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Comment by sam_goody | Hacker News Reader

I use https://time.is (Choose any location.)

Does other conversions and stuff, but much more elegant and simpler than your link.

Also good for setting your clock

Yep I use this for setting my mechanical watch every morning, great website apart from the clock text is relative to window width, so I can't zoom out if the window is too short, I literally have to resize the window width to see the time.

That's an interesting morning routine. Why do you do so (do you work in 'measurement' industry?)?

Mechanical clocks (like all clocks . . .) drift.

For two centuries mechanical clocks and watches have been regularly wound and reset.

Ports traditionally had a noon day canon and ball drop down a pole (like a flag pole) for ships in the harbour to set their onboard clocks to (for navigational use in determining Longitude).

Watches frequently have bimetallic strips (two sided) with metals that each expand with a differing coefficient to counter effect for rate of 'tick' with respect to tempreture.

Ships at sea required triplets of clocks with mechanisms that countered for pitch and roll accumulation.

You might enjoy:

https://ciechanow.ski/mechanical-watch/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longitude_(book)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horology

I think for me it's just part of the fun of owning a mechanical watch. Yesterday I got to increment the date from 31 to 1! But also it's useful having accurate time on my wrist and its drifts a few seconds every day (like any mechanical watch).

time.is is clearly simpler in display on the splash page.

timeanddate.com has a lot of depth to it, it's been about for many years and has a back catalog of odd edge cases and pages of good technical explaination.

Its appearence can be customised.

What did catch my eye was I believe time.is may have read my timeanddate.com config cookies and displayed times for my custom locations ...

Which is interesting (and I'll have to circle back and check).

The default alternatives are LA, New York, London, Paris, Kyiv, Beijing, and Tokyo.

Cheers for that, your comment reminded me to check.

They're regional defaults - I'm getting Adelaide and Sydney thrown in as I'm in Australia .. and a few Asian cities also, along with London etc.

It's close but not quite my Timeanddate customs - I specifically use Toronto for the TSX time.

I guess they're not looking for competitors cookies after all :).

It’s also not possible for them to read the cookies of other domains without those domains setting cookie access control that explicitly allows it.

That's something I 'knew' in theory .. but as I'm back end numerical geophysics coder that avoids web UI as much as possible I frequently lag on the latest sneaky end runs in practice.

Nice to know that this is still the case - but always worth checking.

Yeah, the security of the web depends on it so it’s unlikely to ever change.

Your session tokens that give you access to a website after you’ve logged in are stored in those cookies. If another site could read them, they could use them to access your email, etc.

Why no UTC? I guess London may be the same, though I’m unsure about DST?

The launch wasn’t listed in UTC but in its local timezone? That is odd.

There's also https://www.whattimeisitrightnow.com/ if you like a longer and harder to remember URL.

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