Drat and double drat. Today is 05-06-07. I wanted to get a picture of 02:03:04. Even though none of my clocks display a year, I could at least get the day and the seconds. I didn't stay up for the one this morning, so I had to get a picture in the afternoon if I was going to get it at all. I had the camera lined up, I'd taken some practice ( Read more... )

You may already know that I enjoy clocks which are a bit tricky to read. My private collection includes a linear clock, a binary clock, several count-the-dots clocks, and even a glowing pyramid clock. Now I can finally say I've made a hard-to-read clock. Feast your eyes on the grandest display of my geekdom: the Prime Factorization Clock! It ( Read more... )

As somebody with a great interest in timepieces, I was naturally curious to see which of my clocks might get the time right today, the first day of the new, early Daylight Saving Time. I've eliminated from the list anything that I didn't think stood a chance because it must normally be set manually ( Read more... )

I spent some time in co-worker Robyn's office today hunting down a mistake I made six months ago that had only reared its ugly head last week. Her computer's clock was off by a few hours. Initially, I suspected that her time zone was set incorrectly, but we couldn't find a setting to fix that. We ran ntpdate to sync the clock with a time server ( Read more... )

As the kind of guy who likes radio-controlled clocks, the leap second promised some excitement. WWVB broadcasts a warning bit for the leap second. Since a full WWVB time signal takes sixty seconds to broadcast, that empty second presents a curiosity. The diagram linked above doesn't explain it.

jwz posted the leap second advisory that got me ( Read more... )

So there's this guy in Switzerland, Marcel Betrisey. He is neck and neck and neck with George Rhoads and Barry Gamble for appealing to my love of interesting clocks and my love of rolling-ball sculpture. Betrisey's clocks make ingenious use of rolling balls to do things like power pendulums. Betrisey also measures the accuracy of his clocks, ( Read more... )