Forebruary | Hacker News Reader

Forebruary

ilyabirman.net

95 pointscolinprince37 comments

> For the United States, where week starts on Sunday (but it is anyway considered a part of weekend)

My fiancée likens the weekdays to books, and the weekends to bookends. Books, bracketed by bookends, have two ends, one at either side.

If I ask you to "circle the ends of this line segment", you will circle two spots.

Of course, the problem with time is that it has a beginning. But the above is her logic for it.

Does she also say things like “Did you do anything fun over the weekends?”

More likely, it goes back to the origins of our 7-day week. The ancient Romans had an 8-day week. Our 7-day week comes from the Jewish calendar, where supposedly the world was created on a Sunday, and the final day of the week is the Jewish Shabbat on Saturday. (Though, we didn't keep the Jewish calendar's notion that days start at sunset.)

I suspect that if you go back far enough, most of Europe considered the week to begin on Sunday, but I have no idea how far you'd have to go back.

> Books, bracketed by bookends

Ah, yes, hence why we refer to them as the bookend.

Perhaps there's some difference between bookshelves and weeks, such that the weekend both serves as bookends to the week proper, and is yet contiguous?

"Forebruary is a wall calendar that you do not need to replace every year" — Hmm. When I had a wall calendar, I used it to write down upcoming events or tasks. So I needed to buy one calendar for each year I planned to do anything: if it's August 2025 and I'm already planning as far out as March 2026, then I need wall calendars for both 2025 and 2026, in order to have places to write what I'm doing. That is, I'd need to buy one calendar for each distinct year in which I had plans.

This minimalist calendar has space for only a single month. So in the August–March scenario, I'd need to buy eight separate calendars for August 2025, September, October, November, December, January 2026, February, and March, in order to have places to write down what I'm doing in those months. That is, I'd need to buy one calendar for each distinct month in which I have plans at a time. (Presumably I could use dry-erase markers and reuse a month's calendar as soon as it was in the past.)

The above is the geeky/theoretical interpretation. In practice, I don't think people would buy multiple of these; I think this just doesn't function as a calendar at all.

It could be useful to display in a bank, where customers need to know today's date and nothing else... except that the calendar offers no way to mark today's date! Not even a little magnetic ring or anything. A simple flip calendar (as banks already use) is superior.

It could be useful to display in a place of business, like a 19th-century clerk's office, where no employee would want to mark events on the communal calendar but it would still be useful to see at a glance "Next Monday, that's the 17th..." Unfortunately, suppose today is the 29th. Then next Monday is the... uh... We have two problems: not only can we not see dates in the next month, but the calendar doesn't even give us a hint about the number of days in this month! There's already a small genre of office comedy about things happening on "April 31st" or "September 31st"[1]; this calendar would exacerbate that problem to the point of being counterproductive to display at all.

This calendar design isn't even a "solution in search of a problem" — it's merely several additional problems with no familial resemblance at all to a solution.

[1] - Or the inversion on "Parks & Rec" where the intern mistakenly believes that there is no "March 31st". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/94_Meetings

Maybe I'm misunderstanding the value here, but this doesn't handle any months that have less than 31 days (including February ironically, which seems to be the source of its name).

Additionally how does the user align the frame year by year? Look up the month on a normal calendar first?

> Additionally how does the user align the frame year by year? Look up the month on a normal calendar first?

In practice, probably yes.

In theory, when it's December 31, you can relatively easily figure out what day of the week tomorrow is going to be.

Ah yes that makes sense, thank you.

On the last day of the month, you would align the 1st to the next day of the week.

I guess you should delete the last days of each month according to its length, Or - have 4 "calendars" one for each possible month length: 28, 29, 30, 31

Yeah, you just have to know when to ignore the 31 (and as you say, also the 29 and 30 in some cases).

Every month of this sliding calendar has 31 days.

That's the first thing I thought. Is that part of the minimalism? An oversight? As a used an April with 31 days makes me question the basic competency of the site, I'd relate it to poor copy. However, I do adore the stripped back aesthetic, and I hope this demo can inspire some UX evolution for calendars.

You're deducting points because of his excellent consistency?

"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds" -- Emerson

Hobgoblin was my favorite superhero in the DC universe.

The little timeline comparing it to the Shostakovich's 10th Symphony, Yury Gagarin being the first man in space, and the presentation of the IPhone was a fun touch lol

Yes, Ilya loves to brag about his modesty.

this is neat for minimalists

for some additional help ... marking days of the week (M T W T F S S) along the top.. at least in relief might be a functional addition.

optionally a month name slider could be added at the top - obviously it won't look as "cool"

finally a smaller slider tab might be added to the frame, in order to hide the numbers 29/30/31 as needed. that tab could either be blank or have digits 1/2/3 printed on it (for next month)

I see a single web page that refuses to fit on my screen and has zero links or interactivity.

Click on the dates. On my iPhone it moves the frame to show the correct month. Landscape looks better than portrait . I gather it’s a design exercise not a product.

And also with some mega tags that prevent me from pinch zooming.

In terms of wanting a wall calendar and not want to buy new ones every year, I like Matt Parkers idea of reusing vintage calendars, as there are only 14 different calendars.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrgN-tvg53I

Nice, as long as it's printed on whiteboard material you can scribble out the surplus days if there are any, write on the month, and annotate with birthdays, etc at the start of each month! Where do I buy?

If one were to make this physically, it could have a narrower width by having the days of month on paper, rolled up like scrolls on either side, with knobs on each to adjust. Motorize those, maybe.

these have been around for a long time. e.g. https://www.ebay.com/itm/276030548980, https://www.ebay.com/itm/275256905873

People who buy physical calendars: why?

I think there's a huge market for things in plain sight.

That said, with new displays you can hang on a wall, there might be a replacement.

Related, I wonder why we can't store more of our stuff in shallow drawers where everything is visible (think rolling tool chest drawers where you can open one and see all your wrenches at once)

Not buy, but I print out a 2-month "calendar" (just the current + next month) every month. I love scribbling on it, drawing arrows, x-ing stuff out, colors, whatever. I do 2 months since near the end of the month, stuff will bleed into the upcoming month. On the 1st, I thoroughly enjoy printing out a clean version for the next 2 months and copying the rollover items. It is a satisfying ritual.

A calendar with good art or photography can be worth it as a wall decoration alone. I find them especially nice for the kitchen because it isn't the end of the world if a $20 calendar gets wet or dirty.

I haven't bought one, but they're handy to write future events on for reference, and they often have a pleasant picture to look at for every month.

In my house, we ended up with a makeshift calendar on a whiteboard with the basic events. Trash + X day (greenwaste and recyling alternate), school days, practice days, vacations and visitors, volunteering. Everyone can glance at it and know what's going on.

Computerized calendars are nice too, but don't live in a certain place to be looked at in passing.

I have 4 kids. Having a centrally visible (kitchen wall), huge (A3 or bigger) zero power consumption display of the family calendar is absolutely fucking essential to my and my spouse's scheduling needs, by which I actually mean our sanity.

We just hung up a large dry-erase one in the hallway. My wife has wanted one for awhile, and it's an excellent way to make sure that our child can add things to the calendar that are important to her, that she or we will otherwise forget about.

(For example, today's busy schedule includes climbing a tree with a neighbor friend at 11am, which is somewhat frivolous, but there have been things she's been upset about missing because she either didn't mention it to us, or we forgot to jot down in our calendars.)

Got that too! Though we use it for actually whiteboarding math homework and tried a chore kanban-ish board (which even sort of worked for a couple weeks).

The kitchen calendar is approved for writes by the kids, too.

Sometimes they have nice designs or pretty pictures.

Circling an important date takes very little effort.

No opportunity for distractions.

That whole "flip through the months to think through future schedules" is actually a pretty good UX.

(2013)

cool idea, I hate free floating numbers though

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