We certainly love to sleep – to some of us, sleep is a luxury, to others, it may even be a hobby or a favorite pastime. A common problem for almost everyone you know in this generation would probably be to wake up in time! Be it for work, class, meetings, or the day’s activities, the alarm clock is a must-have item in the bedroom. But if you’re bored with the mundane ringing, hand-sized clocks that you can easily throw out the window to shut up, then you are going to love this list.

(Image Source: Nootropic Design)

Heavy sleepers and late night gamers, pick your challenge from the alarm clocks below. No matter what has been keeping you up late at night, we have for you 20 creative alarm clocks that will help jolt you out of dreamland in very unorthodox ways. Some of these clocks can be found online while others are merely concepts at this point. Loads of evilness after the jump!

Recommended Reading: 35 Tech-Inspired Pillows For Geeks

Nixie Ramos Alarm Clock

The Nixie Ramos alarm clock will ring for ten seconds, then give you one full minute to figure out the code (hint: it is the date) before the alarm goes all out with the task it’s made to deliver. The defuse panel can be placed anywhere, so it’s best to put it far from the bed. No more deactivating of alarm clocks straight from the comforts of your bed. [$350]

Clocky Robotic Alarm

What better way to wake your sleephead up than to make you run around after a small, fast, noisy thing like this little gem. Clocky, with its all-terrain features, will escape from your night stand, and run around your room while making the annoying beep-beep sound until you catch it and turn it off – or kill it with fire. For the heavy sleeper, you’d probably need more than one. [$49.99 - $59.99]

Flying Alarm Clock

Here’s one to make you at least open one eye at the sound of the alarm. Why? You need to watch where the key to the alarm clock is propelled to, silly! Flying alarm clock is committed to wake you up by making its propeller fly off the alarm. With the frightening alarm sounds blaring throughout your room, and possibly your flat too, you have to quickly retrieve the propeller (the key) to lodge it back to the clock to make the sound stop. [$19.99]

Shape Up Alarm Clock

Ladies, this Shape Up alarm clock is absolutely the best gift for your lazy partner. Work out while you try to wake up by swinging this heavy little friend up down 30 times to stop the alarm. I’m not sure how long this one will continue being your daily alarm clock before ending up thrown out the window. [$14.13]

Sonic Bomb Alarm Clock

If you think that you can still out-sleep most of the alarm clocks above, you’d probably have to crank the sound up a notch or two. The Sonic Bomb alarm clock is intentionally designed for mega-heavy sleepers because if 113 decibels (louder than a rock concert) isn’t able to wake you up, nothing will. Note that regular exposure to these levels of loudness can make you permanently deaf so you might want to go further down the list for a better alternative. [$49.99]

Banclock

Here’s another creative way to wake up. The Banclock will only stop ringing if you put a coin in it. It’s the perfect way to make sure that you save some money every single day. Honestly, I don’t know how this could wake you up but it is a great alarm clock for kids who are finding it hard to save their pocket money. [$81.22]

Target Alarm Clock

If you are a sucker for shooting games, you must try this Target alarm clock. The rules are easy: the clock will sound the alarm based on the time you set, and you need to stop it by using the laser target gun to shoot the bullseye. To help make you aim better, you should try putting your ex’s photo there. Just a thought. [$17.13]

Defusable Alarm Clock

One of the conversation-inducing alarm cocks on the list, if a friend were to find this baby on your desk, you’d have some explaining to do. It’s not as difficult to disarm as a real life bomb (I suppose) but the defusable alarm clock does tick down to ‘explosion’ within 10 seconds. And even then the beeps are not really earth-shattering but seriously, that’s one nice decoration piece to put on your desk. [$32.95]

DangerBomb Alarm Clock

That bomb alarm too easy for you? Then try this DangerBomb alarm clock. Cut the right wire to stop the alarm, or else your mornings will be announced with a kaboom sound. The wires are changed randomly every morning so you best be alert to cut the right wire. Don’t look at me, the manual for this thing is in Japanese language.

Mr Bump Off The Wall Alarm Clock

Bored of buying tons and tons of alarm clocks that you keep smashing against the walls? Then, get Mr Bump Off The Wall alarm clock, Just throw the alarming clock at the wall to silence it and go back to sleep… no, wait, that can’t be right, isn’t the alarm clock supposed to wake you up? [$16.00]

Finger Dance Alarm Clock

Say hello to dance dance revolution for the finger! The Finger Dance alarm clock wants you to play with it until the music stops! It’s probably a really fun way to wake you up, but make sure that you don’t treat it like Mr Bump Off The Wall clock if you cannot follow the steps. [$26.78]

Money Shredding Alarm Clock

Oh gosh, make it stop, make it stop! This is too much to take. Shredding a hundred-dollar bill in an effort to wake up is seriously only for the hardcore sleeper. Thank the stars that this is only a concept alarm clock, and the best part is nobody knows who thought of this crazy idea. Mind you, destroying cash intentionally is a federal crime for countries like the US of A. Hmm, it actually adds to the urgency of the alarm now, doesn’t it? (Image Source: acidcow)

SnūzNLūz

If shredding bills is not feasible, maybe having your online bank account connected to an organization you absolutely despise can help you avoid that snooze button. Get this SnūzNLūz alarm clock, connect via Wi-Fi and never ever sleep in again. Think of it, the longer you stay in bed, the more that organization you hate benefits from you, financially. Think this is too horrific to be real? Yeah, it’s actually an April Fools’ joke!

Bacon Alarm Clock

If anything can pull one out of slumber, it would probably be the mouth-watering aroma of food. In this case, it’s bacon. The Bacon Alarm Clock hasn’t turned into a product yet, but it could possibly be the best-selling clock of the year if it did! Rather than wake you up with a noisy alarm sound, it lets the smell of bacon do the work.

Coffee Time Alarm Clock

Not a fan of bacon? Try coffee instead with this Coffee Time alarm clock. Wake up to the sound of coffee drips, the strong aroma of coffee beans and if the alarm doesn’t wake you up, just let the coffee do the rest. Too bad it’s just a concept alarm clock. For now.

No Snooze Alarm Clock

Once this alarm clock rings, you have to lift the strap and twirl the strap for 90 seconds, managing two rotations for each second. The No Snooze Alarm Clock will not stop if you go too slow or if you stop completely halfway through. In fact, you have to make the full run again if you fail halfway. No snooze button included. This is a cruel one.

Sfera Alarm Clock

Want an alarm clock that allows you to snooze then get this Sfera alarm clock. When the time has come, you can tap the alarm to stop sounding. If you go bak to sleep, the clock will start to rise up towards the ceiling; steal an extra 5 or 10 more minutes, and you’d need to prepare yourself a ladder so to reach the ceiling, because that’s where the alarm clock will be! Drag it back down to your bed to fully deactivate the alarm clock.

IQ Alarm Clock

Here’s one for Mensa group members; the IQ Alarm Clock doesn’t take a snooze for an answer. To make it stop ringing, solve an IQ question, and this is not the riddle me this type, it’s a standard IQ test. I would love to hate this clock, but the design is so sleek that I wouldn’t mind to have one in my bedroom – without batteries of course.

Water Spray Alarm Clock

Trying to sleep in for 10 more minutes? Expect the Water Spray alarm clock to launch a water attack on you then. It not only does ranged damage but splash damage as well, so either wake up at the sound of the alarm, or prepare to towel off the pools of water all over your room. Beats being woken up with a pail of water, I guess.

Chirp Alarm Clock

Here’s an interesting one. If you are a light sleeper, and you sleep with a roommate or bedmate, then waking up is a pretty sensitive issue. While the other alarm clocks in the list would send your roommate smashing them to pieces if you don’t wake up before they do, this one, can selectively wake its owner by vibrating his or her pillow until they are up. Put the clip back into the alarm clock to make it stop and your roommate will not be the wiser. It even beats the conventional alarm clock system.

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Today we are going to continue our discussion on CSS3 Gradients. In the previous post we’ve showed you how to create Linear Gradients. This time we will cover their relative, Circular and Elliptical Gradients.

the Gradient Syntax

The gradient in CSS3 is declared using the background-image property. This is for better compatibility when we also need to add background-color in a single rule set, so that they do not collide with one another. Then, to create the radial gradient we simply call it with this radial-gradient() function. There are four values to be included in the function to set the gradient properly.

The first value defines the gradient position. We can use a descriptive keyword such as top, bottom, center and left, or we can also be more specific like, 50% 50% to set the gradient at the center or 0% 0% to set the gradient to start at top left.

The second value defines the shape and the gradient size, there are two arguments to shape the gradients, first the ellipse which is the default, and the second is circle.

And for the gradient size, we can select one of the following six arguments.

Values	Description
closest-side	The gradient’s shape meets the side of the box closest to its center (for circles) or meets both the vertical and horizontal sides closest to the center (for ellipses).
closest-corner	The gradient’s shape is sized so it exactly meets the closest corner of the box from its center.
farthest-side	Similar to closest-side, except the shape is sized to meet the side of the box farthest from its center (or vertical and horizontal sides).
farthest-corner	The gradient’s shape is sized so it exactly meets the farthest corner of the box from its center.
contain	A synonym for closest-side.
cover	A synonym for farthest-corner.

Table Source: Mozilla Developer Network.

Lastly, the third and the fourth define the color combination. So, here is how we write the syntax to create the Elliptical gradients, and this time we will use cover for the gradient size, so it will spread widely, covering the container;

  body {  	background-image: radial-gradient(center center, ellipse cover, #ffeda3, #ffc800);  }  

To create the Circular gradient we can simply do it this way:

  body {  	background-image: radial-gradient(center center, circle cover, #ffeda3, #ffc800);  }  

As the name implies, the gradient shape will be a circle.

Browser Support

Just take note though, all the browsers are still in the process of providing full support for this feature, so they still need the vendor prefix. Thus, the whole complete syntax that will work in all modern browsers – IE10+, Firefox 3.6+, Chrome 4.0+, Safari 4.0+ and Opera 11+ – will look something like this;

  body {  	background-image: radial-gradient(center bottom, ellipse cover, #ffeda3, #ffc800);  	background-image: -o-radial-gradient(center bottom, ellipse cover, #ffeda3, #ffc800);  	background-image: -ms-radial-gradient(center bottom, ellipse cover, #ffeda3, #ffc800);  	background-image: -moz-radial-gradient(center bottom, ellipse cover, #ffeda3, #ffc800);  	background-image: -webkit-radial-gradient(center bottom, ellipse cover, #ffeda3, #ffc800);  }  

Check out the demo or download the source to play around with gradients.

• Demo
• Download Source

Final Words

Creating CSS3 radial gradient is not as hard as you think, and especially when you get help from these tools for generating code:

• Colorzilla Gradients
• Gradientoo

Radial gradient is only one type of CSS3 gadients, we will continue our discussion on the subject in future posts, so stay tuned to Hongkiat.com

Related posts:

1. A Look Into: CSS3 Linear Gradient
2. Coding a Graceful Breadcrumb Navigation Menu in CSS3
3. CSS3 Attribute Selector: Targeting the File Type
4. CSS3 Border-Image Property: Making Photos Really Cool!