Ruario's Journal

The following is a 'stream of consciousness' (micro *log style).

2022-12-30

23:50 +0100

[9:93 decimal time]

I picked up the decimal watch I ordered before Christmas. No great quality but this was kind of expected. I bought it more for what it is, rather than expecting too much. Nonetheless I have already had to replaced the strap with one off another of my watches. The one it came with looked cheap and was strangely thick and inflexible, making it uncomfortable.

It was a little tricky to set the time accurately but it is the same movement as in my slow watch so I have some experience here and I got there in the end. 😉

Anyway, now we shall see how usable this is and how silly an idea this whole thing was. 😆

My earlier post about buying and using a decimal watch

2022-12-29

23:41 +0100

I updated the script that displays decimal time [§ 22:01 +0100] so that it can take a specified time as an argument to allow me to convert arbitrary time values.

#!/bin/sh -eu
# Check if a time is passed and if so use that instead of the current time
if [ -n "${1-}" ] && [ "${1-}" != '-u' ]; then
  if echo $1 | grep -q ':.*:' ; then
    CURRENT_TIME="$1"
  else
    CURRENT_TIME="${1}:00"
  fi
else
  # Check for -u as an argument and if so print the time on the IERS Reference Meridian (UTC equivalent)
  CURRENT_TIME="$(date ${1:-} '+%H:%M:%S')"
fi
CURRENT_MINSEC="${CURRENT_TIME#*:}"
echo "(("${CURRENT_TIME%%:*}" * 3600) + ("${CURRENT_MINSEC%:*}" * 60) + "${CURRENT_MINSEC#*:}") / 86.4" \
  | bc \
  | sed 's/^/00/' \
  | tail -c4 \
  | sed 's/\(.*\)\(..\)$/\1:\2/'

2022-12-25

14:29 +0000

Merry Christmas to everyone looking at Antenna. 😉

14:23 +0000

Spending Christmas at my brother's, which is really nice but for some reason I am really tired. Not sure why, him and my sister-in-law are doing all the work (food and other preparations).

2022-12-22

08:53 +0100

On it seems that strikes in the UK have pushed my travel plans forward. Christmas is always more stressful than it should be. 😉

2022-12-21

13:45 +0100

I can be quite frustrating getting feedback on the priority of bugs we fix for Vivaldi stable version from users. There is a lot going on behind the scenes and it would be hard to relay all the reasons why we do things certain ways, nor am I sure I would want to. Also, while some of the users might have a background in the tech industry, many clearly do not and how they imagine things work, is nothing like how it actually works or could work.

Nonetheless, when we have known outstanding bugs (which is always) it is quite annoying to read.

2022-12-20

23:25 +0100

I just found @StackSmith's Decimal Time post. I fully agree that 100 units per day can work well for humans. Indeed in my own post I mention that most meetings fall on the hour or at 15 (standard) minute intervals. In addition, the watch I am actually buying is broken down by 10 (decimal) minute markers. 😉

StackSmith - On Decimal Time post

22:57 +0100

I was reading @idiomdrottning's "When a watch company promoted the revolutionary calendar" and I can't help but wonder if she read my post about buying a decimal watch or if it was just a happy coincidence that we wrote about similar topics around the same time. 😉

idiomdrottning - When a watch company promoted the revolutionary calendar

Fediverse post of the above

A decimal watch? (my earlier post)

22:29 +0100

Reading @szczezuja's tinylog just now and I saw myself referenced in relation to all the recent changes to Mastodon.

Szczeżuja's tinylog § Sun 20 Nov 2022 04:00:42 PM CET

To clarify my own thoughts, they are somewhat mixed. On the one had I have had some enjoyment from the influx of people and indeed it was nice to be able to connect with old friends from Twitter (which I left back in April). On the other hand I can get overly addicted to these things, which is the main reason I left Twitter in the first place. Often my time would be better spent elsewhere.

Having said that I have opened a couple sub-accounts on Mastodon that I am enjoying quite a bit recently, largely because they are not general accounts but rather for specialised things.

@binary@wristwatch.social

@ruario@oulipo.social

The former focussed on watches and the latter is a specialist account where you must not type the letter 'e' and thus composing posts is similar to a word game. The local feeds of these are also quite enjoyable to read. In addition because I follow and have less followers on both, they feel more manageable and relaxed.

Perhaps this is the to enjoy Mastodon more, finding your little niche (or two).

22:01 +0100

Script to display the current decimal time

I talked a little about decimal time in my last longer post, so here is a quick complementary script to display the current decimal time to the nearest (decimal) minute.

Since Decimal minutes and Swatch "Internet Time" .beats are the same thing, if you are in UTC+1 and ignore the colon, you also have the current numbers of .beats 😉

#!/bin/sh -eu
# Pass -u as an argument to the script to print the time on the IERS Reference Meridian (UTC equivalent)
CURRENT_TIME="$(date ${1:-} '+%H:%M:%S')"
CURRENT_MINSEC="${CURRENT_TIME#*:}"
echo "(("${CURRENT_TIME%%:*}" * 3600) + ("${CURRENT_MINSEC%:*}" * 60) + "${CURRENT_MINSEC#*:}") / 86.4" \
  | bc \
  | sed 's/^/00/' \
  | tail -c4 \
  | sed 's/\(.*\)\(..\)$/\1:\2/'

⁂

ruario.flounder.online/