"The Clock" is a 24 hour hour long movie made by Christian Marclay which contains thousands of film clips each with a clock somewhere in them, so that the whole thing keeps the right time. Whilst scanning for the time in text may be tricky, the work involved in finding those clips is unimaginable. Sadly copies are only held by few museums.
I heard there were attempts to stitch together a remake with all the same scenes by some torrent site users. Not sure how far they got or if they ever finished.
The amazing progress of image recognition over the last few years would vastly reduce the amount of work required. You would need to chain together a more generic object recognition network, and feed the results into another trained network to detect numerals. Analogue clocks might work better with more traditional geometric detection.
That's great! As a web app, if you have a Kindle Fire you can do the following:
1. Go to the SETTINGS area
2. Click on DEVICE OPTIONS
3. Triple-tap the SERIAL NUMBER option, towards the bottom of the screen.
4. The DEVELOPER OPTIONS will now be accessible.
5. Find the option labeled STAY AWAKE. Click on it to ENABLE.
The Kindle will now remain on while charging (a "clock" mode). Load the page in Silk - kindle browser and you're set.
This would probably be more work than it is worth, but it would be neat to have an option to take into account time differences between the location in the quoted story and the user's location.
For example, this quote is used for 8:19:
> I had arranged to meet the Occupational Health Officer at 10:30. I took the train from Watford Junction at 8.19 and arrived at London Euston seven minutes late, at 8.49.|The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim|Jonathan Coe
If the location aware option were enabled, it would give that to me at 1:19, not 8:19, because I'm in PDT (UTC-0700).
(Well, 1:19 if London is not also on daylight savings time. If they are, then I'd get it at 0:19. This is one of the reasons it is probably more work than it is worth. You'd not only have to have the location information for the quotes, you'd also have to deal with the rules for daylight savings time in multiple locations. This would be a pain in the ass).
I think it is meant to be an interesting clock, not a good clock in the timekeeping sense. There are many times that do not have an associated quote, so the time it shows if often off by several minutes.
If you just need a good clock, https://time.is/ is hard to beat.
I think it would be interesting to, say, look at the clock just before 5 PM, as I'm getting ready to knock off work and find something fun to do, to be told that it is five minutes to midnight at Hogwarts and Dumbledore is advising Hermione that three turns should do it.
I think it still wants to be a useful clock, i.e., you want to be able to see at a glance how late it is where you are now. That's actually why the current time is highlighted.
Thanks, used the JSON files to quickly script a console version. Now I have a kitty giving me a nice quote with the time every time I open a new terminal :)
It's a very simple node.js application. If you don't like node.js the logic can be easily ported to any other language. I just didn't feel like parsing the data files with a shell script.
Some times have a lot of quotes (e.g. midnight and noon). In these cases the quote is selected at random. About a third of the minutes have no quote. The author of the Kindle project (Jaap) has fixed some of these by using a close vague quote (like 'around noon' for 11.57). The remaining missing minutes just use the closest earlier quote.
For those of you that hobby with this stuff, what would be the most stone cold simple cheap way to get a machine that would output this page into a monitor continuously?
Like if I had an extra display lying around and wanted to make a little wall installation, what’s the most direct path, something like a raspberry pi?
The difference between the "time" and "non-time" font styling is more subtle here - when I changed #main_text to have color: gray, it became a bit easier for me to see the time.
Should work fine on iPhone. Maybe you were unlucky to visit it at a point with no quote for the following minute or two, causing the same quote to be repeated.
If you're lucky it will still run with USB power attached. Depending on where/how you want to set it up that should be an option.
I did the same with mine. When I found it again it was dead, but I left it laying on my desk with the USB cord attached (accidentally). When I dug it up again a couple days later it was up and running. It will shut down almost immediately when I unplug it.
It's displaying a rotation of various webcomics now.
That's awesome! Up until now the only reason I have jailbroken every kindle I've owned is to have the screensaver be the book I'm reading rather than the dull preset ones. Finally I've found reason 2!
Had not even thought of that. I rooted mine so I can remotely drop books into it without having to go get it and plug it into my computers. Also, the ability to read epub files is really nice.
There is a send to kindle app [0] which has worked for every document I have ever tried and it works almost instantly. I use it a ton. It even works for epub books I have converted to mobi through calibre (doesn't work perfectly all the time but if you got some programming/hacking skills, you can make it work. I got a book that mobi kept trying to translate each paragraph into a separate page through a triple conversion from epub to single page html doc (then vim find/replace page breaks) and then to mobi).
If you have a firmware 5 kindle (Touch, Paperwhite, Voyage, Oasis), see the screensavers hack thread on Mobileread:
> Dou you prefer to just show the last thing that was on screen, with an overlay indicating when the device's alseep? Just drop a blank file named last in the linkss folder. Restart your Kindle ([HOME] -> [MENU] > Settings -> [MENU] > Restart; or simply use the Screen Savers > Restart framework now button in KUAL), and you're done
This is awesome. It would be cool to adapt the same idea to images which contain numbers (house numbers, highway exit signs, etc) like "1245" to represent 12:45. Since you've identified the number in the image, you could even blur the background slightly and add contrast between the image portion and background (since the numbers may only be a small part of the image).
Not very efficient, but a cool way of combining screensavers and clocks. Not sure how many "aesthetic" screensaver-quality images contain numbers though
A friend of mine in college decided to make an LED clock for an EE project. Everyone else who decides to make an LED clock strives for accurate time. My friend decided that nobody needs time closer than quarter hour intervals. So that's all it displayed - it was highly accurate to within 15 minutes.
Literally just saw this on the verge, nice project. Sadly I don't have an old kindle. I do have an old nook but I don't know if its possible to do the same with that
Nook is linux-based too IIRC. Should be possible to adapt the author's approach to the nook. You'd just need to root it using nook specific instructions.
That's cool! I was looking into doing a project that turned old Kindles into Meeting Room Booking Signage. Did anyone stumble upon previous work in that direction?
What I did was simple: Jailbreak it so I could get to the Android dev menu and disable sleep. Make a webpage with javascript that pulls in an image from yr.no (for weather) and gets xml from ruter.no (for subway times). Then just use the built in web browser and put it all in a frame to cover all the ugly parts and also covers the android status bar up top.
This is so cool! Just one ask: If you have gone through all these trouble, just make a GitHub repo to store your files so people can fork, contribute etc.
It is amazing that you throw away working and functional Kindles around when other parts of the world having one of those is extremelly expensive. Kudos for "America", where everything (I mean everything) is disposable.
