The Procrastinator’s Clock: Desktop Editions

The Procrastinator’s Clock: Desktop Editions
The Procrastinator’s Clock: Desktop Editions
Posted on January 18, 2007 in Productivity
(last edited on April 29, 2014 at 1:27 am)

Procrastinator'By request, I’ve made stand-alone PC and Mac versions of The Procrastinator’s Clock. If you missed it yesterday, it’s a clock that is up to 15 minutes fast, but speeds up and slows down randomly to keep you from guessing how fast it really is.

I’ve made a few quick improvements too:

  • Quarter hour chimes have been added. Enable them by clicking the speaker icons at the top of the time display. At the top of the hour, you’ll hear a low chime ring an equal number of times to the hour. On the 15, 30, and 45-minute marks, you’ll hear a high chime ring 1, 2, and 3 times respectively.
  • Bug fix: 12:00 midnight to 12:59AM now displays correctly (it was showing 0:00 – 0:59)
  • Scaling is now supported and looks a little nicer. Try typing CTRL-F (Command-F on Mac) to go full-screen, and ESC to cancel.
  • Aesthetic fix: color on the disabled AM/PM indicator desaturated so it doesn’t look awful.
  • Added MochiBot tracking support to SWF and projectors.

To grab the new files, visit the Procrastinator’s Clock Page and scroll to the very bottom. Enjoy! :-)

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10 Comments

  1. Pete Holiday 18 years ago

    I’ve always wanted an alarm clock that would operate like this… the flash version is neat, but I think it would be much cooler to set up an NTP time server so that you could sync your system time to a procrastinator’s clock.

  2. zzap 18 years ago

    Nice idea.

  3. Travis Vocino 18 years ago

    Now that is awesome.

  4. Dave Seah 18 years ago

    Pete: That’s GENIUS!!! :-) I’m not familiar with the NTP protocol itself, but I don’t think system clocks sync regularly enough with network time servers to work in the same way as this clock.

  5. Pete Holiday 18 years ago

    I’m not terribly familiar, either, although my windows docs say that windows syncs once a week. Maybe less complicated would be a program which runs as a windows service (or mac equiv) and both:

    <ol>
    <li>Works like your flash version except by directly modifying the system clock, and</li>
    <li>once a week handles syncing with NTP so that it can keep track of the “correct” time. </li>
    </ol>

    Just some thoughts. I love this.

  6. Tracy Smith 18 years ago

    I like the idea of setting up the NTP server.  Then, if we could just synch all of our clocks in the house to an NTP server, we would never be late again.

  7. Dave Seah 18 years ago

    Messing with the system clock directly through a service is kind of a scary idea, since it’s used for auditing system events, tagging emails, etc. Timestamps are also useful with certain processes like version control. I guess that kind of nixes the idea of using NTP as well. A system taskbar replacement probably is the easiest to do. I wish I knew how to write one.

  8. John Hritz 18 years ago

    Very very cool.  I’ve been playing with running this in tandem with the Emergent Task timer too.  Thanks for refining these tools.

    Best,

    John

  9. Manu 18 years ago

    I spot at least THREE monitors on that pic…makes me feel much better about myself :)

  10. Dave Seah 18 years ago

    manu: Here’s a better view. There are another couple monitors upstairs in a secondary email station, and another one in the server room.