Monday, February 21, 2011

NTS and wall clocks... why not?

When you want to know the time, where do you look?  At your wristwatch or a wall clock?...No.  You look at your cellphone.  Your cellphone, besides being the lifeline to work, family and friends, is also the most accurate clock around.

Calls require exquisite timing to allow signal modulation and hand-off between towers.  So the clock is constantly being updated.  Computers also benefits from time updates... its called NTS (Network Time Service).

So, I'm tired of adjusting my plain old battery driven wall clock.  Why can't I find a wall clock that connects to my WiFi and sets itself by NTP to the correct time.  Just once a week is good enough to make me love my wall clock again.  Sure, my battery will get eaten up faster... but once a month is a pretty small power drain.

How about that digital alarm clock that makes you either too late or too early for work twice a year (in places that enjoy the insanity of Daylight Savings Time)?  With WiFi and NTP, you'll forget that DST even happens.

I'm talking about a clock that has a USB port, client software for the operating system of your choice to allow configuration (loading the wireless SID and password, choosing the relevant time zone and NTP server), and a stripped down WiFi client that listens on UDP port 123 for 10 seconds and then sleeps for 7 days.  In a face clock, there will need to be a weak motor to advance the hands.

Does anyone feel that we are pretty silly not to have clocks like this already?

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