No-Nonsense Clock

The No-Nonsense Clock is a clock for Windows that tells the time without any non-sense getting in the way, such as second hands, or accuracy.

Who needs accuracy?!

The program simply tells the time the way you think of the time. It is a project that has been eighteen years in the making, and I have recently updated it for Windows 11.

Tells the time the way you think of it.

The code is written in BBC BASIC for Windows. If you ask nicely I will provide the source code, or if you just want to run the executable program yourself, you can download and have a play.

DOWNLOAD No-Nonsense Clock Version 4.01

If you enjoyed this post then you probably need to have a good, hard long think about your life, but if that's not enough, then you might like to explore some of the other 'nonsense' on this blog such as:

More clock stuff  or  'Funny' stuff

I've updated my Day Clock

Today I updated my Web Day Clock.

Day clock running on my Dell Chromebook showing the 'spring' colour theme. Who am I kidding? It is grey all year round (but the images do change - I promise!)

The Day Clock features real-time clock, date and some interesting facts about the current day. Each fact has been painstakingly mined from Wikipedia and I am pretty certain that I now have every month of the year covered. It is my fond wish that someday, someone, somewhere will use this clock to tell the time and, in amazement at the current fact, say, 'gosh, that long ago, huh?'.

If you like this post, then you might also like Random Movie Titles.
Failing that, you might just like to move on to my other website.

Updated day clock

Today I have been updating my day clock to include even more historic events, pagan festivals and international days of this and that.

It would be great if you went and had a look, and even better if you set it as your homepage.

Seasonal change for the day clock

Today was a lovely summery day in old Blighty.  It was good to generate some vitamin D, but I guess that was our summer over for another year.  If you blink then you miss it.

It reminded me that my day clock needed updating. The old autumnal leaves I posted originally back in December no longer seem appropriate. So today I added a rolling background image that changes with the seasons. There is a different image for each time of year: Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter.

Do please check it out.

The old Autumnal version. Do click it to see what's new.

Day clock page

Following on from yesterday's Dementia Day Clock, I decided to create a new Day Clock with a little more information - for instance - accurate time.

Day clock on my Lumia 950. Click the image to load the new Day Clock.

I managed to export the data from the Perpetual Calendar for the BBC microcomputer using BeebEm and then wrote a script to convert the data from a BBC text file into a JSON file. The data contains the dates of various interesting anniversaries, and so I thought it would be a nice touch to show these on the new day clock, including a calculation of how long ago the event took place.  For example today is the 41 year anniversary of the UK Sex Discrimination Act 1975.

BeebEm has some really useful tools, most notably the 'export' function which allows you to export one or more files from a BBC disk image to a PC format. This means that I can code a file on the BBC microcomputer, but still access or edit it on my Windows 10 machine. Yay!

I then added in 'red-letter' days, or other recurring events including holidays and Pagan festivals (from Pagan Calendar). I cannot be absolutely sure I haven't made any errors here, but I'll keep checking that this works and then add some more date/time information as and when.

The final touch was to put the current time into the new page tab so you can check the time in your list of browser tabs without navigating back to the page.

Well that's it for now. In the future I may add some other features, perhaps a background image that changes with each passing month. Maybe I shall put a Google search box in, or other widgets such as weather. Maybe I'll just sack it off and build something else.

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Come back soon for more nerdy stuff.

If you liked this post, then you might also like to watch some bouncing balls, or just play a game of Have Spell Will Travel.

My BBC Master 128 projects part 04

You will have been following my BBC Master computer projects series religiously.

I am trying to write some apps to turn my 30-year-old BBC microcomputer into an everyday productivity machine.  Sure, it can't handle multitasking and there is no network connection, but it is still an incredibly sophisticated machine, relatively speaking.

Today I wrote the start of the time app.  It is named 'Timely' and features various timing functions:

• clock
• timer
• countdown
• alarms

All in glorious teletext graphics.

The BBC Master has a battery-backed CMOS RAM clock, something my model 'B' computer lacked. This is an incredibly useful thing as it means that the clock stays accurate even when the machine is switched off. This might not seem that impressive when compared to modern machines, however it does make this thirty-year-old brute something of a useful machine.

Timely clock showing current time, date and a friendly message.

The timer function counts up in seconds. You can flip to the timer display by pressing button '2' and reset the timer back to 0000:00:00 by pressing SHIFT+'2'. You can switch back to the clock display by pressing '1' without affecting the timer.

The Timely timer clock 31 seconds after launching the app.

The count-down function works like the (count-up) timer, except that it is access used button '3' and reset using SHIFT-3.  You can specify the duration of the countdown from anywhere from 1 second to 1000 hours (numbers larger than this causes an overflow error, which although I think I can solve, it is unlikely that I will want to set count downs for times accurate to a second over a duration longer than 41 days!).

Setting a Timely countdown.  The countdown will generate an alert when it has finished, regardless of which mode you are currently in.

I have implemented five different user-programmed alarms.  Alarms can be set for any minute of any hour throughout the thrird Millenium.  Alarms generate an alert when they complete along with a custom message.  The difference between 'alarms' and 'countdowns' is that the alarms are saved on disk between uses of the clock.  The only problem is, of course, that the alarm will only sound if the app is actually running at the time!

Setting an alarm.

What's next?

I would like to implement:

• hourly chimes;
• calendar functions;
• summary of items that are 'due' from the 'Listy' app;
• other time/date functions, eg date of next Easter, or number of days until a due date; moon phase, position of Halley's comet, etc etc.

Well, that's it for now. You might want to roll your eyes and scroll down to this image of my floppy disk collection.

For computing history fans, these are double-sided, double-density 5 and a quarter inch disks.

The BBC disk filing system allows for up to 31 files, or about 200KiB of storage, whichever happens first.

Still scrolling down?

You might like to read about my chatbot project, or my English dictionary project, or just want to play an adventure game.

A simple Clock App in BBC BASIC

     rem Simple Clock
     mode 12:off
     repeat
       date$ = left$( time$, 15)
       clock$ = right$( time$, 8)
       *font Courier New, 60
       print tab(2, 3)date$
       *font Courier New, 94
       print tab(2,3)clock$
       wait 50
     until false

This code produces a very simple, but rather effect clock app.