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Mechanical Watch

ciechanow.ski

301–310 of 425 posts

Re: Mechanical Watch

#301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using the same mechanical watch, more or less every day, for a little over 12yrs now. Miyota movement, stainless body, Sapphire window, about $300. In years of machine shop work the movement survived fine, and has one scratch on window from some tungsten carbide. Has kept brilliant time, maybe a minute a month, and taught me that my watch being accurate to the second was something that, for me, just didn't…

> one scratch on window from some tungsten carbide. Checks out. Tungsten Carbide and Corundum (sapphire watch crystals, the hardest watch crystal in use) have the same Mohs hardness of 9 and will scratch each other. And I'd guess that a $300 watch probably doesn't use Corundum but rather mineral glass.

County comm mid pilot watch, it's advertised as Sapphire. Comparing with colleagues at the time, it was a far sight tougher than their watches.

Re: Mechanical Watch

#302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using the same mechanical watch, more or less every day, for a little over 12yrs now. Miyota movement, stainless body, Sapphire window, about $300. In years of machine shop work the movement survived fine, and has one scratch on window from some tungsten carbide. Has kept brilliant time, maybe a minute a month, and taught me that my watch being accurate to the second was something that, for me, just didn't…

> I started working around pulsed high voltage last year (100kV+) and now it loses a couple minutes a week. Are these two things somehow related to one another?

Yes indeed, though not necessarily the cause in this case. While it could be coincidence, magnetization of components can result in reduced accuracy. Some companies have started to release watches with silicon springs, though very expensive.

Re: Mechanical Watch

#303
I have a mechanical watch. I wish it was quartz. I simply could not find any quartz watch in a style I liked. I even prefer thin watches.

I feel like the field of actually nicely designed quartz watches is dead from competition with mechanical and smart watches. Where smart watches are just ugly, and mechanical watches look amazing but are more hobby or conversation pieces than actually good for telling time.

Re: Mechanical Watch

#304
post #237
post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly I think your examples are both genuinely less comprehendible to someone without a deep understanding of GL going in than my example. It’s a very bad, non-object oriented API in an object oriented language. It was designed for and by people who know GL in other C like languages, not for people who know JavaScript. It is unlike any other part of the language. The fact that I have to write a shader myself, as a…

Yeah, they probably are, I didn't intend them as tutorials but as a better representation of the actual scutwork necessary to draw a triangle. Object-oriented languages are not a good way to do 3-D rendering. If you want to write pixel shaders in JS you can totally do that but you will have to run them on the CPU; as it happens I wrote a program last week that works that way: http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/tram…

> you may find out that the real problem is that solid-state physics isn't object-oriented

I am saving this quote for future use. Thank you :)

Re: Mechanical Watch

#306

I was curious how he did those visualizations so I looked at the source code. Turns out he codes everything by hand in WebGL [1]. Absolutely impressive stuff. Source code is non-minified so you can have a look and understand everything as well. [1]: https://ciechanow.ski/js/watch.js

I like that; it's a lot of work but a lot of people seem to prefer to have to make libraries work together than to just do the work, and it's timeless since it doesn't depend on any future frameworks; any issues that might come up in the future with regards to browser incompatibility can be fixed relatively easily.

Would antifragile be an applicable word to use here?

Re: Mechanical Watch

#307

I was curious how he did those visualizations so I looked at the source code. Turns out he codes everything by hand in WebGL [1]. Absolutely impressive stuff. Source code is non-minified so you can have a look and understand everything as well. [1]: https://ciechanow.ski/js/watch.js

Fun fact, the time and date on the model is correct as well.

No post body was provided.

Re: Mechanical Watch

#308

I was curious how he did those visualizations so I looked at the source code. Turns out he codes everything by hand in WebGL [1]. Absolutely impressive stuff. Source code is non-minified so you can have a look and understand everything as well. [1]: https://ciechanow.ski/js/watch.js

He does it "the right way™". Use the platform. Don't use any framework or generic library. Go straight to the point and code what you need, when you need it. Don't minify or bundle anything, and let the people who are learning and courious a straightforward way to connect the dots, without forcing them into a github repository with 90% of the code unrelated to the thing and existing just to glue 1000 pieces written b…

> Don't minify or bundle anything

Yeah in this case it doesn't need to; there's no extraneous or unused code or documentation blocks, and gzip (and comparable) compression is good enough, minification doesn't actually reduce the downloaded code size by that much.

Re: Mechanical Watch

#309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

minified js is not greatly smaller than gzipped js, I think the whole minification thing is a swing and a miss and now we have to deal with source maps and shit, and build pipelines and etc $ ls -la -rw-r--r-- 1 jack 197609 330905 May 4 22:56 watch.js -rw-r--r-- 1 jack 197609 152172 May 4 22:55 watch.min.js $ gzip watch.js $ gzip watch.min.js $ ls -la -rw-r--r-- 1 jack 197609 43690 May 4 22:56 watch.js.gz -rw-r--r--…

True, but it also removes the comments and the whitespace, leading to slightly better performance and memory usage. There are also less bytes to gzip on the server side.

Slightly, but is it enough to warrant the extra steps?

I don't think the difference is significant enough in this case.

That said, I do think there should be an alternative to minification+gzipping, like e.g. a compiled version of JS that is more optimized than a browser's own JIT compiler can do. Mind you, that might up being a larger package than the JS source code.

Re: Mechanical Watch

#310
post #213

Wow very comprehensive & well done. If mechanical watches tickle your fancy, there is a ton of watch repair video on YT. I particularly enjoy wristwatch revival ( https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCD80T1s2Za4K682CQDGwEKQ ). A warning though, if you consider to get into that hobby. I tried, it's really hard, expensive (I spend close to €1k and that is with b-quality stuff. Good stuff is 5-10x more expensive.) and can b…

I was able to get into this with a $60 set of screwdrivers, a $20 crappy movement from eBay, and another $20 toolkit of random watch repair stuff that wasn't really necessary. And maybe like $20 of lube. I would never attempt to service something I wear/use, but for the $20 crap movement off eBay there's no harm no foul.

I probably already went overboard a bit when staring out. My cost where mostly in a stereo microscope and the consumables (mobius oils, cleaning liquids). Oh and maybe I didn't need a timegrapher before having a functional movement haha

Also, almost everything I had to import in to the EU. Importing chemicals is expensive for some reason I discovered. UPS charged me like 3 times the usual amount.

There is a lot of advice that says 'don't cheap out, just buy good stuff'; which is great if you are going to make this really your hobby for years to come. But I feel starting with some cheap tools on a junk movement is a fine start.

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