[HN Gopher] I Made a Rubbish Clock
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       I Made a Rubbish Clock
        
       Author : jgrahamc
       Score  : 110 points
       Date   : 2024-09-28 07:36 UTC (15 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (blog.jgc.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (blog.jgc.org)
        
       | benrutter wrote:
       | This is cool
       | 
       | Semi related- did I read this righr that Portugal has a bin
       | collection every day bar Sunday? (that sounds like _a lot_! I 'm
       | from the UK and where I live there's one a week)
        
         | zzbn00 wrote:
         | I think daily bin collection was normal in London until the mid
         | 1990s or so. Also post was delivered twice a day and picked up
         | from post boxes at least three times a day!
        
         | fodmap wrote:
         | There's also daily bin collection in Spain
         | https://www.expatica.com/es/living/household/recycling-in-sp...
        
           | extraduder_ire wrote:
           | The last time I was there this surprised me, until I realized
           | you really don't want your bins hanging out in that heat for
           | more than a day. Sometimes it gets pretty bad even during the
           | same day.
        
             | 082349872349872 wrote:
             | The iberians probably have cheap enough labour that they
             | needn't bother, but a high-capital low-labour sol'n is to
             | store rubbish deep enough* that even summer daytime
             | temperatures don't hit their surface peaks: eg
             | https://www.molok.com/benefits-and-principles/
             | 
             | * Fourier apparently worked this problem in relation to
             | wine storage; see also https://topex.ucsd.edu/geodynamics/H
             | W3_2010_presentations/C_...
        
         | jgrahamc wrote:
         | It depends where you live, but in general, yes, bin collection
         | happens every night except Sunday night. Here's the information
         | for Lisbon:
         | https://informacoeseservicos.lisboa.pt/servicos/dias-do-lixo
        
           | vasco wrote:
           | It really heavily depends where you live, in my hometown for
           | example it's every single day at most, but it can be less
           | depending on their assessed need. In my childhood street it's
           | every day. On the other hand you don't have a personal or
           | building bin, you only have street bins that everyone takes
           | their trash to. https://fagar.pt/residuos
        
         | lol768 wrote:
         | > where I live there's one a week
         | 
         | You're lucky you have this! So many councils have moved to
         | every-three-weeks for general refuse, now. Council tax hasn't
         | gone down to compensate, mind you. Not even the recycling is
         | weekly.
        
         | the_mitsuhiko wrote:
         | I'm not sure what the bin collection schedule in Vienna is but
         | what's really nice here is that I just don't have to think
         | about it. There is a garbage room in our building that the
         | recycling agency has a key to and they get the bins themselves.
         | I would guess they come twice a week to our building but the
         | garbage truck is in the street probably every day. Big
         | difference to my experience in London.
        
           | stevekemp wrote:
           | Similar here in Helsinki, there are a bunch of bins inside a
           | communically accessible room - paper, glass, metal, mixed,
           | plastic, and biological rubbish.
           | 
           | There's some fancy schedule for when the various bins are
           | emptied, but not something I think about. It seems to work
           | out okay.
           | 
           | Compared to Edinburgh where initially it was weekly, then
           | fortnightly, and now collections occur every three weeks from
           | what I remember. Recycling wasn't even an option unless you
           | counted the bottle-banks at the local Tesco.
        
         | amluto wrote:
         | Taiwan does this, too.
         | 
         | I think NYC should consider daily collection. They have a huge
         | curbside trash problem, and I suspect that there is so much
         | trash accumulation by the time the truck comes by that a lot of
         | labor is used putting the bags in the truck. Collecting 7x as
         | often seems like it would not require anywhere near 7x the cost
         | or labor, and the city would be a lot more pleasant with more
         | frequent collection.
        
           | sampullman wrote:
           | It depends where you are, in my city it's 5x/week, but twice
           | per day. They don't pick up bins though, you have to go down
           | and throw your bags into the truck.
        
       | nvader wrote:
       | I really enjoy seeing learning little maker projects like this on
       | HN. The inside scoop on SVG path is a bonus, and it's going into
       | my toolkit for a future day.
        
       | petepete wrote:
       | My bin schedule is slightly complicated by it cycling between
       | different recycling bins every 3 weeks. I think I'd need a bigger
       | clock.
       | 
       | Currently I have 3 recurring events in my calendar that remind me
       | the night before.
        
         | MrJohz wrote:
         | You could possibly fix this mechanically using three 7-day
         | clocks (and wheels) and a mechanism that switches which one is
         | being powered whenever a wheel reaches a certain point. But at
         | that point I might be more tempted to reach for a
         | microcontroller of some description!
        
           | the_mitsuhiko wrote:
           | You can also just attach a 3:1 gear.
        
         | Freak_NL wrote:
         | I live right at a street corner, so even if I were to forget
         | that tomorrow is bin-day, I can hear neighbours rolling theirs
         | out in any case, and the lid colour tells me which bin it is. I
         | rarely forget though; I just put up the paper year calendar for
         | bin days we get end of December near the door.
        
           | moepstar wrote:
           | Interesting - I'd have thought that most of the world
           | would've moved to digital by now.
           | 
           | Here in Germany, you can get the whole year as .ics to import
           | into your calendar, works for most cities... usually, there
           | are different schedules per street/neighborhood, so that's
           | really convenient!
        
             | borski wrote:
             | That's true for a lot of cities. I have this in Cupertino,
             | and used to have it in Mountain View.
             | 
             | Most people just don't seem to check their website.
        
       | 082349872349872 wrote:
       | A debugger I used to use had a `phase of the moon` command,
       | presumably so you could track if your difficult-to-repro bug had
       | any correlation.
       | 
       | Should I ever be tempted to make an analogue equivalent, it was
       | worth learning that
       | https://www.youngtownco.com/en/product-655753/Moon-Phase-Clo...
       | is a thing.
        
         | Luc wrote:
         | > A debugger I used to use had a `phase of the moon` command
         | 
         | Which debugger would that be, or am I not getting the joke?
        
           | cbarrick wrote:
           | `Phase of the moon` has an entry in the Jargon File, meaning
           | "reliability seems to be dependent on conditions nobody has
           | been able to determine."
           | 
           | It is a reference to a real bug from long ago.
           | 
           | I would not be surprised if this was included as an Easter
           | egg in a debugger, as a reference to this legend.
           | 
           | http://catb.org/jargon/html/P/phase-of-the-moon.html
        
           | gavinsyancey wrote:
           | The MULTI debugger includes an optional phase-of-the-moon
           | display, in the dead space in the lower right between the
           | horizontal and vertical scrollbars in windows that have both
           | :)
        
         | nlawalker wrote:
         | Related:
         | 
         | "The code worked differently when the moon was full"
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39452193
         | 
         | "You are lucky, full moon tonight"
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40472226
        
       | dezgeg wrote:
       | I found this part funny:
       | 
       | > Also, I really didn't want yet another thing with [...] code to
       | debug (there comes a time in every programmer's life when they
       | can't face debugging yet another thing that should be simple and
       | just work)
       | 
       | ... when two paragraphs later comes the code to generate a SVG :)
        
         | jgrahamc wrote:
         | Yes! I am a programmer, of course, but my graphic design skills
         | are non-existent so my only choice was to write some code. But,
         | thank goodness, that code only has to run once and doesn't have
         | to interact with WiFi, an API, or anything else!
        
           | the_mitsuhiko wrote:
           | As I'm getting older (and have seen more of my "smart"
           | solutions turn into terrible maintenance nightmares) I'm now
           | fully on board with that general idea. The simple things just
           | keep working and it's great.
        
           | stavros wrote:
           | I'm with you, the less complexity the better. I hate having
           | to maintain ten thousand things around the house.
        
       | rammer wrote:
       | Why?
       | 
       | Doesn't your council give a fridge magnet which has the dates in
       | the calendar printed clearly?
       | 
       | Why overcomplicate?
        
         | ramon156 wrote:
         | Because it's fun (:
        
         | ryukoposting wrote:
         | Huh, I wish American municipalities did this. Maybe some of
         | them do, but certainly nowhere I've ever lived.
        
           | Zircom wrote:
           | Most American towns have one pickup day for both recycling
           | and trash, and only one type of recycling anyways. Kind of
           | unnecessary to print hundreds of thousands just to mark
           | Tuesday or Friday every week on them.
        
       | andai wrote:
       | I had a neighbor with Alzheimers who was often confused about
       | whether it was morning or evening (she only had analog, 12-hour
       | clocks). She seemed to have two days per day, and I'd often hear
       | her 6am alarm go off at 6pm.
       | 
       | I made a simple web app for her that showed the time along with
       | the bold text MORNING, AFTERNOON, EVENING etc. I set this up on
       | her tablet by the wall, but every time I visited it had been
       | switched off (all the way), and she had no memory of it being set
       | up. (Presumably her bedtime routine involved "turning off the
       | computer"...)
       | 
       | So I just bought her an analog Alzheimer's clock (a 24 hour clock
       | with some colors and pictures to indicate the time of day --
       | quite similar to OP's design actually). She took readily to that
       | one.
        
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       (page generated 2024-09-28 23:01 UTC)