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.

Two square clocks, the one points at 9:00 and the other at 9:07:30.

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.

A clock that points exactly at 9 o’clock.

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

A clock that points 9:07:30, with a very long minute hand.

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.

A clock that points 10:30, with a very long hour hand.

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 might add it to the fourth typewriter clock I’m working on. It’s a version that types out the time in words. I’ll ad a link to it when it’s done. 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

There’s one thing I dislike about this clock, and that’s the fact that I have to deal with things like licences. There’s this thing called copyright, and then there are licences to use copyrighted material, and my mind just doesn’t work that way. But I think that, with the help of Erik, I came up with a sensible set of licences, that you have to agree with if you want to add pictures to this project. Most importantly: your images must be yours, and you must agree to publish them under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence. And that is by far the most boring paragraph I’ve ever written on this site. I am really sorry about that.

Blah’blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah, blah blah’blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Blah’blah blah blah blah blah, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah, blah blah blah blah blah’blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah, blah blah blah blah blah, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah: blah blah blah blah blah, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah Blah Blah Blah-Blah 4.0 Blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah’blah blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah blah.

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.