stuck around for 2 minutes to see the minute hand wobble... Thought it would be a little bit bigger than that.
Something wrong, yank?
Wobbly clock
161–170 of 209 posts
Re: Wobbly clock
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
Off-topic, but what do you use for your "geographical address book"? I would love to have something that showed all my contacts on a map, but haven't run into any software that does this ever.
It will come as a surprise to no one who knows me ... I wrote my own. More, I created a system wherein people can register, and then whenever someone is travelling they can tell the system and it automatically emails everyone they know who is close to the destination. I'm the only one who uses it, although there are a few hundred people on it, so I basically just use it as my geographical address book. I also put lan…
That is so amazing! I also attempted creating such a concept but never got anyone of my friends to use it... I ended up heavily using (and abusing) the Google maps share your location feature and I was so excited to see they are adding features related to notifications when people get close - only noticed it a few months ago. Telegram had also released similar features but only when you share your location live witch you can only do for a limited amount of time. Nevertheless interesting to see these kind of features are slowly getting implemented even if easy too late and not close to how I would like and imagine they could be... I also have my live location broadcasted here: https://chagai.website/location.html when it's not broken
Re: Wobbly clock
#163At first, I thought it meant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wobbly.
Alas, there's no sabo-tabby.
Re: Wobbly clock
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for that. We had those as well. But third-grade me never really thought about the purpose. So it's fun to think about it now. In contrast, I'll sometimes now walk into a lobby or reception area of a business where they will have like five different analog clocks on the wall representing NY, Paris, London, etc, (trying to look "international" I guess) and the minute hands are out of sync. Kind of sad in 2023. :…
My gym has about 15 different clocks on the walls, and they all tell a different time, some of them egregiously so. Every few months (often after I mention it), someone will go around and fix the worst ones.
Reminds me of the old saying, "A person who has a watch always knows what time it is. A person who has two watches is never quite sure."
Re: Wobbly clock
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
GPS would be tricky to receive in a typical hotel or office lobby (i.e. far away from any windows at the ground floor, possibly in an urban canyon). In Germany (and in neighboring countries), radio-controlled clocks are quite common for this purpose, listening to DCF77 near Frankfurt [1]. Long wave seems to work a bit better than the L-band for indoor propagation, and it probably also helps that the transmit power is…
WWVB is running at 60kHz, and powers at least a few of the small desk clocks in my home :) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WWVB
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Re: Wobbly clock
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
GPS would be tricky to receive in a typical hotel or office lobby (i.e. far away from any windows at the ground floor, possibly in an urban canyon). In Germany (and in neighboring countries), radio-controlled clocks are quite common for this purpose, listening to DCF77 near Frankfurt [1]. Long wave seems to work a bit better than the L-band for indoor propagation, and it probably also helps that the transmit power is…
> I'm not sure if the US has an analogous service – there's WWV and WWVH, but they are shortwave transmitters, and I don't know if wall clock or even wristwatch size receivers are possible for that. It does. Small WWVB clocks that self set are quite common.
Yes, works for small clocks and watches, but they have mostly moved to gps these days, at least for auto sync watches.
Re: Wobbly clock
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honestly, I have a contradicting personal experience. For me, it takes me an order of magnitude longer to process an analog watchface into a numerical reading, than just glance over a digital watchface directly (over a second versus a few hundred milliseconds). For the progress bars (or, say, tank level gauges) it totally makes sense - I like them the same way you've presented, it's easier to ingest [####__] (or, bet…
> , I suspect that most people read the time then do the arithmetic rather than imagining a pie chart. depends how the person was trained, my friend.
Of course, yes. And I merely "suspect" rather than have some concrete statistics to back this up.
I have this suspicion based on a few anecdotal data points plus the fact that digital watchfaces are becoming more and more common (phones and computers specifically), and people love to do things in an uniform manner.
But I'm very biased here (and thus could be wrong), because I strongly dislike classic analog watchfaces. I'm certainly for novel approaches - I do like Apple Watch's "Solar" watchface (the digital version), as it has a digital reading centered in essentially a gauge that shows the Sun's motion, allowing to see the time relative to the daylight. Similarly, I enjoy calendar and weather widgets that show the day as a timeline, so I can see how events or weather conditions approach. But I'm always asking myself "what time is it now?" first (and "ok, how long until...?" only comes after, even if it was the original intent) - it was my mental model for as long as I remember myself - so I strongly prefer digital 24-hour displays.
Re: Wobbly clock
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
My gym has about 15 different clocks on the walls, and they all tell a different time, some of them egregiously so. Every few months (often after I mention it), someone will go around and fix the worst ones.
Reminds me of the old saying, "A person who has a watch always knows what time it is. A person who has two watches is never quite sure."
And this is why I don’t like digital Vernier callipers. :P
Re: Wobbly clock
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
The clocks in my elementary, middle, and high schools would do something similar. Not every minute, but every hour. At the top of the hour, when there was 15 seconds left, the second hand would make 3 second jumps until it hit the top, and then hold until the next hour started. I always thought that was a brilliant way to keep mechanical clocks in sync. And the system had been there since the 1970s, so it was well be…
How did they know when the next hour started without digital communication?
In the Standard Electric Time Company slave clocks that I've got, the master sends about a 12ms pulse once a minute, which pulls in a solenoid and allows a lever to ratchet one tooth on the minute wheel and advance the movement. Then once every twelve hours, the master sends a longer pulse, which pulls in a stronger second solenoid that allows the wheel to turn freely. There's a weight on the hour wheel which will pull the wheel around until the weight is on the bottom because of gravity, which corresponds with 12 o'clock. So no matter where the clock is, it will fall back to twelve with the longer pulse, and then begin the ratcheting again with the once a minute shorter pulses.
(Sorry for the deprecated master/slave terminology, it's unfortunately what they used at the time)
Re: Wobbly clock
#170This clock is great for teaching kids how to tell time! When learning to read a "circle clock", they have a heck of a time understanding what it means when the hour hand is almost but not quite pointing at a number. So when it's 3:45 they will say 4:45 because they know the big hand on 9 means "45" but they get confused because the little hand is almost pointing at 4. This clock solves that problem. Anyone know if I…
> This clock solves that problem. In English! In Dutch this would actually create a problem, as when it is 3:45 we say it is "15 before 4". I noticed that I actually struggled to interpret the wobbly clock when it was close to changing the hour.
We do this on English too. 3:45 is "a quarter to four."
I always think that the prevelance of saying "three forty-five" is a result of digital watches.