I've been working in the internet and computery industry long enough to know not to count on anything on the internet, there's too many points of failure between my chumby and shoutcast for me to call it reliable if I *HAVE* to be up and at work at a specific time.
your router could have a problem, your neighbor could turn on something that disrupts your wifi, a backhoe could dig up a cable (backhoes are the natual enemy of fibre cables), backbone routers could get DDOSd, routing issues could happen, shoutcast could forget to pay their electric bil, someone could trip over a plug, etc etc...
I've seen *all* of those things disrupt connectivity, so I keep my music local
the c1 chumby control panel has better alarm capabilities than the larger, newer c8 model (something I'm hoping Duane will fix when he gets around to improving things *hint hint*), and allows a 'backup alarm', so if you don't respond to the alarm in a set period, it starts beeping at you like a regular alarm clock, so you're more insulated from internet flakeyness making you late for work.
I will probably put up a wiki post for my alarm script, once I make it a little simpler, it requires being comfortable with sshing into the chumby and creating custom files.
yes, the displays can be automatically blanked at night, in a variety of ways, and you can create as many individual alarms as you wish, every day, week days, certain days, specific days, pretty much anything you could possibly want.
at one point, while I was testing my script, I ran it without a limit set on how many alarms it had, and the chumby dutifilly created three hundred and sixty five unique alarms, one for each day of the year.
here's my current alarm list on my bedside chumby:
Custom Alarms
Alarm name Time Audio Duration Backup alarm Snooze
07:45 wed 03/05 3/5/2014 7:45 am bromance 30 m After 5 10
07:45 thu 03/06 3/6/2014 7:45 am bromance 30 m After 5 10
07:45 fri 03/07 3/7/2014 7:45 am bromance 30 m After 5 10
07:45 mon 03/10 3/10/2014 7:45 am bromance 30 m After 5 10
07:45 tue 03/11 3/11/2014 7:45 am bromance 30 m After 5 10
07:45 wed 03/12 3/12/2014 7:45 am bromance 30 m After 5 10
07:45 thu 03/13 3/13/2014 7:45 am bromance 30 m After 5 10
07:45 fri 03/14 3/14/2014 7:45 am bromance 30 m After 5 10
07:45 mon 03/17 3/17/2014 7:45 am bromance 30 m After 5 10
07:45 tue 03/18 3/18/2014 7:45 am bromance 30 m After 5 10
Cleaning up any loose bits and bytes.