Category: Technology

Getting a new phone might leave you wondering what to do with your old one. Trading it in, particularly for credit towards your new handset, is ideal and could make a future refurbished shopper happy. But if the trade-in value isn’t worthwhile to you and you’ve been wondering what else your retired pocket computer can do, we have a few ideas. One suggestion is to turn it into a dedicated alarm clock. Yes, you can absolutely use your new phone for that purpose — you probably already do. But there are clear advantages to using your decommissioned device instead. Here’s how to upcycle your old iPhone into an alarm clock.

What’s the point?

Stuffing a retired gadget in a drawer does nothing — except make you half-heartedly contemplate doing something with it each time you open said drawer. Recycling is a valid option, but even if your old handset isn’t as speedy as your new one, it’s almost assuredly more powerful than any sleep machine or smart alarm clock on the market. And with the setup tips detailed here, it can actually perform more advanced functions, too.

Plus, using your current phone when you’re trying to sleep is perilous. I’ve never picked up my phone without getting distracted. Finally, with on-again, off-again tariffs making electronic gadgets harder to come by for a good price, rethinking what an existing device can do is intelligent alchemy.

First, delete everything

OK, not everything. But the idea is to make your phone as unexciting as possible — no Instagram, no Monument Valley, no Photos memories from last year’s road trip. Your iPhone won’t let you delete certain apps, such as Phone, Messages, the App Store and others — but you can hide them from your home screen so they’ll only pop up if you search for them.

You’ll still need a few apps to create your alarm clock, so don’t delete or hide the following:

Clock

Music (and iTunes store if you don’t pay for Apple Music)

Shortcuts

Health

Settings

Make your phone look exactly as boring as this.

Set a personalized alarm tone

If you’d rather wake up to something more pleasant than the Clock app’s chirps and bleeps, pick a personalized sound instead.

1. Set your sleep schedule in Health. Apple requires you to set your Sleep Schedule in the Health app before you can set an alarm in the Clock app.

2. Download a song. Theoretically, you can use any song you have downloaded to your phone as a sound for your alarm. But I couldn’t get it to work with any song that supported Dolby Atmos or Lossless audio (even if I turned those options off in Settings > Music > Audio).

But standard quality songs worked great. If, like me, you’re not a heavy sleeper, you might like something like singing bowls or a meditative flute. If you need the thunder of the gods to wake you, perhaps go for something more rousing.

3. Set your alarm. Open the Clock app and select the Alarms tab. Set your alarm as usual. Then tap Sound > Pick a song > Downloaded > and select the (non Lossless!) song you desire. Hit Save.

4. Turn off vibrate. If you don’t want your phone to vibrate when it plays your alarm, turn the Haptics option to Never Play in Settings > Sounds & Haptics.

Tap Sound then select any downloaded song as your alarm sound. Just be sure not to select a Lossless or Dolby Atmos track.

Make some (white) noise

My favorite thing about my sleep machine is the ambient music it plays as I drift off into slumber. Unsurprisingly, your old iPhone is capable of playing lulling tunes as well. And if white noise helps you stay in dreamland, you can program your phone to play those sounds, too. A combination of Shortcuts and Automations will make your sleep routine play automatically so you don’t have to touch your screen at all.

1. Build a sleepytime playlist. Open Apple Music and make a playlist. (Unfortunately, Shortcuts doesn’t work with Spotify.) I populated Amy’s Sleepytime Mix with songs from Apple’s Ambient Chill and Pure Ambient playlists. I made the set about 30 minutes long because that’s a little longer than it takes me to drift off.

2. Turn off Autoplay. It’s pretty jarring when you’re drifting off and your dreamy playlist morphs into some algorithmically selected oontz oontz banger. To turn Autoplay off:

Play any track in Apple Music.

Tap the name of the song to enlarge the album cover and track controls.

Tap the three lines at the bottom right. You’ll now see upcoming tracks and three buttons at the top of the list: crossed arrows (shuffle), looped arrows (repeat) and an infinity symbol (Autoplay).

Toggle Autoplay off so it’s greyed out.

Tap the song that’s currently playing to access the Autoplay option (left). Tap the infinity symbol at the top of the screen to toggle Autoplay off (right).

Note: Turning Autoplay off turns it off across ALL your Apple devices. If you like it when Apple keeps the tunes flowing after a playlist ends, you’ll have to complete a side quest, which is detailed at the end of this post.

3. Pick your white noise sound. An accessibility feature gives you the option of eight different white noise sounds, including Rain, Ocean, Fire and Night (with more functions coming soon).

Open the Settings app

Tap Accessibility

Tap Audio & Visual

Tap Background Sounds

Toggle Background Sounds on

Tap Sound then pick your favorite

Press back and toggle Background Sounds back off

Toggle on Use When Media Is Playing

Toggle off Stop Sounds When Locked

3. Create a Shortcut. This will make your phone play your playlist with white noise beneath it (which softens song transitions) and when the playlist ends, the white noise continues.

Open Shortcuts and tap All Shortcuts, then tap + in the upper right

Search for the term “volume,” tap Set Volume and choose a percentage, such as 25-percent or your desired level

Search for “background,” tap Set Background Sounds. The shortcut should read: [Turn] [Background Sounds] [On]

Search for “play” and tap Play Music

Tap Music > Library > Playlist > [Your sleepy time mix]. Then tap the tiny ⊕ in the upper right

Tap the arrow next to the Shortcut title at the very top to rename your shortcut, perhaps something like Sleep Routine or Night Night.

Tap Done.

4. Trigger your Shortcut with an Automation. To run your Shortcut, you can just ask Siri by saying “Hey Siri, Night Night” (or “Hey Siri, Sleep Routine” or whatever you named the above shortcut). But if you want your routine to start at the same time each night, create an automation.

In the Shortcut app, tap the Automation tab at the bottom

Tap + to create a new Automation

Tap Time of Day and enter your preferred start time and days

Make sure there’s a checkmark near Run Immediately (and not Run After Confirmation) and keep Notify When Run toggled off

Tap Next

If you don’t see the name of the Shortcut you created at the top, search for its name and tap on it

Create a Shortcut that sets the volume, turns on white noise and plays a playlist (left). Set an Automation that automatically runs the Shortcut at bedtime (right), or just say “Hey Siri…” and the name of your shortcut.

5. Turn off Background Sounds. Whether you want your white noise to play all the way up to your alarm or just for an hour or two, it’s wise to create an automation to turn it off so you don’t have to do it manually.

Create a new Shortcut

Search for “background”

Tap Set Background Sound

Tap [On] to [Off] so the Shortcut reads [Turn] [Background Sounds] [Off]

Rename the Shortcut: Background Sounds Off

Hit done

Create a new Automation in the Automation tab

Tap Time of Day

Set it for your alarm time or a couple hours after you’re usually asleep

Tap Run Immediately and make sure Notify When Run is toggled off

Hit done and choose the shortcut you just made (Background Sounds Off)

To enable an Automation that turns off Background noises (left) first, create a Shortcut that turns Background Sounds Off (middle). You can change which background sound you want in Settings > Accessiblity > Audio & Visual (right).

Stand it up

Phones running iOS 17 or later have StandBy mode, which displays your choice of stylized clock faces when the handset is charging and oriented horizontally. To enable StandBy:

Open Settings

Tap StandBy and toggle it on

Toggle on Night Mode (This makes the clock dimmer when it’s dark in the room)

If you put your phone in a stand, it’ll look a lot like an alarm clock (and be easier to see from afar). Whether you use a MagSafe wireless stand or a basic stand-and-cord combo, your new alarm clock (aka old phone) will likely be plugged in all the time. So you may want to change your battery settings to keep it from reaching 100 percent. (Being fully charged or fully empty is what strains batteries the most). To do that:

Open Settings

Tap Battery

Tap Charging

Set Charge Limit to 80 percent

Putting your phone on a stand and plugging it in enables StandBy mode and makes it look like a real alarm clock!

Side quest: Make your sleep playlist stop without turning off Autoplay

Some people like it when the algorithm tries to keep the party going with related songs after a playlist ends. But, playing random music all night probably isn’t great for sleep. The good news is, you can set a timer to have your sleep tunes play for a specified period, so it ends on its own without you having to disable Autoplay across all your devices.

Note the length of your playlist

Open the Clock app and tap the Timers tab

Tap When Timer Ends and scroll down to and tap Stop Playing

Tap Set

Open Shortcuts and edit your night time routine by tapping the three dots in the Shortcut card (the one with your playlist and Background sounds)

Search for “timer”

Tap Start Timer

Enter the length of your playlist in the Duration field

Tap Done

Because the Background Sounds are a setting and not technically media that’s playing, your white noise selection will still play until the automation that ends it runs.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/mobile/smartphones/how-to-turn-your-old-iphone-into-an-alarm-clock-110001148.html?src=rss 

The Mission: Impossible film franchise has always dabbled in the, well, impossible. We’ve seen Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt climb his way up the Burj Khalifa, have a motorcycle joust to prevent the spread of a bioweapon and hang off the side of an airplane. Even the most grounded entry, Brian DePalma’s 1996 Mission: Impossible, featured Cruise leaping off of an exploding helicopter onto a train in the Chunnel. But with the previous film, Dead Reckoning, and this year’s follow-up Final Reckoning, the series has jumped completely into science-fiction territory with an AI villain called The Entity. It has the power to control anything that touches the internet, manipulate digital information to suit its needs and potentially wipe out humanity through a global nuclear annihilation.

Stopping the Entity is a mission Ethan Hunt has no choice but to accept. But as a fan of this series from the start — hell, I even like John Woo’s gloriously operatic Mission: Impossible 2 — I can’t help but see the move into true sci-fi as a huge mistake. It makes both Reckoning films far too plot-heavy and impenetrable (Final Reckoning clocks in at three hours!), and they also just don’t have much to say about AI beyond a Terminator-esque extinction scenario. But perhaps worst of all, the shift towards sci-fi inadvertently (or perhaps purposefully) turns Ethan Hunt into some sort of Messiah. Apparently, only Scientology’s greatest son can save us.

The best M:I films are the ones that don’t get bogged down in the intricacies of plot mechanics. That’s a trend that truly kicked off with the JJ Abrams-directed Mission: Impossible 3, which relied on a standard MacGuffin (the “Rabbit’s Foot”) and a powerhouse Philip Seymour Hoffman villain performance to send Ethan and his team gallivanting around the world. With Ghost Protocol, director Brad Bird used his experience in animation and love of silent film to turn Cruise into a modern-day Buster Keaton, hopping from one elaborate set-piece to another.

The series found a new life when writer/director Christopher McQuarrie hopped aboard for Rogue Nation, which introduced Rebecca Ferguson’s enigmatic Ilsa Faust. McQuarrie has previously likened his approach to the franchise as something like action film jazz, wherein he and Cruise would develop some set piece ideas and build a narrative around that. At the same time, they also sought to develop Hunt’s inner-life and team dynamics more than previous films. Plot, once again, was mostly a vehicle to reach those spectacular action set pieces and character-defining moments (which were often one and the same).

McQuarrie mostly repeated his formula for success with 2018’s Mission: Impossible – Fallout, which was notable for featuring a real-time high altitude skydiving sequence. But with 2023’s Dead Reckoning, he faced the limits of trying to improvise a movie as it was being shot. Production was significantly delayed by the pandemic, and the film also had to go through several reshoots. Perhaps not surprisingly, it also became increasingly more complex and plot-heavy.

That movie couldn’t just treat The Entity’s AI like another plot MacGuffin, instead it practically became an anchor for the film’s momentum. We had to learn what the Entity was, why it could be bad and also introduce new characters who were devoted to its ambitions. The final film feels like a hodgepodge of ideas trying to string together a few notable action sequences, like that aforementioned motorcycle jump. The prolonged production also led to the departure of Ilsa Faust, who was immediately replaced by Hayley Atwell’s Grace, an expert thief who’s so thinly sketched she doesn’t even get a last name.

I had hoped that McQuarrie, Cruise and co-writer Erik Jendresen would learn from the sloppiness of the last film and refocus on the characters and action we love in The Final Reckoning, but unfortunately things get even more convoluted. We’re presented with a world where the Entity has already taken over most information systems, can easily reshape digital reality at will and is in the process of taking over nuclear weapons systems around the world. There is no hope but Ethan Hunt, who must seek out the Entity’s source code in a sunken Russian submarine and try to stop it from annihilating humanity (while also trying to survive the apocalypse in an underground data bunker). And if that all sounds tiring as you read it, it’s even harder to swallow as you sit through the film’s three-hour runtime.

Once the film actually starts moving around the half-way point, it delivers some of the most complex set pieces we’ve seen yet. Hunt’s dive into Arctic waters feels as claustrophobic as some of the best scenes from The Abyss, and it’s still thrilling to see Cruise hang onto bi-planes during the climactic chase. I just wish it actually did something interesting with the AI at the center of the story, instead of giving us a basic-ass Terminator/Wargames scenario. We’re told that the Entity has inspired a cult-like following, and that it can completely reshape the idea of truth, but we don’t actually see how it affects people around the world.

That’s a particular shame since the Mission: Impossible series’ has always been about genuine human effort, you’d think McQuarrie and crew would actually have more to say about the impact of AI. Fans want to see practical stunt work being accomplished by a movie star who’s desperate for attention. Now with real-world AI threatening to dumb down the act of creativity and recycle existing content, turning the film’s AI into a simplistic villain just seems like a total waste.

The Final Reckoning also wastes far too much time extolling Ethan Hunt’s virtues as humanity’s savior. No government can be trusted, no elected leaders — just one man who never follows orders. The one man who has given up love and bled for an ungrateful world. Even the people whose lives he has ostensibly ruined can’t help but love him. 

The Mission: Impossible franchise has always been a vanity project for Cruise, but he also balanced out his ego by working with talented directors who pushed him and the series in new directions. Now, in his fourth film with McQuarrie, and possibly his last as the main character, Cruise can’t help but remind us how much he’s suffered. And it’s as dull as yet another world-ending AI villain.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/tv-movies/mission-impossible-should-never-have-gone-full-sci-fi-200043337.html?src=rss