I Made a Rubbish Clock | Hacker News Reader

I Made a Rubbish Clock

blog.jgc.org

124 pointsjgrahamc40 comments

I had a neighbor with Alzheimers who was often confused about whether it was morning or evening (she only had analog, 12-hour clocks). She seemed to have two days per day, and I'd often hear her 6am alarm go off at 6pm.

I made a simple web app for her that showed the time along with the bold text MORNING, AFTERNOON, EVENING etc. I set this up on her tablet by the wall, but every time I visited it had been switched off (all the way), and she had no memory of it being set up. (Presumably her bedtime routine involved "turning off the computer"...)

So I just bought her an analog Alzheimer's clock (a 24 hour clock with some colors and pictures to indicate the time of day -- quite similar to OP's design actually). She took readily to that one.

A debugger I used to use had a `phase of the moon` command, presumably so you could track if your difficult-to-repro bug had any correlation.

Should I ever be tempted to make an analogue equivalent, it was worth learning that https://www.youngtownco.com/en/product-655753/Moon-Phase-Clo... is a thing.

> A debugger I used to use had a `phase of the moon` command

Which debugger would that be, or am I not getting the joke?

`Phase of the moon` has an entry in the Jargon File, meaning "reliability seems to be dependent on conditions nobody has been able to determine."

It is a reference to a real bug from long ago.

I would not be surprised if this was included as an Easter egg in a debugger, as a reference to this legend.

http://catb.org/jargon/html/P/phase-of-the-moon.html

The MULTI debugger includes an optional phase-of-the-moon display, in the dead space in the lower right between the horizontal and vertical scrollbars in windows that have both :)

"The code worked differently when the moon was full" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39452193

"You are lucky, full moon tonight" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40472226

This is cool

Semi related- did I read this righr that Portugal has a bin collection every day bar Sunday? (that sounds like a lot! I'm from the UK and where I live there's one a week)

I think daily bin collection was normal in London until the mid 1990s or so. Also post was delivered twice a day and picked up from post boxes at least three times a day!

> Also post was delivered twice a day

And for something like 150 years. If you read say Jane Austin you find that they send letters in the morning and receive answers later that day.

There's also daily bin collection in Spain https://www.expatica.com/es/living/household/recycling-in-sp...

The last time I was there this surprised me, until I realized you really don't want your bins hanging out in that heat for more than a day. Sometimes it gets pretty bad even during the same day.

The iberians probably have cheap enough labour that they needn't bother, but a high-capital low-labour sol'n is to store rubbish deep enough* that even summer daytime temperatures don't hit their surface peaks: eg https://www.molok.com/benefits-and-principles/

* Fourier apparently worked this problem in relation to wine storage; see also https://topex.ucsd.edu/geodynamics/HW3_2010_presentations/C_...

It depends where you live, but in general, yes, bin collection happens every night except Sunday night. Here's the information for Lisbon: https://informacoeseservicos.lisboa.pt/servicos/dias-do-lixo

It really heavily depends where you live, in my hometown for example it's every single day at most, but it can be less depending on their assessed need. In my childhood street it's every day. On the other hand you don't have a personal or building bin, you only have street bins that everyone takes their trash to. https://fagar.pt/residuos

I just love how the days of the week are in english, and the rubbish separation labels are in portuguese.

Inside my head days are in English (or French), but what's written on the actual bin is Portuguese.

> where I live there's one a week

You're lucky you have this! So many councils have moved to every-three-weeks for general refuse, now. Council tax hasn't gone down to compensate, mind you. Not even the recycling is weekly.

Social care is always going to crowd out other spending for councils. I do wonder if that should be separated out to another body.

I'm not sure what the bin collection schedule in Vienna is but what's really nice here is that I just don't have to think about it. There is a garbage room in our building that the recycling agency has a key to and they get the bins themselves. I would guess they come twice a week to our building but the garbage truck is in the street probably every day. Big difference to my experience in London.

Similar here in Helsinki, there are a bunch of bins inside a communically accessible room - paper, glass, metal, mixed, plastic, and biological rubbish.

There's some fancy schedule for when the various bins are emptied, but not something I think about. It seems to work out okay.

Compared to Edinburgh where initially it was weekly, then fortnightly, and now collections occur every three weeks from what I remember. Recycling wasn't even an option unless you counted the bottle-banks at the local Tesco.

Taiwan does this, too.

I think NYC should consider daily collection. They have a huge curbside trash problem, and I suspect that there is so much trash accumulation by the time the truck comes by that a lot of labor is used putting the bags in the truck. Collecting 7x as often seems like it would not require anywhere near 7x the cost or labor, and the city would be a lot more pleasant with more frequent collection.

It depends where you are, in my city it's 5x/week, but twice per day. They don't pick up bins though, you have to go down and throw your bags into the truck.

My bin schedule is slightly complicated by it cycling between different recycling bins every 3 weeks. I think I'd need a bigger clock.

Currently I have 3 recurring events in my calendar that remind me the night before.

You could possibly fix this mechanically using three 7-day clocks (and wheels) and a mechanism that switches which one is being powered whenever a wheel reaches a certain point. But at that point I might be more tempted to reach for a microcontroller of some description!

You can also just attach a 3:1 gear.

I live right at a street corner, so even if I were to forget that tomorrow is bin-day, I can hear neighbours rolling theirs out in any case, and the lid colour tells me which bin it is. I rarely forget though; I just put up the paper year calendar for bin days we get end of December near the door.

Interesting - I’d have thought that most of the world would’ve moved to digital by now.

Here in Germany, you can get the whole year as .ics to import into your calendar, works for most cities… usually, there are different schedules per street/neighborhood, so that’s really convenient!

That’s true for a lot of cities. I have this in Cupertino, and used to have it in Mountain View.

Most people just don’t seem to check their website.

The dates are available digitally too of course, but that's just not as convenient as having them all on a calendar by the backdoor.

My council do have it online as well but, unfortunately, but in an .ics/ical format.

I really enjoy seeing learning little maker projects like this on HN. The inside scoop on SVG path is a bonus, and it's going into my toolkit for a future day.

I found this part funny:

> Also, I really didn't want yet another thing with [...] code to debug (there comes a time in every programmer's life when they can't face debugging yet another thing that should be simple and just work)

... when two paragraphs later comes the code to generate a SVG :)

Yes! I am a programmer, of course, but my graphic design skills are non-existent so my only choice was to write some code. But, thank goodness, that code only has to run once and doesn't have to interact with WiFi, an API, or anything else!

As I'm getting older (and have seen more of my "smart" solutions turn into terrible maintenance nightmares) I'm now fully on board with that general idea. The simple things just keep working and it's great.

I'm with you, the less complexity the better. I hate having to maintain ten thousand things around the house.

Why?

Doesn't your council give a fridge magnet which has the dates in the calendar printed clearly?

Why overcomplicate?

Because it's fun (:

Huh, I wish American municipalities did this. Maybe some of them do, but certainly nowhere I've ever lived.

Most American towns have one pickup day for both recycling and trash, and only one type of recycling anyways. Kind of unnecessary to print hundreds of thousands just to mark Tuesday or Friday every week on them.

I think ours has given us little stickers to put on our calendar before. Generally it's the same day every week, so you really don't need individual reminders.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com