How to set up an alarm on Mac OS X without 3rd party applications.

So I’m sleepy, but want to make sure that I wake up on time.

For numerous times, my phone’s alarm clocks failed me. Some morning I wake up late with a notification, saying ‘missed alarm.’ My iPad, too. It would play the alarm song once before going completely silent.

And I thought, “using my laptop as an alarm might be more reliable,” but I don’t have any alarm clock app (and not in the mood of downloading one), so I thought of a quick solution:

I’ll make my laptop wait for some time, and then start playing songs in iTunes.

And here’s how:

1. Open iTunes.
2. Start playing a song or playlist that you want to use as an alarm sound, then pause it.
3. Calculate how many seconds until you want the alarm to go off. For example, I want to wake up in 4 hours 45 minutes. That would be (4×60 + 45)×60 = 17100 seconds.
4. Open Terminal.
5. Type in the following shell script, substituting the number, then hit return.

sleep 17100; osascript -e 'tell application "iTunes" to play'

Have a good night. ☺