My inability to predict the future loses the hotel a customer

[JLRodgers]

Last time I was in a hotel for an important thing, I brought my own alarm clock and set it, and set theirs AND asked for a wake up call! I figured the odds of all three going down (mine had a battery backup) were slim.

[pacman]

Hehe, I heard about this one guy that had a laptop always with him. He used it as an alarm clock - by typing "sleep 8h; cat /dev/urandom > /dev/dsp" to a script and then running it. I think it was funny.

It directs random data to the default sound device.

[Chromatix]

Ah yes - the UNIX hacker's alarm clock. Creative at least!

Better though would be if he used the at or cron daemons to do it. He'd have to use the dd command instead of cat, so that he could limit the time it ran for, since those tools don't conveniently run things in a terminal window to cancel.