I originally built this in Visual BASIC in 1994 for a friend who was in McMurdo Base Antarctica waiting on an 'Air Drop!' that was still months away, that would bring fresh food and much-desired mail to its denizens. It was a looming event everyone was anticipating and the waiting was cruel. No shortages but the 'freshies' run out first and for long spans everyone had to eat from cans, which saps morale. People would barter for spare batteries. I said via email "Sorry I cannot help you... but HERE is something that will make the wait even harder to bear! Hopefully it will become funny after awhile." So I sent him a CALCLOCK counting down to Air Drop. For awhile I used it countdown to various things and to make life clocks.

It stopped working a long ago. It was made using 16-bit Visual BASIC so ancient it even crashes the wine emulator today.

This is the 2025 rewrite. Runs everywhere, 76k self contained html using js/svg elements built on the fly.

Set from-time to NOW and to-time to the date of something in the future, and it becomes a countdown clock and will be 'all hands up' when the future moment arrives.

Set to-time to a day and time of birth and hit the BIRTHDAY button. This sets from-date to a year before the birth. Since the to-event is long past, it is showing elapsed time since birth and the blue and gray hand in the center will track the year as it leads up to the birthday again. The 'flip' button mirrors the clock horizontally for clockwise/anticlockwise. Or hit flip repeatedly and make the hands dance.

You can also SAVE a local copy to a folder that loads the clock with the current settings. The EVENT NAME becomes the title of the window or browser tab.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46380963

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