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hpr_transcripts/hpr4124.txt

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+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
+
+---
+
+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.
+You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio does work.
+Today's show was contributed by a HBR listener like yourself.
+If you ever thought of recording broadcast, click on our contribute link to find out how
+easy it really is.
+Hosting for HBR has been kindly provided by an onsthost.com, the internet archive and
+rsync.net.
+On this advice status, today's show is released on our creative comments, attribution 4.0
+international license.