Online alarm clock

How to use the online alarm clock

This section holds one page for every minute of the day — 1,440 of them — so an alarm for 6:42 am has its own address rather than being buried behind a picker you have to nudge into position. Land on the page, the countdown starts, and the sound goes off at the minute named in the URL.

The honest caveat comes first, because it matters more here than anywhere else on the site. The alarm lives inside a browser tab. Close the tab, quit the browser, shut the laptop lid or let the phone drop into sleep, and nothing will sound. Silent mode, do not disturb and a muted tab will each swallow the alert just as thoroughly. This is a limit of what any web page is permitted to do, not a fault that can be patched away, so anything you genuinely cannot afford to miss belongs in your phone's own alarm app.

What it is actually good for

• A twenty-minute nap at a desk where the laptop is already open and awake
• The reminder to leave for the station in time for a specific train
• Holding the kitchen to a schedule when the roast has to come out at a set minute
• Marking the end of a revision block without reaching for another device

Precision earns its keep in a British day more than you might expect. Peak rail fares turn over on the minute, GP surgeries open their phone lines at a fixed time, and the school gate closes when it closes. Through the winter there is a further reason to trust the clock rather than the window: in late December it is still properly dark in London well past eight in the morning, and later still in Glasgow or Aberdeen, so daylight gives you no useful signal about whether you are running late.

Every minute page works the same way and none of them asks for an account, an email address or an install. Pick the minute you want, leave the tab where it is, and let it get on with watching the clock.