[plug] Binary Clock

[Cameron Patrick]

Mark J Gaynor wrote:

| BTW: this is not flaming anyone, I just want the thread go to sleep
| before someone needs to get help to deal with it something which is
| really nothing. Let's not go there!

:-)  Fair enough too.

BTW, just an explanation for my message which sparked a surprising
response: at the time I wrote it, I hadn't heard anything about this
binary clock other than what was mentioned on this list, hadn't
purchased one and had no intention of obtaining one.  From what Mark had
mentioned, I could think of two reasons that RTFM'ing would be helpful:
(a) the manual said that if you're in a 50 Hz area and you want the time
to be accurate you're screwed but it doesn't matter as no one wants one
of these to tell the time anyway (backed up by Mark's description of the
thing as more of a conversation piece than a time piece); or (b) there's
a switch on the back (or whatever) for 50 Hz mode - probably more
likely.  Not having one of the clocks (and their associated TFM) or
having looked at any information about them other than messages to the
Plug about how nifty other people thought they were, I was vaguely
curious about which, if any, of my two guesses was correct.

What I did not expect was two flames about how I should just read the
fine manual - I'd have thought that by snipping my quoted section of
Mark's message down to three sentences each of which amounted to "read
the bloody manual you fool" it would be obvious that I had indeed got
that message.  Evidently this was not enough for the James Devenishes of
the world.

Anyway, that was much longer and rantier than I had hoped it to be -
apologies to everyone about that - but it will at least probably be my
last contribution to this particular thread.  *collective sigh of
relief*  ...But not to this mailing list, though, not just yet anyway...
*collective booing*

ObSortaLinux:  just prior to writing this message I went to the
Thinkgeek site and had a look to see what it was that everyone was
talking about.  It actually looks quite interesting - but rather than
buying one I'm tempted to buy a bunch of large LEDs and a PIC and build
something similar myself.  And then, as per James's PIC talk at LCA, I
could even programme the things under Linux.  ... I wonder how hard it
would be to make one that speaks NTP? ;-)

ObReallyLinux:  I believe there's a Window Maker dockapp that displays a
little binary clock floating around somewhere.

Cheers,

Cameron.