Show HN: Weird Clocks | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Weird Clocks

clocks.specr.net

53 pointsvunderba19 comments

I had a lot of time on my hands so I spent Sunday afternoon coming up with a bunch of completely impractical ways to visualize clocks.

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years ago in Japan daylight and nighttime were each given 12 hours and clocks were made to adhere to this ... throughout the year as summer days grew longer and nighttime shorter their clocks adjusted to make an hour longer or shorter self adjusting

TIL - this is very cool. It looks like somebody actually put together a wari-koma (temporal) watch in 2011 as well.

https://www.masahirokikuno.jp/watches/temporal-hour-watch/

If you want to look at some old ones the Seiko museum in Tokyo has a few. Entry is free and I can only recommend it.

Thanks for the tip! The wadokei clocks on the museum's site look incredible.

https://museum.seiko.co.jp/en/collections/traditional_Japane...

The non-fixed type system per https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%92%8C%E6%99%82%E8%A8%88 was called "futei jihou" (non-fixed time system), same with other sites https://museum.seiko.co.jp/knowledge/relation_16/ . "Temporal hour system" seems like the correct translation.

My guess is that "wari koma" here means basically "separated panels" (wari: broken, koma: panel). Wadokei means (traditional) Japanese timepiece.

Just double checking, but the day and night were each given 6 hours, not 12.

Its one of the best UI/UX I have ever experienced. Really cool man.

Thanks for the kind words!

Wow, so cool. Looks amazing. You must really like clocks.

I do! Cogsworth is my spirit animal.

Really neat! Is this built through react?

Thanks! It's actually just mostly vanilla HTML, CSS3, and Tailwind. I used ThreeJS for the solar clock, 3d euclidean clock and the water clock, and MatterJS to handle the physics for the marble based clock.

These are wonderful!

Thanks perilunar - I see from your profile you're a clock enthusiast as well! I'm starting to think we should start an HN web ring for clocks.

A bit of feedback for your sun clock: since it asks for my location, by the time I clicked “Allow,” it had already timed out while trying to get the location. You may want to have it continuously check for permission changes and then initialize the sunrise and sunset features once access is granted. Cheers!

i love the pi clock

Thanks that was a fun one to work on! I initially had it working at the second level HH:MM:SS but the zooming in and out on the canvas every second gave people whiplash.

I wonder if you could find all the seconds in the region around the HH:MM time — or more to the point, how much do you need to zoom out to find the nearest SS pair?

Then you could keep the HH:MM time centered as it is now, but highlight the nearest SS each second.

That's a good idea! It would make that sixty seconds a little bit more engaging instead of just hanging around on one time and having to wait before it zooms out to find the next HH:MM combination.

I had initially set it up to go for each second, but it was physically giving me whiplash.

So cool!

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