So a while back, we were having a problem with our 3-year old waking up progressivly earlier. Probalby due to it getting light out progressively earlier. One of the issues with living above the 45th parallel. He can’t read anything yet, so it seemed unreasonable to give him a clock and say, you can’t leave your room before 7:30. So, after pondering it for a couple days on how to give him an clear indication to him when it was OK to get up, but also not wake him up in the process I recalled the chumby: http://www.chumby.com/ was a nice little linux platform with touchscreen, and a quick trip through the user manual showed that you could get it to switch "channels" at specified times. So, $45 dollars on ebay later, I had an Insignia Infocast (a BestBuy branded version of the chumby). There was a bit of a hassle getting it deregistered/registered, but a quick email to the chumby support cleared that up. Then I created a "night" and a "day" channel, set one to show a flickering candle and the other to show a koi pond with little fish. Then a couple of alarm settings to switch back and forth and done…

Now he’s got an easy way to tell if it’s OK to be up in the morning. He doesn’t always pay attention to it, but sometimes when he comes out at the right time he tell us "Wake. Fish. Wake.".

Ah, technology to the rescue…