy and only using it as a dedicated alarm clock feels like a very Velocio solution?

Ideally with a custom walnut stand.

It has my full support.

Not really...

• Can iPhone allow disabling of core services? No - but I've installed https://grapheneos.org/ and run not a single Google service
  
• Can iPhone allow full private DNS of your choosing? No
  
• Can iPhone run a full non-Safari browser, such as Firefox? No
  
• Can iPhone support adblocking extensions within browsers? No
  
• Can iPhone support something like SyncThing so you can achieve backup of photos to a place of your own choosing, without having to use Apple Photos or Google Photos? No
  
• Can iPhone fully support an always on Wireguard VPN? Not really, it's not fully exclusively "VPN or nothing" and when on it breaks any private DNS (even the Apple one)
  
• Does Apple consider you to have privacy? No (recent court cases have fully stated that "no reasonable user would ever expect that Apple couldn't access all of their data... meaning there isn't end-to-end encryption, only on device encryption)
  
  

I'm a total nerd, security and privacy are extremely high... and Android via something like GrapheneOS is absolutely private.

Also you left the butt plug on the side table in your pic.

Can iPhone allow full private DNS of your choosing? No

Is that true?

Last time I checked, though I only check when I consider a new phone and apply my list of requirements to all the devices out there.

I do like Apple hardware, I just think their software sucks big time and has very little focus on privacy despite their marketing, and that it's all made significantly worse by their walled garden precluding more privacy conscious solutions within that ecosystem (as it would represent a loss of control to Apple which they will do not find acceptable, as the revenue from apps and services is too great to risk reducing due to more privacy)

.

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Seriously though, is nextdns not fully private? It definitely blocks ads for me across apps and and browsers.

You can also get adblocking extensions for safari.

NextDNS is fully private.

However Apple did a thing where, if the privatedns was not reachable, it would fallback on their DNS and thus it was leaky.

The failure mode should be "nothing works"... but their failure mode is towards user convenience "it still works"... but at the cost of privacy.

If they've improved this, good. At the time I checked it was shitty.

https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/25/24050478/apple-ios-17-4-browser-engines-eu

Nah, that's a bollox move... Apple have said that the EU users can get this, but not global... thus forcing Firefox and Chrome into fully supporting 2 entire versions of their browser, the one that uses Safari for outside of EU and the one they want to ship within the EU.

Apple are playing very shitty games here.

Equally so with regards to the App Store payment changes which has virtually all app developers in full revolt right now.

Apple are super deep in enshittification, and are playing a highly political and marketing game where they get to point at everyone else and claim it's their fault, whilst Apple are the one that created it.

To be very very clear, despite working in tech, I loathe all big tech. We're living through the biggest transfers of wealth that ever occurred, and Apple, Amazon, Google, Meta (Facebook), are all leading the charge collectively at making the World a shittier place, just to line their own pockets further.

Can we get back to alarm clock chat pls?

The neek pages are >>>>>>>>

I use one of these. It’s tiny, quiet, and has lasted about 30 years.

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If you're interested @Velocio this is what my Pixel does when I put it on the Pixel Stand 2.

Next to it is my Levono Smart Clock Essential. Athough it looks like it dims a lot when I turn the light off, it's still way too bright for me!

https://youtu.be/ugFukuHFSL4

that's part of the Google app which I do not have