Episode: 4124
Title: HPR4124: Developing a project
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4124/hpr4124.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 19:53:00

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4,124 for Thursday the 23rd of May 2024.
Today's show is entitled, Developing a Project.
It is hosted by Lee and is about seven minutes long.
It carries an explicit flag.
The summary is, Collaborating to Develop an Alternative Time System.
Hi, I'm Lee.
I'm going to talk today about developing a long-term project, starting from a vague concept
and ending up with stuff that does something in the real world.
This will be based on my experience as collaborating with someone to make things that measure
and present the time.
It all started five years ago when I met a Dutchman called Ben-A while on a course that
was being held in the South London Church.
During the break he was doing something on the knife pad and I asked him about it.
What he began to explain to me was that he had an interesting obsession with different
possible ways of telling the time.
Next time we met, I showed him a simple Python script he could run on his iPad using
an app called Pythonista which counted through the seconds but would easily allow different
symbols to be displayed and for the size-coloured position of these symbols to be altered.
And I was amazed what he showed me the next time we met.
The Python script had grown from a few dozen lines to hundreds if not thousands.
It was what I can only describe as psychedelic and somewhat incomprehensible.
It was seemingly counting up to eleven then repeating in different permutations.
Explain to me that from his point of view it counted to ten the extra like a breather
before the next iteration and the idea was that bigger units composed of the smaller
ones would behave in the same way.
Some months passed of a sort of back and forth we started working on a clock one with ten
segments and several concentric rings.
When the segments of one ring were full that ring would then empty and the next ring
would count one segment.
What was tantalising was that with four rings and using the logic I've described the whole
sequence was in the region of a 7th of a day.
The revelation came when we decided that once all the rings were full growing outwards the
rings should then count one more of each unit growing in the reverse direction inward
rather than outward.
This was now exactly a 7th give or take a few seconds and that stage the idea went from
a vague notion to something that could be potentially practical in some context.
What followed over the course of several years was implementing this core idea in as many
different ways as possible.
This included physical clocks using RGB LEDs and Arduino microcontrollers in a 3D printed
case programmed in C++, further software page types mainly with Python and iOS but also
dipping into Java script and Lua and working on different platforms such as Apple's Watch
OS, Google's Android and most recently Google's Wear OS.
I did discover that while I was busy programming Ben I would lose focus on what we were trying
to achieve, get distracted and start off on new concepts.
This is a bit frustrating because I would like to follow through on one particular application
to extend its mature enough to be a product others would find appealing and useful.
He hasn't, as yet not fully developed, concept that his units of time can be represented
by three dimensional objects of different volumes.
This is something I've yet to grok in terms of it being practical, although a few months
ago he did work with someone else to produce a demo in Blender which I admit looked interesting.
Ben also says that this should not just be visual but that sound should be part of the
experience.
I haven't been able to produce anything that really puts flesh on to the bones of that
idea.
A year or so ago I did try to involve him by making a clock designer running on Android in
which he can lay out the different units of his clock using components.
Things struggled with an app for the Apple Watch which could not be realised due to various
restrictions of the OS, we had more success creating a version for a Wear OS device.
This uses the colour and thickness of rings rather than the sequence of individual segments
to count out the time, as this is easier to read on a very small display.
Ben I now wears this watch every day and we started work on a Pomodoro style timer to
come neither watch face.
Being a spare time project the work over the years has not exactly been well managed.
A lot of the code and associated artifacts get bunged onto a private GitHub repository
and rather than incrementally building progressively better versions of the code, version control
consists of copying the previous version and incrementing the suffix before saving
it as a new file.
This willful disregard for proper version control may not be as bad as it sounds, since
we have no idea which version will turn out to be useful in the end, so it's best to
be able to see it at glance all of them, not just the latest version.
While I'd like to tell you this time system is revolutionary and in the future everyone
will throw away their 24 hour clocks and divide the day to 7, despite all the effort I've
put into it I'm still not solved myself.
Ben I would have a lot more to say about it and he would tell you why all the symbols
and colours and names have special significance and why our lives are restricted by the dominant
time system and that we all need that extra second in between to live our lives well.
I've repeatedly asked Ben I to record something for HPR, but if you have a friend with ADHD
you'll be familiar with the response not now and other time, so it's up to you to decide
if he is a symptom of my schizophrenia, like Tyler Durden in Fight Club or whether he
really exists.
As corroborating evidence I could point you to the website he asked me to make for him,
then got too distracted to pay any more attention.
But perhaps I'd better talk about that and the intricacies of installing WordPress on
the VPS and misusing a Spanish TLD because you want the domain to end.es another time.
If the project has achieved nothing else I hope it's helped Ben I to appreciate his
own potential and that his overabundance of creativity can be put to use.
When I met him he was unemployed at a turning point in his life, he now has progressed
back to a steady job and is pursuing a number of constructive endeavors.
There's a little more info about how the time system works at github.com forward slash
time prism, forward slash introduction, including a working demo that runs in the web browser.
But anyone who's interested in different time systems, refer you to Wikipedia to read
about decimal time, the interesting revival a few decades ago by swatch named Beat Time
as well as HPI episode 4048 a few months ago, which was about ship spells, noting the classical
system of ship spells also divided the day to seven.
That's all for this episode, whatever time you'll keep you and keep it well and thanks
for listening.
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