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Digital artist Jer Thorp writes:
Holding a smoke alarm, battery installed, is somewhat like holding an unwound jack-in-the-box. While you know that it shouldn't go off, there's still a nagging suspicion that it might. I get a similar feeling when I check news websites in the morning - somewhere in the back of my mind, I suspect that the world might have caught on fire while I was asleep. So, it made at least some degree of sense to me to build a NewsAlarm - a device that sounds an alarm when specific new stories are detected 'off the wire'.
He hooked a smoke alarm to a simple set of Classes in Processing which connect to the New York Times NewsWire API. He can set it up to be on the lookout for certain words/phrases that trigger the alarm when they appear over the wire. Cool. Annoying.
When I read the title I thought the alarm communicated with the web to signal that the alarm was triggered. That way, I would know while away that it went off. An alarm that used SMS or email (or twitter) would be sweet.
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Yeah, that's what I thought too. I think that idea would probably be more useful. :) Also, it could maybe send you an email reminder when you should replace your battery or something.
Cheers,
-nanobri of http://nanobri.blogspot.com
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