Nice concept, but if you are bothered by the light and don't want to hear sounds why not simply hang the device on the power, and put it off? Then put it on when you wake up. Booting the device has very much improved with Diablo.

Also, what if the device went off while inbetween those 2 cron scripts? The scripts will have to be executed on boot as well.

Then there are weekend days with perhaps different preferences but thats easily fixed in cron.

Perhaps a cron frontend a-la Windows Scheduler would be nice for the NIT.

Have an alarm in the form of an MP3 being your alarm clock.

Nice concept tho but IMO these scripts should also save the current setting IOW save the setting before it goes into 'night' mode, and then in morning return to this original setting before it went into 'night' mode. Currently. reminds me of ALSA in its early days, hehe.