One life, one change

Late April 2025 I spent a few days in Greece, visiting my family. I made long walks through the old town of Thessaloniki together with my father and with an uncle. I also made long walks through the mountains around Eleftheroupoli, I ate a lot, and I took pictures of clocks to fill the Pix Clock with even more pictures of clocks.

The tattoo

My aunt took me out for an enormous lunch in the fabulous Taverna Kastaniés, high up on the Pangaio mountain. It was the first of May, which is a public holiday in Greece. It was very, very busy in the taverna. Families eating and drinking, and waiters running around with huge trays, filled with plates of food. One of these waiters was this Herculean body builder with a large tattoo of a clock on his underarm. When he brought us the bill, I dared to ask him if I could take a picture of this tattoo. He was honoured.

It’s a classic macho tattoo, with a rose, with playing cards, and with banners. And with some small, but interesting issues. First of all, on the banners it says One life, One change. What does this mean? Does it mean that one life brings one change to the world? Or would it perhaps be more personal, about the changes in our own lives? That our one life is just one single, long, continuous change. That’s one way to look at change. Personally I think I’ve had many changes so far in my life, so my macho tattoo would read One life, many changes. Could it be that it’s just one wrong letter? Maybe he means One life, one chance. In that case it’s a classic, and wonderfully weird Greek spelling mistake, similar to the jeweller who advertised Cold Silver in bright neon.

The other issue is that the clock doesn’t have hands! I really wanted to add this picture to the Pix Clock, but it doesn’t show the time! It does have cogs, you can see them, they tattooed them, so it has a mechanism to change the time. But they obviously couldn’t decide on which time to show. Maybe when the one big change happens in his life he’ll add the time? Who knows? Maybe when his first child is born? Maybe that’s what he means by One life, One change?

Anyway, I don’t want to wait until his child is born, I want to know what time it is right now. Since the clock is remarkably precise, it is a well set tattoo with almost perfect angles, I was able to add the hands programmatically. So here it is, a fully functional one life, one change tattoo clock.

Interactive clocks

Clocks are not very interactive nowadays. You simply look at them and they tell you what time it is. Before they were digital things, clocks were a bit more interactive. My parents have this old wooden mantel clock and every morning they pick up a special key, put it into the slot, and wind the mechanism up. Pretty nifty. It’s magical, it works without batteries. Old wrist watches used to work with wind up mechanisms as well. Every morning you would start the day with winding up a few clocks.

Rotary clocks

If you forgot to wind up your phone you could use another interactive clock to check the time. In the Netherlands you would pick up your old rotary phone, dial 002, and listen to a voice that would tell you that at the next tone, it is 9 hours, 52 minutes and 50 seconds. I made a few interactive rotary phones, and I’ve written about them before. So you should head over to that article and read all about them

Interactive typewriter clocks

My daughter asked me a while ago if I could turn a real, physical typewriter into a clock. I think it’s a fantastic idea, and maybe one day I will buy an old typewriter and turn it into a clock. Or more probably: fail while trying. I did make a few prototypes of how this typewriter clock could work though. Here’s a version where in order to see the time, you have to type. If you keep typing, the time keeps being typed. Here’s another one where you simply have to click. Which is really handy if you don’t have a keyboard. If you keep it running, and click on this clock every now and then, it turns into a log of how often you want to know what time it is.

Here’s a different version of this clicky typewriter clock which works better if you don’t need a log. I also made more stern versions of these two clicky clocks: they only type a new line when the time has changed. So compulsive clicking doesn’t work with these.

Interactive station clocks

Clicking on clocks to see the time seems like a simple way to make clocks interactive. Here’s a version of a station clock that I find particularly pleasant to use. In its default state all hands hang down, pointing at half past five, or half past six. When you click on it the hands bounce in their right position, and after ten seconds they hang down again. The hands have such a nice wobble!

Clicking is nice, but they are too easy. I wanted to make a digital clock that feels a bit more like winding up your mechanical watch. This idea turned into this scrolly clock. You have to scroll all the way down to see what time it is. If you have a browser that doesn’t support the newish scroll driven animation feature, it is a different version of the clicky station clock. Still interactive, less tiresome, still slow. New technology does not necessarily make things better.

It is 25:14

Last week Robert Jan Verkade sent me an image of a clock. This was a peculiar one. It shows the time in a format I hadn’t seen before. It is a digital clock in a billboard for a company that buys and sells gold. The clock on this image shows the time as 25:14. This clock needs an answer, because it triggers the question: What kind of clock needs more than 24 hours?

Two day clocks.

There are a few possible clocks I could think of. One of them would be a clock that keeps on counting for two days, instead of just 24 hours. This clock would show 25:14 every 48 hours. Here’s a version of this clock where 00:00 start on even days at midnight, and here’s a version where 00:00 starts on odd days. I made two, just for you, so you can see its effect no matter what day it is. I have found no use for this clock.

Week clocks

Another clock that will show 25:14 every now and then is a week clock. It keeps on counting the hours for seven days, until it reaches 167:59. Where I come from, weeks start on Monday. If your week starts on Monday too, here’s your link to the week clock. If your week starts on Sunday, here’s a link to another week clock. There was a period in my life where I would go out for a proper meal, with good amounts of wine, with good friends every Wednesday. During this period me and my friends used to say that the week starts on Wednesday. For those of you who live like that right now, here’s a version of this week clock that starts on Wednesday. I don’t find this clock very useful.

Longer clocks

I skipped the fortnight clock because I couldn’t figure out when a fortnight starts. So I move over to the month clock instead. It shows 25:14 on the second day of each month, at 14 minutes past one. I thought about making a trimester and a semester clock, time periods commonly used in educational institutions, but again, I couldn’t decide on when to start. Where I work, the semesters start in September and in February, which makes no sense. So let’s see what a year clock looks like instead. Once a year, exactly 25 hours and 14 minutes after this clock switched from 8759:59 to 0000:00 (or from 8783:59 to 0000:00 after a leap year) it shows the time as 0025:14. Wait for it!

You may imagine what a century clock looks like. A century has less than a million hours in it. You’ll have to wait until 2 January 2100, and stay awake until fourteen minutes past one to see it switch to 000.025:14. If you want to see a two day clock, a week clock, a month clock, a year clock, and the century clock switch to 25:14 all at once you’ll have to wait until the second of January, 74 minutes past midnight in the year 2300. And don’t forget to use the week clock that starts on Monday, and the two day clock that starts on odd days. If you miss it, your next opportunity is in the year 2700. I published this post at 24 minutes past 221.627.

More options

But what if we don’t want to wait a century? What if we’re impatient? Or what if we’re always asleep at 01:14? There are other possible clocks that can show 25:14 as a valid timestamp. For instance clocks that use a system where we have more than 24 hours in a day. And why not? I’ve never understood why we should have 24 hours in a day. 24 is such a random number, we could just as wel have 48 hours in a day. So here it is, a clock for a 48 hour system. At 37 minutes past noon it will display the time as 25:14.

Let’s zoom in a bit more. Here’s a clock for a 168 hour system, those are as many hours as there are in a week. Makes just enough sense as a 24 hour clock to me. It’s 25:14 between 3:36:18 and 3:36:25 on this clock. Here’s a clock that has 720 hours in a day, indeed about the average amount of hours in a month. It will flip to 025:14 at 0:50:28, and it will show it for just two seconds. And indeed, here’s one with 8760 hours in a day, as many as there are hours in a year. It shows the time as 0025:14 for a fraction of a second around 9 seconds past four minutes past midnight. Yes, here’s a clock with 876.000 hours in a day, as many hours in a day as the hours in a century. It might crash your computer. Somewhere between two and three seconds past midnight it shows the time as 000025:14 for a tiny, tiny fraction of a second.

Let’s switch to a 876600 hour time system. It was 42 past 418.574 when I wrote this.

Rotary Clocks

Years ago I turned an old rotary phone into a music player. I still use it, it’s a unique, and pleasant way of listening to music. I showed it to my neighbour once, and a few months ago she contacted me if I could make a custom phone for the Unread Book Club. This club was organising an exhibition around the books from the public library in Amsterdam that had never been lent out. There is a list of these books, the so called Zero List. I put this list into a phone. You can dial a number and then listen to the title, the author, and the date it was entered into the digital database. It’s still on display for a few more weeks, if you want to try it out. This assignment inspired me to make two more phones. Clock phones.

Speaking clocks

When I was young, in the Netherlands you could dial a number to listen to what time it was: If you dialed 002, a voice would tell you that at the next tone it is 11 hours, 34 minutes and 50 seconds … beep. I still remembered this number, being bored was an important part of my childhood.

The alternative Pix Clock Phone

Together with quite a few people I’ve been working on the Pix clock. A website that shows the correct time by showing pictures of clocks. I tried to make this clock as accessible as possible by writing alternative text descriptions for all pictures in this clock, more than 2000 of them. This is a very nice exercise, it forces me to take a closer look at each image. I remember images better now.

These alternative texts are read out to people who use a screen reader, and who visit the website. I don’t use a screen reader myself, but I wanted to enjoy these descriptions as well. So I put all these texts into a beautiful red rotary phone. Now when I dial 002 on this phone, I get to hear the description of an image that shows the correct time. It makes me ridiculously happy.

The alternative Literary Clock Phone

Another project I have been working on for years now is the brilliant Literary Clock, a project by Jaap Meijers. It shows the time on an old Kindle by showing a quote from a book that has the correct time stamp in it. The dataset was started by the Guardian, I think Jaap added quite a few books, and in the last few years I added lots and lots of quotes from all the books that I read to my own version of this clock. I have a few of these e-reader clocks at home, and they’re wonderful to look at. And now I also have a beautiful blue rotary phone with these quotes in it. So, when I dial 002 on this blue phone, a voice will read out a quote that has the correct time stamp in it.

And yes, the clock also works when you dial 117, 161, or 123, which were used in other countries. And if you dial 112 or another three digit emergency number it will tell you that if you have a real emergency you should try a different phone. You can also dial 067, which is the unicode number for the question mark to listen to an explanation about what you’re listening to.

An abstract alternative to the sun

I like things that are off. Or things that are different. I like to flip things completely, like fantasising about the back of paintings. But I also like things that are off in different ways, like this About Clock that my friend Jasper came up with. To my surprise, when I showed it during a presentation someone from the audience told me that they got a bit nauseous when they looked at it. Doing things differently, flipping things, turning things around, they often lead to new, and unforeseen ideas and results, like people getting sick from a clock. This story is not about making people sick, it’s much bigger. It’s about how a simple idea turned into an abstract alternative to the sun.

Perfectly geometric off clocks

David Krooshof told me about this idea he had for a clock: at the whole hour both hands should point at the hour. This means that the minute hand has to turn 65 minutes in an hour. I wondered what such a clock would look like. It turns out it is an excellent clock. It’s really easy to tell the time on it once you figure out how it works.

What’s so good about it is the logical geometry of it. At the whole hour both hands always point in the same direction. At the half hour the hands always form a long, straight line. At a quarter to, and a quarter past the hands always form a nice 90 degree angle. This is something that always bothered the OCD part of my brain: the timestamps that the hands on a normal clock form a clear geometric angle are completely random. On this off clock, these forms appear on logical moments.

On this particular Off Clock the hour indicators on the clock’s face stay where we expect them, but the minute indicators slowly move along with the hour hand. Of course I wondered what a clock would look like where the hour indicators move, while the minute indicators stay where you expect them.

The other Off Clock

So I made a clock where the hour hand always points up. And on this clock the part of the face where the hours are printed slowly turns. The minute hand turns the way we expect it to turn on a normal clock. This clock shows a similar logical geometry as well. At the whole hour both hands point up, at the half hour they form a long, straight vertical line, and at a quarter to and a quarter past they form a perfect 90 degree angle. It’s a bit harder to see the exact time: you have to look at the turning hour face to see where the hour hand points to.

A nice experiment, good to see what it looks like, but I think it’s less interesting than David’s original idea.

An unexpected Off Clock.

It’s clear that I prefer the first Off Clock. I like the fact that it’s pretty easy to see what time it is, but I also like the fact that quite a lot is going on: (1) When a minute changes, the minute hand moves a bit more than we’re used to. (2) At the same time the minute indicators move a bit as well. (3) And every fifth indicator rotates a little bit in order to stay perfectly level. All these movements are subtle, but visible. I tried to emphasise these movements by making all fifth indicators bigger and over-the-topper:

Not entirely satisfied with the result, I tried a few other ways of emphasising the movement. One of them involved using coloured backgrounds. I really liked the abstract pattern this version creates, so I played around with it some more. I removed the hands of the clock, and I even removed the face, and flipped things a bit. And I aded some hourly, daily and seasonal logic: The hue depends on the hour. Then I decided to let the saturation of the colour depend on the time of the year: high saturation in summer, low in winter. And lightness is influenced by the time of day: at noon it is at its brightest, at midnight it’s at its darkest.

At first it is impossible to see what time it is. But with a little practice — by looking at this clock for a long period of time — you can see patterns emerging. Every hour, even every minute has its own distinctive pattern. You just have to recognise it. If you place this clock in your house and look at it every now and then, after a while you will be able to tell the time, and the season, just like you can tell the time and the season when you look at the sun.

I love these kinds of creative processes where all kinds of unexpected things happen. I never expected David’s idea to turn into such a nice geometric clock that solves an old OCD frustration of mine. And I definitely didn’t expect that with a few iterations this clock would turn into this wonderful, abstract alternative to the sun.

A political clock

Yesterday there were general elections in the Netherlands. An extremist right wing party became the largest party. Almost 25% of people who voted, voted for this party. This party wants to deport all people of one certain religion, it wants to ban churches of this one single religion, it wants to ban their book. It wants to stop acting against climate change, no solar, no wind energy, more gas, more cars, and it wants to stop all subsidies for the arts, which it calls leftist hobbies.

So I sat down and enjoyed working on one of my leftist hobbies: making artistic clocks. I made a political clock this time.

I divided the clock into leftwing and rightwing minutes and hours. If the votes would have been 50/50 for left and rightwing parties, it would have been a normal clock. But the Netherlands is clearly leaning right at the moment. About 66.6% of the votes were right wing*. So on this clock 66.6% of the minutes and the hours are on the right hand side of the clock, and the rest is on the left.

Everything on the left is coloured red, which over here is the default color for leftwing parties, I think. On the right everything is coloured brown, which is the default colour for fascists, or for people who have no problem collaborating with fascists.

*Some people might not agree with this division I made. They would argue that many parties that I placed on the left are in reality also rightwing: These parties have been actively supporting an extremist right wing agenda for decades. And these people are right, of course. But if I coloured these parties brown as well this clock would have been too depressing. We need some hope.

Anti-clocks

I was writing alternative texts for a few pictures of clocks I took last weekend in Antwerp. One of the clocks turned out to be impossible to describe correctly: the minute hand clearly points at five minutes to the hour, while the hour hand points to at least five minutes after the hour. The hands were out of sync. This happens every now and then. I decided not to use this image for the pix clock.

But the clock kept bugging me. And this morning I woke up with the solution. Some sort of an anti-clock would solve the problem. The clock is not wrong, it simply ignores the conventions we use when it comes to the directions that the hands are supposed to turn.

In this anti-clock the hour hand keeps moving clockwise, like most clocks do. The minute hand is the rebel here: it moves counter clockwise. And now, when we look at the same clock with this anti-convention, all of a sudden it shows the time as five past one. As you may understand, I wanted to know what this clock looks like, not just at five past one, but whenever. So here it is, a clock with a normal hour hand, and a reversed minute hand. Time does look rather normal at the whole and the half hour.

I encountered another problematic clock recently. The hour hand of this clock points exactly at nine, while the minute hand suggests it is half past something by pointing down. Very confusing. Is it half past nine? Or half past eight?

Again, this problem can be solved by ignoring conventions. Convention tells us that both at zero hour and at zero minutes the hands should point upwards. By moving zero minutes to the bottom of the clock this frustrating problem was solved as well.

When I wrote on Mastodon that I was working on some anti-clocks Roman Komarov asked but how about ant clocks? So I also made an ant clock.

A wandering hour dial

One of the additional fun things about building clocks is that people start sending links to peculiar clocks. My good friend and fellow nerd Dave Krooshof sent me a link to this video of a night clock. It’s a clock that can show you the time when it’s dark. And it can do so in environments where all you have are oil lamps instead of electricity. The 17th century was such an environment, and the clock in this video was built back then. The fact that it can show the time at night is interesting, but I found the mechanism inside it to be even more interesting. And I assumed that it could be made with CSS, and so I did.

Numbers on a chain

The wonderful narrator in this video will open the clock step by step, so it’s really worth it to watch all of it. In the end it will show the brilliant mechanism that this clock uses. It’s called a wandering hour dial: the hour wanders around the clock, instead of the hands. It’s a pretty simple but very ingenious mechanism, made from a chain and a disk.

First of all there’s a chain with all the numbers which simply turns around. Here’s an example (it only works on larger screens, sorry).

The trick is in the disk that’s placed before this chain. There are two holes in it. The correct hour appears behind a hole. Here’s an example of this mechanism, turning in a very nice fast forward pace.

A few hours later I slowed it down, set it to the correct time and added some minute-indicators and a magic pointer. In the original clock the mechanism is covered. Which in a way is a shame. So in my version I’ve left it uncovered. Here it is, a wandering hour dial for your web browser.

I used to have a problem with square clocks

When I was a kid I was bored quite often — I’m from a pre-computer and pre-smartphone generation. I’m also from a household that didn’t have a television. So being bored was part of growing up. One of the good things of having nothing to do is that you can spend a lot of time with looking at things in every detail. So as a kid I used to be an expert on the wallpaper in my bedroom, on the program of our washing machine, and I was an expert on the tiniest movements of clocks. One of the things I liked especially about clocks is the exact moment that the minute hand touches a minute indicator. The moment the hand and the indicator align perfectly takes just a second. I loved those moments and I would gladly wait another minute for it to happen again. And again and again and again.

This works perfectly fine with most clocks, since most clocks are round. But with certain designs this doesn’t work and this used to frustrate me. The most frustrating clocks were square clocks: In the corners the minute indicators are too far away from the hands; only once every fifteen minutes do they really touch.

Here you see an example. At nine o’clock everything is fantastic, both the minute and the hours hands touch their indicators. Yet seven minutes and thirty seconds later the long hand is way out of reach.

I solved it.

The reason why this happens, of course, it that the hands of a physical clock can’t stretch. But if you want to, the hands of a digital clock can. So, with the help of my daughter and her high school maths book, I created a square clock that doesn’t frustrate me. On the contrary, it pleases me. The clock consists of two squares. A large one and a smaller one inside. The long hand always touches the outside square, and the short hand always touches the inside. They’ll simply stretch if they have to.

Here’s it is at nine o’clock. This looks like a normal clock. The dimensions of the to hands look just right.

Here’s the same clock at seven minutes and thirty seconds past nine. As you can see the long hand is now stretched all the way up to the corner, and it is now almost twice as long as the hours hand. An even nicer effect happens at half past ten.

The long hand is now in its shortest form, and the short hand in its longest, and if you measure them you’ll find out that they’re exactly the same size. Yet still you can clearly see what time it is.

This is caused by the ratio between the inside and the outside square. The large square is 1.414 times larger than the small one. This 1:1.414 ratio is the ratio of ISO paper. One of the effects of this ratio is this wonderful relation between a diagonal hand and one that’s straight.

I’m happy. This is the square clock that I wanted as a kid. And now I have it.

Another version

I played around with this clock a bit. I played with the width of the hands. I played with their colour, and after some iterations I came up with a simple idea: what if I made the hours hand the same colour as the outside square, and the minutes hand the same colour as the inside square. As soon as I launched this clock I was surprised by the powerful geometric shape that I saw. And, the bored kid that I still am, I keep being delighted by all the shapes and touch points it keeps on generating. Sometimes I just sit and wait until a line meets a corner. Or the moment that both hands start touching each other. Or that exact moment when they form a straight line (which happens once every hour). Every time I look at it there’s a different pattern.

I’m extra happy. This is the square clock that I didn’t know I wanted as a kid. I have it now.

Typewriter clocks

As a kid I learned how to type on an old mechanical typewriter. One of those machines where every key was mechanically connected to a hammer. If you hit the key, the hammer would punch the paper. You had to use quite some force to make sure that the paper was hit hard enough — this is one of the reasons why some older people still hammer away on their keyboards with so much force. If you hit it hard, the letter would be bolder, if you hit it soft, the letter would be lighter, and if you didn’t hit it hard enough you’d have to type the letter again. This difference in thickness was of course something that was missing from ordinary digital typewriter fonts. Yesterday Erik van Blokland released his NCND typewriter font. A variable font that seems to be based on this idea of using variable force when typing. Of course I made a few clocks with it.

Clock no1.

The first clock I made is a simple one. When you load the page it types out the time, like 08:52. As you might see variable force is used to type each digit. Every time a minute changes, a new line is added and the new timestamp is typed, again with random force for each character. This goes on forever.

Clock no2.

Whenever you made an error with a mechanical typewriter there were two ways to undo it. The first one was to use a substance we called Typex in the Netherlands. It was a white fluid. You would paint it over the error, wait for it to dry, and then type over it again. The other option was to make the original text unreadable by typing a few random characters over it. This last option is built into the NCND font. I used this so called Stylistic Set for the second variant of this typewriter clock.

At first when you load this clock it looks the same as clock no1. But in this version, whenever there’s a new minute, the previous minute is first typed over with random characters before the new time is typed out. I like its rhythm, and I really like the look of it. It looks really good after a few minutes, especially on a very thin and high screen.

Clock no3.

These previous clocks look a bit as if you’re typing on an endless roll of paper. I didn’t have rolls to type on as a kid, I did have endless amounts of ISO format A4 paper though. So in this third typographic clock the time is typed onto a container with the ratio of 1:1.414 (or 1.414:1, depending on the dimensions of your screen). One of the more advanced features of mechanical typewriters was setting the margin. And if I remember correctly you could even set tab stops, if you wanted to type things in columns. And in this case I want to type the time in columns. The first iteration of this clock fills a sheet of “paper” with sixty timestamps in an hour. The second iteration of this same clock types the time every second, so it takes just one minute to fill a sheet. Much more fun to look at if you have a short attention span. I’m still working on the I made a print stylesheet for it. This means that if you leave the web page with this clock open for 24 hours it should result in a book with all seconds in a day, printed on 1440 pages. Which would be ridiculous to print, please don’t.

More ideas.

It’s interesting to see the memories that typewriters bring up. I showed these clocks to my colleague Irene. She had memories of her mother who taught at the Dutch school for management assistants. They had to type simultaneously on music, hahaha. And we marvelled over how powerful your fingers had to be if you wanted to type with all ten fingers on these mechanical typewriters. Which gave me the idea that this font needs a pinky-algorithm: All characters you would usually type with your pink should be lighter. I may write this script one day.

I created a version of this typewriter clock that writes out the time in words. It uses this pinky-algorithm: each finger has a different force.

The OBA Clock

Recently I’ve been taking pictures of clocks. It can be real clocks, like a clock on a church or a watch on someone’s wrist. It can also be an image of a clock, like a clock as an illustration on a poster or a painting of a clock. Recently I took a picture of a drawing of a clock at the OBA, our local public library. I didn’t pay too much attention to it until I tried to add it to the Pix Clock. While it does look like a normal clock, when you look closer all of a sudden it’s not clear at all what time it indicates.

So I asked the people of Mastodon what time it is on that clock. 9% said it’s seven o’clock, which seems to be right. The weird thing is that nobody thought it was eight o’clock, which seems to be right as well. 9% said it is five, which is correct it you simply count the units. 82% said What which is a logical answer. A few people came up with sensible alternatives. Peter Gasston came up with this simple solution that definitely made the most sense:

Eight major units, so it must be a 24 hour clock divided into three hour segments, so 3pm.

I built this clock

It’s a 24 hour clock. So at midnight the hour hand points up, and at noon it points down. At six in the morning it points east, and at six in the evening it points west. And indeed, at 3pm its hands point exactly in the same directions as the hands in the original picture.

I think I like the minute hand even more. Since it takes three hours for the hour hand to move from one unit to the next, it seemed logical that it should also take three hours for the minute hand to make one turn. This makes it contrarian in a weird but logical way: When it points to the top or to the bottom, all is fine. But when it points at the place where we expect a quarter past, it is actually a quarter before. And the same way, when it points at a quarter before it is a quarter past.

I’m adding it to my collection of clocks.

I am a clockmaker

I’m not sure how many clocks you have to build before you can officially call yourself a clockmaker, but I’ve made yet another one, and I enjoyed making it again, so from now on I’ll call myself a clockmaker.

This last clock is based on an idea Erik van Blokland had been toying with for quite a while — some of the pictures he sent me date from 2001. So at least since then he wanted to make this clock that shows the time by showing a picture with a clock on it. He told me about it on Mastodon and I offered to build it. And here it is, the Pix Clock.

And indeed, as you saw, the time on that clock is probably not correct, more often than not it lags behind. There are still quite a few pictures missing (at least a thousand, haha). So your help would be appreciated. I’m sure you have some pictures of clocks. You can try to add them in this git repository. And if you don’t know what the previous sentence means, you can also try to send them to me via a service like wetransfer. Send them to lovenonsense at vasilis dot nl.

I’ve looked at Erik’s images and there are a few clear qualities in them: there are no recognisable people, a clock can be seen, the time can be read, it is interesting to look at, and they are all unique, which means that series of the same clock, taken every minute are, well, probably less interesting. The result should be diverse and if possible surprising.

Boring but important section

This legalese reminds me of a website I made a very, very long time ago, probably in 2001 or in 2002. It was for a large, rather shitty company, and they had this legal disclaimer on their site. I added a hidden feature to this disclaimer: if you printed that page, all words were replaced by the word ‘blah’. I’m sure nobody ever noticed. So I’ve added the same feature this page.

A clock that shows the correct time twice a day

A friend of mine told me that his ideal clock shows the correct time twice a day. We’ve all seen these clocks: a classic wrist watch that stopped ticking, or a church clock that doesn’t work anymore. Even though the clock stopped working, it still shows the correct time twice a day. Just for fun I decided to create one of these clocks and publish it on the internet. And then it became quite complicated.

The location of time

It is easy to create a physical clock in one location that shows the correct time twice a day. The time on the clock is related to the time zone where the clock and the person watching it are located. So if I decide to create a physical clock that always says that it is thirty seven minutes past one, it is correct twice a day.

If I publish this exact same clock on the internet, all of a sudden it is correct more than 24 times a day! That’s because now this clock shows the correct time twice per day in every single time zone. And there are more than 24 time zones. So a clock on the internet that shows the correct time just twice a day must be a completely different things than a clock that stopped ticking.

An online clock that shows the correct time only twice per 24 hours

The clock I built shows the correct time just twice every 24 hours, only to the first two people who visit it (or to the first two robots that visit it). So let’s say I visit this clock on 8:06, and I’m the first visitor, the clock says it’s 8:06. If the next person visits this clock at 8:07, the clock will say it is 8:07. Now if a third person visits the clock a few seconds later the clock will show a random time — well, not completely random: it will show a time that’s anything except 8:07. Everyone who visits the clock until 8:06 the next day will get an incorrect time.

The first two people who visit the clock 24 hours later will get to see the correct time again. So the clock doesn’t reset at midnight, because what’s midnight on the internet? It resets 24 hours after the first person saw the correct time.

Now there’s a last thing that I had to do to make sure that the correct time is only shown twice a day. Imagine that you are the third visitor of this day, and you visit this clock at 8:59. The clock might now pick 9:00 as a random incorrect time. Now if you wait one minute it will show you the correct time, right? And this would break the clock, because now it could actually show the correct time all the time. So I added a small script that refreshes the page every time a minute changes.

But is it accurate?

Without assumptions it is impossible to create this clock. The clock shows the time on your computer, so I have to assume that the time on the device that visits the clock is accurate. So yes, It is possible to break the main function of this clock by changing the time on your device. If you do so, and you visit the clock as one of the first two visitors of that day you will get the incorrect time, and when you visit it later that day there is a very low chance that you get to see the correct time.

Why does it look this way?

This clock has two different views. The first two visitors will see a style that’s based on the website of this friend of mine. He’s a scientist, so his design is trustworthy. The time is shown as follows: It is probably 09:03, because the time it shows is based on assumptions.

The rest of the day you get a design that looks like ChatGPT, a chatbot that’s known to tell lies in a very convincing way. So now it will very convincingly tell you something like It’s precisely 13:29, which is probably not true.

You should try it yourself.

Another friend of mine wanted a clock that always says Right, it’s that time again! (in Dutch). So I made that clock as well. Which was much easier.

A tool for Josef Albers

This weekend I finally saw that fantastic Anni + Josef Albers expo in the Art Museum in Den Haag. I was amazed by the incredible woven patterns and fantastic graphic work by Anni Albers. It is just so good, I can only wish to one day be able to make work that’s inspired by her. But since the expo was so good I just had to make something based on what I had seen. So I ended up with the much less complex work that Josef used to make. Maybe one day in the future I’ll dare to get inspired by Anni Albers’ work.

I noticed that in the earlier years Josef Albers would sometimes recreate the same painting, with the same shapes, and the same palette, but he would shift the colours of the shapes. Making these different paintings must have taken ages, especially if he wanted to test all possible colour combinations. So, naively, I can’t help but think that he might have appreciated a tool that would have generated all these possible combinations. It could have helped him, I guess, with picking the best combinations, the ones that should be painted.

So at home I wrote a simple PHP script that generates the possible forms that follow the logic of this one painting I liked a lot. The shapes on this painting remind me of bottles, and one of the shapes I’ve been playing around with lately is bottles. Only Albers’s bottles are so incredibly beautiful. It is a wonderful shape. It looks like two, or even three separate shapes, but it is just one very clever line. I recreated the shape using SVG, and then played around with PHP to generated all different coordinates that still look like Albers’s shapes. There’s not very many of them, it’s just six different patterns. So I randomised some coordinates, so in the end all shapes are still unique.

In all my previous work I used to just generate random colours. But Josef and Anni Albers never used random colours, they were very deliberate in their choice. Josef Albers was an absolute expert on what he called the interaction of colour, how colours behave when you combine them with other colours. He didn’t need random, he knew very well what he was doing. So I simply nicked all schemes with four colours that he used for his paintings. Well, probably not all of them, just 30 that I could find. And now, every time you refresh this page, it shows all 24 possible ways to paint this painting with a particular four colour colour scheme.

So there you have it, a simple tool that generates lots and lots of versions of the same painting. The title suggests it is a tool for Josef Albers, but I think he did great without it. Let’s call it what it is: just another tool for myself.

Spare letters for dolphins

The Fediverse turns out to be this wonderful playground of creativity. There is this incredible place called Oulipo that doesn’t allow the use of the letter e. And last week, while surfing I found this place for dolphins where you are only allowed to post the letter e! The balance in the fediverse is restored.

I have been posting to Oulipo for a week now. And it is much more intersting, and at the same time much harder, than I thought. It is ridiculously hard to write without using the letter e, and then the weird this is that it is even harder to find an e in a sentence that is rejected by Oulipo. I had to read this sentence a few times before I spotted that fifth Latin glyph:

Last night I finally saw a group of Boss Musicians of Jajouka play music on a podium, in that large round hall in Tivoli in Holland. It was as brilliant, wild, and funky as I thought.

So I built a tool that makes it a little easier to spot an unwanted letter. Every e that you type is displayed in red crimson. This makes it so much easier to spot (at least, if you’re not colour blind, so I also added a wavy underline to it). It is a handy little tool for those of us who like to publish things without using that fifth symbol.

But now that I know that there is this place that thrives on the letter e I decided to add an extra feature to this Ouliposting tool. Every time you do, by accident, type an e it gets added to a list of es you typed before. The idea is that you can then copy them and post them on Dolphin.town. It also plays a happy dolphin sound whenever you type an e. This startles me so much that I think I’ll develop some kind of Pavlovian fear for that letter.

The present, ever e-less

While wandering around the fascinating Fediverse I stumbled upon a wonderful community of people who communicate with each other without ever using the letter ‘e’. Or in Oulipo words: no fifth symbols if you want to talk in that Oulipo community. Find words without that gliph if you want to join. I joined right away.

Oulipo means Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, which means something like workshop for potential literature. Its practitioners write literature with restrictions. Such a restriction could be writing with only one vowel, like the title of this blog post. Or writing without one vowel, like the Oulipo Mastodon instance does. A wonderful example I read today is

it’s shockingly straightforward to find anagrams of “procrastination”.

In the past, in the nineties to be exact, when I was an art student, I made some oulipan art. I made sculptures with acrostic little stories in them: every next word in such a story starts with the next letter in the alphabet. Yes, all these stories had just 26 words. Here’s a Dutch example:

Alle beregoeie creatieven denken echt formidabele genialiteiten. Hoe iedereen jegens kunst leunt, metafoor natuurlijk, opent potentieel qua resultaat. Serieuze totstandkoming uiteindelijk, vergt wetenschap, xenologie, yver, zakelijkheid.

You can understand that I got excited when I found this Oulipo community. Stuff like this makes me extra creative. At first I thought about writing an acrostic story, but then I realised that it would be impossible to write the fifth word. The next idea was a bot that posts the time whenever it can be written in english without using the letter ‘e’. The problem with such a bot is that people live in different time zones. So instead of making a bot, I made a website which uses the time on your own computer.

Most of the time it says It is way past six o’clock, since every hour after six has an ‘e’ in it. But in the first hours after midnight and noon things are slightly less boring. Sometimes. It is by far the most boring clock I ever made. But it was surprisingly hard to do. The hard part was not writing the logic. The problem was that I tried to write the code for this clock in Oulipan fashion, without using the letter ‘e’. Which is impossible. In JavaScript it is impossible to write functionality for time without the ‘e’. And writing if else statements is, understanably, a bit more complicated with this constraint. And in HTML you really need an ‘e’ for some things, like styling things. So yes, the clock shows no fifth symbol, but the source code is not entirely without it. Every time I had to use that fifth glyph in the code I wrote an apology behind it.

If you know ways to improve this code please let me know.

Super ball

A few years ago we went on a family holiday to Levkas in Greece. There was a swimming pool at the little resort where we stayed, and in this pool there was a ball with which we used to play. It was a simple, cheap plastic ball. I think it was white with a brownish pattern of brownish illustrations on it.

Now these illustrations are the interesting part. As my eye sight got a bit blurry from the chlorine, after playing in the pool for a while, I noticed that the illustrations on the ball looked like a hand with a raised middle finger! Now imagine my pleasant surprise — as an old punk rocker — to find a ball with raised middle fingers in a swimming pool in the middle of nowhere in Greece.

On closer inspection it turned out that the pattern did not consist of raised middle fingers. Each middle finger was instead formed by the word “SUPER”. But it was set in such a way that it looked like a raised middle finger. Ever since that holiday in Greece, if someone yells That’s super! we wonder why they are so rude.

Kiki, my kid, remembers it like this:

The foot of the letter P is standing on the baseline, and its head sticks out above the other letters. You can click on the illustration to make it blurry.

But I think it was set like this:

The head of the letter P in this version is as high as the other letters, but its foot sticks out below the baseline. If you look at it upside down, it does look like a raised middle finger. You can click on it to emulate chlorine blurriness and to flip it upside down.

I know this is a long shot. But stranger things have been found on the internet. I would love to find this ball. Or a picture of this ball. It was a cheap plastic ball, and we played with it in Greece in the summer of 2016. I am not sure about the distribution of cheap plastic balls: are they regional? Or could it be that it was sold globally? I mean, who doesn’t want a Super ball?

So if you are an incredibly lucky owner of this ball, could you please send me a picture? Or if you would like to get rid of it, I would love to pay for the shipping costs. That would be super.