Make:

• Build your own iPod speaker set
• HACKED! - Maker-made USB cable storage now a product!
• Add mood lighting to your Xbox controller ports
• Sinclair watch will make a geek grin
• Use a Wii Fit balance board to control a robot in the real world
• PSP hack mixes live sound editing and collection with GPS navigation

Make the bed turn over and flip you out. That should wake you up. Other than that I would have used every spice under the sun and mixed it together. Add some vinegar to react with it all and you have a stinky mix to wake the dead. I know, I've done it.

No, the smell of smoke isn't enough to wait you. By the time it is you're stuck on the wrong side of a fire and you're about to add crispiness and dead to your list of problems.

@John - Good point, but the quoted comment was proposing a circumstance where the fire was in close enough proximity to the person that it would compete with the strength of horseradish. Still, an interesting and debatable (if unclear) scenario.

Imagine a college dorm room where the smoke detector goes off on the 1st floor and a hearing impaired person is sleeping on the 5th. You surely wouldn't want to wait til that person can smell smoke before they evacuate. In my freshman dorm the school installed a super-powerful strobe light right over the bed of a hearing-impaired person. We never had a fire, thank god, but we had plenty of fire drills, so presumably it worked.

I'm fairly sure that's a picture of hon-wasabi.

...Which can be called horseradish. Nevermind.

No no... deaf people don't have to wear vibrating alarms. We put them under our pillows. They're strong enough -- believe me. I often wake up in the nick of time because I don't want the alarm to wake me up.

@Meryl - Sorry for that assumption (see update)
Wow, I could imagine a strong vibration against the head being a very unpleasant wake-up call(even with a pillow between). Here's to sleeping late!

An experiment consisting of only 14 people doesn't seem like a very definitive, or reliable one.
Especially not when the system is possibly going lull people into a false sense of security, over more reliable methods (as Meryl points out) of vibrating alarms.

I admit I know nothing of aerosol propellants, other than the flammable nature of most house hold sprays... but isn't the propellant used in aerosols flammable? If so I certainly wouldn't want to be woken up by a device that sprays a flammable gas (consisting partly of a horseradish scent) into a room who's occupant is in danger of a fire in close proximity...

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