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Wobbly clock

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Re: Wobbly clock

#141

Post by yreg »

ok123456 wrote: post #132
jaywalk wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's so much more to a smart watch than a fully-customizable watch face. While I fully believe that Apple should open up to third-party faces, I am quite content with the customization options that they offer now.

There may be more, but it includes that functionality at the very least. That would be the absolute base line functionality of a watch that has a bit-mapped display.

I think they should give us the option to create watch faces, but don't care about it much. It's very far down my priority list of what I want from Apple Watch.

As for the reasons why they don't, my speculation is the following (I'm not defending them): They are worried about custom watch faces that might perform poorly or draw too much battery. Watch is a challenging platform to develop for as watchOS is very protective of its resources and won't hesitate to kill your app. But Apple probably doesn't want to kill the watch face and at the same time doesn't trust the developers to develop their watch faces to Apple's standard.

Re: Wobbly clock

#143

Post by noja »

agys wrote: post #39

Made me think about the Swiss Railways clock that has the second hand completing the circle in 58.5 seconds; all the clocks on the network then wait for the sync signal from the “master clock". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_railway_clock

Why 58.5 seconds?

Re: Wobbly clock

#144

Post by doublesocket »

noja wrote: post #143
agys wrote: post #39

Made me think about the Swiss Railways clock that has the second hand completing the circle in 58.5 seconds; all the clocks on the network then wait for the sync signal from the “master clock". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_railway_clock

Why 58.5 seconds?

Because then any slow clocks have 1.5 seconds to receive additional pulses from the master clock to bring them into sync.

Re: Wobbly clock

#145

Post by qrohlf »

ColinWright wrote: post #82
ColinEberhardt wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just had to check whether you were 'the' Colin Wright, and looking at your profile I think you are. Small world! I am a fellow juggler, and used to run the Internet Juggling Database. We also very briefly bumped into each other in a corridor at Leeds Uni Physics department about 25 years ago ;-)

It's me ... hi! You don't have contact details in your profile, but feel free to email me. I travel a lot and can put you in my geographical address book so that if I come within reach we can get a coffee. Cheers!

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.

Re: Wobbly clock

#146

Post by lxgr »

caf wrote: post #140
jimmydddd wrote: post #115

Earlier 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. :…

It'd be a fun project to make a dial wall clock that uses GPS time.

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 three orders of magnitude higher.

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DCF77

Re: Wobbly clock

#147

Post by lxgr »

ipqk wrote: post #119
jimmydddd wrote: post #115

Earlier 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.

That's one good thing about daylight savings time, I suppose: It's a good opportunity to correct any non-synchronized clocks.

Re: Wobbly clock

#148

Post by spc476 »

NiceWayToDoIT wrote: post #86

How do you say 5:46 -> "Five and and bit tense 45" 5:48 -> "Five and 45 tense" 5:49 -> "Five and very tense 45" or "Five and loose 50?" ? But I like it :D

> 5:49 -> "Five and very tense 45" or "Five and loose 50?"

Four past a quarter to six. As I'm posting this, it is 12 past half til 6 (Eastern).

Re: Wobbly clock

#149

Post by gpt5 »

CharlesW wrote: post #91
jedberg wrote: post #83

This 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…

> Anyone know if I can get this as an Apple Watch face? Currently, 3rd parties can't create custom Apple Watch faces.

My guess is that this is likely because of the availability of an always on display. Apple has likely programmed each of the watch faces into the microcontroller that manages that low power mode. The other option would be to wake up the main cpu every time you need to refresh the 3rd party watch face, but that would have a power cost.

Re: Wobbly clock

#150

Post by kortilla »

lxgr wrote: post #146
caf wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'd be a fun project to make a dial wall clock that uses GPS time.

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.

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