Online alarm clock

How to use the online alarm clock

This section holds one page for every minute of the day, all 1,440 of them, so an alarm for 5:42 am has an address of its own rather than sitting behind a picker you have to nudge into place. Open the page and the countdown starts; the sound plays at the minute named in the address.

The honest limitation belongs at the top rather than the bottom. This alarm lives inside a browser tab. Close the tab, quit the browser, shut the laptop or let the phone lock its screen, and nothing will sound. Silent mode, do not disturb and a muted tab each swallow the alert while the page carries on looking perfectly healthy. No web page can override any of that, so anything you truly cannot afford to miss belongs in your phone's own alarm application.

Where the exact minute earns its keep

• The school bus, which collects at a fixed minute and does not circle back
• A federal office start at 7:30 am, reached along Sheikh Zayed Road at the wrong end of the rush
• Airport check-in for one of the long-haul banks that leave in the small hours
• A nap at a desk where the laptop is open and awake anyway

Daylight is a poor guide here for the opposite reason to northern Europe. Sunrise in Dubai moves only between about 5:30 am at midsummer and just after 7 am in January, so the sky looks broadly similar across a wide stretch of the morning and tells you very little about whether you are late. In the summer the more useful signal is temperature, and by the time it is obviously hot the early window has already closed.

During Ramadan the pattern inverts completely: the alarm that matters is the one before dawn for suhoor, and the working day is shortened by law, so start and finish times that held all year suddenly do not. Every minute page here works the same way, needs no account, no email address and no install, and reads the clock from your own device rather than from a server.