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25-Hour Digital Myst Clock/Chronometer

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Re: 25-Hour Digital Myst Clock/Chronometer

#11

Post by jf »

Waterluvian wrote: post #8

That is absolutely beautiful and one of the kinds of things I'd love to have for my Shelf of Interesting Items. I have two older brothers so growing up I was exposed to a ton of stuff way outside my age range (but I credit a lot of my success to this). I played countless hours of Riven when I was 9 or 10. I really didn't get far at all. But I am still wildly proud of figuring out their numerical system using the fish…

What do you have on your Shelf Of Interesting items? I’m slowly building up mine, with an eye to “things that will spark creative thoughts”

Re: 25-Hour Digital Myst Clock/Chronometer

#13

Post by Uehreka »

djsumdog wrote: post #10
Uehreka wrote: post #2

RIVEN SPOILERS I actually didn't play Riven until about 5 years ago, when it came out on iOS (I played Myst on CD as a kid). Learning the game's number system was a fascinating exercise that I don't think I've ever had in any other game. Basically, in your explorations you eventually happen upon a small empty one-room building, which (if you look at the arrangement of desks) you can deduce is some sort of schoolhouse…

Yea. I liked Myst, but Riven is where I gave up on the series. I did complete it, but it was a long time ago and I remember giving up on puzzles and looking up a lot of hints. Also the font for the books in Riven were terrible. I could read all the Myst books. They were relatively short and it was a neat device to learn the story. In Riven, they were painful to read and there were so many books everywhere. I even bou…

Riven definitely has some next-to-impossible bits. Stuff that's just not fun where what you need to do is find the right pixel to click on. I definitely used hints a few times while playing, and my general attitude was: This game is fun when it's having me explore or solve puzzles, so I won't cheat on those, but if I feel really confident that I've looked everywhere and the game is acting like a brick wall, I'll take a hint.

Re: 25-Hour Digital Myst Clock/Chronometer

#15

Post by mjevans »

mrweasel wrote: post #5

Sort of side note, but some IT systems do in fact need to deal with 25 hour days, due to daylight savings time. If your system deals with schedueling electricity production, you may need to accept that one day a year may only have 23 hours while another have 25.

It's usually easy to relegate yourself to the issue of various periodic measures being some crazy human duration long and just writing the software to use a common date/time library and live with it.

Harder are the moments when you actually care if one time has longer seconds than another due to leap seconds or smearing over the day to spread out a leap second.

It's really just easiest if you take nothing for granted, and even assume that clock-cycles aren't of a fixed duration but of a given quanta of work.

Re: 25-Hour Digital Myst Clock/Chronometer

#16

Post by SAI_Peregrinus »

mjevans wrote: post #15
mrweasel wrote: post #5

Sort of side note, but some IT systems do in fact need to deal with 25 hour days, due to daylight savings time. If your system deals with schedueling electricity production, you may need to accept that one day a year may only have 23 hours while another have 25.

It's usually easy to relegate yourself to the issue of various periodic measures being some crazy human duration long and just writing the software to use a common date/time library and live with it. Harder are the moments when you actually care if one time has longer seconds than another due to leap seconds or smearing over the day to spread out a leap second. It's really just easiest if you take nothing for granted…

> It's really just easiest if you take nothing for granted, and even assume that clock-cycles aren't of a fixed duration but of a given quanta of work.

Thanks to spread-spectrum clocking, this really ought to be the default assumption for most computers. It's a small variance, but it's there.

Re: 25-Hour Digital Myst Clock/Chronometer

#17

Post by Waterluvian »

jf wrote: post #11
Waterluvian wrote: post #8

That is absolutely beautiful and one of the kinds of things I'd love to have for my Shelf of Interesting Items. I have two older brothers so growing up I was exposed to a ton of stuff way outside my age range (but I credit a lot of my success to this). I played countless hours of Riven when I was 9 or 10. I really didn't get far at all. But I am still wildly proud of figuring out their numerical system using the fish…

What do you have on your Shelf Of Interesting items? I’m slowly building up mine, with an eye to “things that will spark creative thoughts”

Every item has a story attached. Like a badge from when I spent two weeks at a certain factory in Fremont or a calculator from the 1970s when my parents met in math class in university.

Dozens more.

Re: 25-Hour Digital Myst Clock/Chronometer

#18

Post by StillBored »

djsumdog wrote: post #10
Uehreka wrote: post #2

RIVEN SPOILERS I actually didn't play Riven until about 5 years ago, when it came out on iOS (I played Myst on CD as a kid). Learning the game's number system was a fascinating exercise that I don't think I've ever had in any other game. Basically, in your explorations you eventually happen upon a small empty one-room building, which (if you look at the arrangement of desks) you can deduce is some sort of schoolhouse…

Yea. I liked Myst, but Riven is where I gave up on the series. I did complete it, but it was a long time ago and I remember giving up on puzzles and looking up a lot of hints. Also the font for the books in Riven were terrible. I could read all the Myst books. They were relatively short and it was a neat device to learn the story. In Riven, they were painful to read and there were so many books everywhere. I even bou…

Well by the time of riven you could look up the puzzle solutions on the internet, which is what I did when I got stuck one of the problem that turned out to be audio (and silly me I though they were just playing sound effects).

Anyway, I really view those games as the last of the nearly impossible games that were everywhere in the 1980s. And not just adventure games, a lot of arcade games were the same way, I played conan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan:_Hall_of_Volta for probably 4 months straight before I beat its 7 (?) lousy screens. 99% of the difficulty was basically being able to play it perfectly for the ~15 mins it takes to win. If you added a save game feature it would have probably only taken a couple hours.

If you watch the playthroughs on youtube, the difficulty is completely not evident. Another one like that was Dragons Liar.

On the plus side, the incredible rush one got when figuring out a puzzle after spending days on it is maybe part of the reason a lot of modern games simply aren't fun.

Re: 25-Hour Digital Myst Clock/Chronometer

#19

Post by jedberg »

Sort of related question. I have an old clock with a 3 inch clock face that I want to change to be digital.

Does anyone know where to get a 3 inch round led/lcd display (ideally that can be attached to a Raspberry Pi)? I've looked online and they are either crazy expensive, a round display on a square back, or I have to buy 1000 of them.

I assume I'm just not googling right.

Re: 25-Hour Digital Myst Clock/Chronometer

#20

Post by jedberg »

mrweasel wrote: post #5

Sort of side note, but some IT systems do in fact need to deal with 25 hour days, due to daylight savings time. If your system deals with schedueling electricity production, you may need to accept that one day a year may only have 23 hours while another have 25.

I always solved this by setting my systems to a time zone without DST. Since I am in California, I always use Arizona time. 9 months of the year it's the same as mine and the other 3 I can easily subtract 1.
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