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For years the US Naval Observatory would generate a precise .gif of the master time clock. Alas it seems the service has been discontinued, unless someone here can find the new home for the .gif generator. This is the dead link:

http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/cgi-bin/nph-usnoclock.gif?zone=es...

The last message from Tycho about the gif clocks: https://web.archive.org/web/20191015032841/http://tycho.usno...

The Precise Time Department is here now:

https://www.cnmoc.usff.navy.mil/Our-Commands/United-States-N...

They now refer Time Displays to https://www.time.gov

I tracked down someone with knowledge of the old .gif generator, this is their reply:

"Mr. Paddock:

When we were directed to move our websites to a cloud-based system, we found that the animated GIFs and the SimpleTime Perl script were not compatible with the new server system."

Great post. I wish there was a site where I could consume endless posts like this:

A page or so of text, showing code, showing how to do something cool or useful using code.

This one is perfect, in terms of my interests.

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2018/02/this-svg-always-shows-today...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13823704

https://research.swtch.com/zip

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12262470

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12264461

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18342042

https://twitter.com/David3141593/status/1573218394358386688

https://twitter.com/David3141593/status/1425264439624978435

https://mobile.twitter.com/David3141593/status/1371974874856...

https://mobile.twitter.com/David3141593/status/1368957384471...

http://aem1k.com/world/

https://github.com/mame/quine-relay

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24824977

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4326164

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16317458

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16040723

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8602122

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10719317

Not exactly what you asked for, but, some similar fun stuff.

I'm starting to doubt your username with how quickly you came up with such a great list

Haha, I just browse the web a lot, have a decent memory, and have a bunch of practice with search engines :)

So does Googlebot :P

Thank you, these are great!

Love the concept of being able to find and read a bunch of these. Real quick put together a quick redirect URL that jumps to a random text-and-code-on-a-page thing https://textandcode.page (can add more if there's other recs!)

I've added a bunch more to a comment that's a sibling to yours, but you might want to open the links once to ensure they're appropriate for your redirector.

Awesome, will add them, thanks!

Too late to edit the above, but here's another! https://underjord.io/live-server-push-without-js.html

Edit: more!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9457187

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26273960

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16312317

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8602122

https://mobile.twitter.com/David3141593/status/1372281280772...

https://mobile.twitter.com/binitamshah/status/11047503254734...

http://blog.soulshake.net/2016/04/command-line-resume/

https://mobile.twitter.com/netspooky/status/1405860275392335...

https://mobile.twitter.com/fr_brennan/status/134023279228268...

https://rohitpaulk.com/articles/

https://mobile.twitter.com/angealbertini/status/844294290750...

https://dev.to/sebastianstamm/this-image-is-also-a-valid-jav...

https://mobile.twitter.com/angealbertini/status/126530622675...

https://hyperpolyglot.org/scripting

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10528899

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25625877

https://www.alchemistowl.org/pocorgtfo/pocorgtfo11.pdf

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29586549

http push, baby!

alternatively, trust the client timer, ship a full 86400 frame gif, and figure out a start-frame hack.

or just use javascript Date() object, and display it as text

Or just generate 86400 gifs, each 86400 frames long, and have the server deliver the correct one depending on the current time. But that wouldn't be nearly as cool as generating and delivering the gif in real time.

This is kind of what I was expecting. I tried saving the gif to see what happened, and it's empty! It's a pretty neat trick!

Despite the author's caveat, the gif works in Safari (16.1).

It doesn’t work in Safari for me (16.1)

Try again, I think there was an unrelated issue. It load for me on Safari now, but runs super slowly in the beginning, so not as a real time clock.

Safari truly becoming the new IE

Maybe in some ways. Back then devs seemed to care more about supporting IE a lot more than they do Safari now.

Yep, it loads and ticks a bit slowly.

We had a webcam streaming a model railroad you could drive with this technology, around 1995.

> streaming a model railroad you could drive

Reminds me of this tank simulator from the 70s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcQifPHcMLE

I saw that too! :-)

Interesting! It's so funny when he says that the computer was too old to maintain so they replaced it with raspberry pi - it's weird such big thing can be controlled by something so small

Is it the post where OP actually fixed a bug in a record time? I think it was on Reddit.

Author here. The bandwidth usage was high with many open connections, I fixed that quickly by using LZW encoding instead of sending uncompressed data. I think you are referring to this thread: https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/6t8gpq/timegif...

Exactly, 5years ago already ... anyway I remember you fixed it in like 2 hours, great job.

CSS & HTML No JS needs to be modified/forked to set current time: https://codepen.io/iliadraznin/pen/AjWWQr

You'd have to add JS to get the user's local time, or use a dynamic backend to get the server's time.

A while back I had the pleasure of working on a system that generated large-ish (up to ~800x600, but typically low fps) personalized gifs at the rate of hundreds or sometimes thousands per second. It was fun balancing the various constraints, like encoding/flushing raw frames ASAP to keep latency and memory usage down, but also trying to do as many transparency tricks and size optimizations as possible without being allowed a second pass. (no global color tables, etc)

> Compile with -threaded, otherwise GHC networking has problems with more than 1024 open connections.

(2017)

Some previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14996715

https://hookrace.net/time.gif returning 503 for me now

Author here, my bad. There was a DoS attack against this a while ago and I set too strict limits after that. Didn't expect it to hit Hacker News again. Should be fine now.

What makes someone attack this?

I'm running an online game on the side and am thus commonly the target of DoS attacks. I guess it's related to this.

You mentioned in your blog post that you know who the attacker is. Do you know their motivation?

Destroying the fun for others and wasting time I figure. I received no demands or anything like that.

Learned that my iPhone limits webpages from refreshing when left alone or when scrolling. I need to zoom to get a page refresh.

Time.gif (2017)