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Wobbly clock

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201–209 of 209 posts

Re: Wobbly clock

#201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What's the point of a smart watch if you can't change the dial and face however you want? It's like when carriers wouldn't let you load your own ring tones on to your phone, because they didn't want to cannibalize their own ring tone sales.

> What's the point of

The point of a smart phone is not ringtones. The point of a smart phone is not even being a phone anymore. It's everything else you do with it.

The point of a smart watch is not cool watch faces.

You want skins/customization, which is fair. But you have to admit it's not core functionality.

Re: Wobbly clock

#202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well not just that. In England at least we generally say "20 to 4", "10 to 4", etc . if we're using a 12-hour clock. If I'm using 24hour we generally just say 1545, etc.

In German and Dutch you also say "half four" which means "half to four" (e.g.: half past three).

Haha! In New Zealand, "half four" would be half past four: 4:30

Re: Wobbly clock

#204
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing that I wonder about (with nails) would be "what would happen if the the flexihand was able to wiggle past the peg when it moved from one peg to the next?" In that case, I believe, it would just be a regular clock style hand. It's possible that I've got the wrong mental model for how that would work.

I think you'd put the nails at N+1 position, not N. (e.g. for the minute mark, you't put the nail at 6, 11, 16, etc. not 5, 10, 15). Then, the hand would press against the nail and progressively bend until it slipped past the nail entirely and jumped to the next 5 spot (and not yet be touching the next nail).

In exploring an idea on this a bit more... I found https://ferrolic.com which... is interesting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PFgVtzsXHM is another video on the idea.

Re: Wobbly clock

#205
post #196
post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In western Germany we say "quarter to four" and in eastern Germany we say "three quarters (of) four".

"three quarter four" is also common in austria, but worse (for visitors) is "quarter four" which is a quarter past three.

Re: Wobbly clock

#206

I love it! And I think that the idea of random intervals averaging to correct values mentioned below would make it beautifully irritating. Not a clock, but I was messing with soft body physics and ended up with this thing this weekend: https://mrrr.vercel.app [1] Consider a v2 where the hands are physically simulated al dente spaghetti. [1] (I ended up making a classic frame-by-frame animation though: http://mrr.sonn…

Oh my god!! I forgot I had my laptop still connected to a bluetooth speaker in a different room and totally freaked out when those lips started making faint noises through a door!

Oh my god, that's hilarious but I'm so sorry for scaring you! (OK a creepier part of me is satisfied that I went full poltergeist in someone's house, but I promise to do these sorts of things sparingly.)

Re: Wobbly clock

#207
post #146

Earlier 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 think you can still buy NTP reference devices for your network that use GPS. So, the lobby of the hotel doesn't have to be within view of the sky, as long as their reference device is.

Meinberg is just one of several companies I've seen that sell clocks that are NTP clients.

It makes sense that a company might make those, if they also make the NTP servers that those clients might be connected to.

Good stuff. I'm planning on buying some for the house.

Re: Wobbly clock

#208
post #97
post #81

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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…

Our elementary school clocks (70s) made a variety of nearly imperceptile sounds as they got near the top of the hour, or turned it over. We were like dogs when they hear the about-to-eat sounds start.

Pavlov was sitting in a bar when the last order bell rang. "Oh shoot! I need to feed the dogs" he thought.

Re: Wobbly clock

#209
post #145

Earlier 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…

I also wrote my own system for pretty much this exact purpose, although instead of emailing me reminders, it just lets me record notes on a map and then I skim that map whenever I am planning a trip to a given country or region.

It's online (but registration is invite only, let me know if you want to play with it) over at https://scoutmaps.io/ – at one point I was going to attempt to commercialize it, but eventually decided I liked it better as hobby software so that I can write features that better serve my current userbase of one :)

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