Slashdot Mirror
Human Clock (Complete with Hands!)
soulsteal writes: "Some people with too much time on their hands have decided to make a clock of, for, and by the people! Humanclock allows for anyone anywhere to set their time zone and view over 1100 pictures of people posing with one of the 1440 minutes available each day. On the geek side, their server is a Radio Shack 2.4mhz TRS-80 Model 100 portable running a port of Aache and PHP." Something seems extremely suspicious about that server ...
This harkens back to yesteryear. The FishCam, the internet enabled coffee maker, etc.
Reminds me of the good old days, when people had way too much time on their hands and creativity was rampant.
A nice break from the current spam infested and x10.com peddling (oops, I mean, "business friendly") Internet.
Some of my friends and I populate almost the entire 1 AM hour. All the photos in that block were taken at a club here in Pittsbugh, PA. Not all the photos are of us, though -- running around the club and asking random people to let us take their pictures for a website was really fun while drunk, and a surprising number of people agreed. I think we only had one or two people refuse.
I think my favorite pic of the three of us that did the photo-taking is the one at 1:59 AM, because I'be been told I ended up looking like Gary Oldman in that one.
This is not a Fugazi
---------------------------------- Jump on it.. you know you want to.
You know, when I first read this post, I thought "Wow, thanks for pointing that out, I never would have gotten it..." But, then I realized something. There are a fair number of Slashdotters who *didn't* get it! I find that remarkably unbelieveable... but, perhaps that's just my misplaced faith in the intelligence of the common man rearing it's ugly head...
Read the post. They are running the Aache server, not Apache.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Oh dear lord, some people have *no* sense of humour. This isn't a hoax. Hoaxes are, generally speaking, at least marginally believable. There is usually an attempt on the part of the hoaxers to actually convince others that what they are claiming is true. This, OTOH, is *obviously* a JOKE. I mean, come on... 4 gigs on a tape? The webserver powered on 4 "AA" batteries (double coupon day)? Heck, even tim knew it was a joke: "Something seems extremely suspicious about that server..."! OTOH, at least I can now see just how thick some Slashdotters are...
Spoken like an unmarried man.
-no broken link
Now that is a feat! > We hired a crack team of crafty crack monkeys > that were able to modify the Apache source code > and reduce it down to a 25k text file that runs > under the BASIC interpreter native to the Tandy > TRS-80 Model 100. Those were some smart monkeys. I would love to see that code.
It's dead jim!
Yegods, the poor thing never had a chance...
there site gives a thanks to Amazing!
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
And being a hardware hacker myself I would also insist that you are dead wrong and it is possible. It may be a bogus story but your reasoning is dead wrong.
Got Code?
err, that wasn't the point
I was talking about using tapes on trs80 in general, not using z80 assembler on a model 100
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
I bet we could overclock the cassette tape recorder .... get higher thruput ....
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
Actually You can lease the 4:20 spot. The current auction is over at ebay. Here's the link.
they can't, really. but they can make it terribly difficult to get the images by naming them cryptically (the md5 sum is a one-way hash of image contents... so trying to guess them is non-trivial). so you could manually visit the site, once a minute, for 24 hours, and save every image that comes up, and rename it locally.
or you could just take the pictures yourself. that would be my best option.
('while true; do wget -r -l0 http://thesite/; sleep 60; done' for 24 hours would also work, with some awk/perl goodness to rename the files, but who really cares that much?)
I love the first bid on that auction.
-no broken link
well at least we don't have to worry about it spreading the worm ;)
Server: Apache/1.3.14 (Unix) PHP/4.0.3 AuthMySQL/2.20
Getting MySQL to fit on a TRS-80 is even more impressive, I think.
Uhm, are there really poop and puke commands in BASIC?
Ken
Ken
Of course, I still have some of my earliest z80 code on cassette somewhere still in my basement (the integrated monitor on my ModelIII died and I never got around to trying to get it fixed while there might have been replacements parts around, now forget it. Man, I never should have donated that model 1 to the library!)
;-)
I think the point is that without a record head, a walkman would be pretty useless for a TRS-80 (unless you already had the data on tape and just wanted read-only).
Yeah, this is obviously a joke. Part of me was momentarily hopeful that someone had actually hacked a TRS-80 into a http server, though.
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
it went down with all hands :)
JET Program: see Japan, meet intere
troll? huh?
Not only that, "all I/O done through the headphone jack"? Right. Sure.
(And is the plural of "walkman" walkmans or walkmen?)
if the answer isn't violence, neither is your silence / freedom of expression doesn't make it alright
First, there is a Zilog Z80 variant that is marketed as a web server on a chip. Of course, the ez80190 runs at 50MHz and can address up to 16MB of memory, a far cry from the old Z80-A or 8080. (the chip itself only appears to have 8KB of SRAM, however, which is pretty similar to a TRS-80 or yore)
Second, the storage capacity of audio cassette tapes should not be underestimated. We can reasonably espect that the maximum storage density of an audio cassette is similar to the maximum bandwidth of vioce telephone lines (audio cassettes probably have a higher storage density, in fact, because the vioce telephone line bandwith is artificially limited in order to filter out varous kinds of noise). If we could record at 32Kbaud we would be able to store 10MB (that's Mega BYTES) on one side of a 90 minute tape.
Looked at another way, a cassette tape can store about the same amount of information as your average CD (they store about the same amount of music, and cassette tapes are actually better fidelity that audio CDs, they just degrade faster and don't reproduce well on consumer grade equipment), which means that we could actually expect to get something more like 600MB-800MB if we had really good recording and playback equipment. Not too shaby.
Of course, with a normal tape player we would have an average seek time of over 20 minutes, but you have to make some compromises for this level of geekiness. I can think of a few ways to decrease the seek time, but we are still talking about something on the order of minutes rather than a reasonable value in the range of seconds.
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:j7H61q2E32M:w ww.humanclock.com/+&hl=en
I don't believe this. For those of you who can't access the page because the poor TRS-80 couldn't handle it, these guys are leasing the rights to 4:20 am/pm! For the current bid price of $66, you can have your picture come up when it turns 4:20. See the auction at ebay
Lawrence Lessig is my personal hero.
Slashdot should start an annual geek hoax award. Let people vote on whether or not they consider certain websites/products to be hoaxes or not. The winner is the one that fools the largest percentage.
Does anybody remember some story on here about some PCI card that turned out to be a hoax?
...and it's even harder to use two-letter variable names.
I assume you meat U$ and PW$ (or DIM PW$,7 - see getpwnam(3) man page!)... not lame long names like LOGIN$ and PASSWORD$, those weren't there until DOS and QBasic.
Well, I suppose I will use cc64 and raw 6502 assembler for my microcomputing needs. Commodore basic was one of the most hideous programming environments Microsoft has ever produced =)
oh god, thinkgeek is going to pack it into corn syrup and add caffeine by the end of the week....
Here is the Web Server Description: *click* (unslashdotted google archive :))
:))
Ah yes, and it is a joke for everyone who did not get it the first time
> i have two if they need a spare!
Cool, we could set up a Beowulf cluster...
"Life is like a sewer - what you get out of it depends on what you put into it" - Tom Lehrer
All I get is a picture of a guy holding up a sign that says 12:00, then he takes it away, then he holds it back up again, then he takes it away again, then he...
The government's moral compass is controlled by GPS.
In times of crises, they alter it to suit their needs.
Yes... yes, precisely... :)
I wonder if it's significant to the joke in some way that the ROM of the Tandy Model 100 is reputed to be the last code that Bill Gates actually wrote himself?
We are inspired by this human clock thing, and will implement a clone ourselves.
Look for martianclock.com, featuring pictures for all 24 hours and 37 minutes using photographs of live martians.
Unlike humanclock.com, and due to the long distances involved, we'll be using a cluster of Commodore 64 and Atari 800XL machines to handle the web server(s).
"Trust me - I know what I'm doing."
- Sledge Hammer
Did anyone else notcie that goatse.cx now has a warning. That wasn't there on the weekend.
-no broken link
It's Slashdotted right now, so I guess I'll have to check back later... I'm just hoping they didn't get creative in using certain appendages for the second hand.
-----
Free P2P Backup, Windows & Linux
That's it... I want a humanclock slashbox :o)
"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear"
See, they really knew what they were doing but those spoilsports in Redmond, M$, took over the world with their inferior version of BASIC that they bundled with the OS. It has caused untold missery across the world. Millions of Dollars have been lost, hundreds of millions of man hours wasted trying to fix things. It would all be OK if only they had POOP and PUKE.
Timex Sinclair also had superior IT, and my site uses a 1600, much expanded. It takes a licking and keeps on ticking.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
i have two if they need a spare!
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
WOW, can you really do that?!?! How many users can it support during a certain time frame?
I gotta make myself one of those!
Wonder if anybody has any links about incredible web servers like this one?!?
SIGSIG -- signature too long (core dumped)
...what have I done?
"I have become death - destroyer of worlds" -Oppenheimer
That brave little TRS-80 never had a chance....
* Havokmon slaps smack_attack with a tuna.
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
I'd be amazed if anyone actually believed that it was a TRS-80. Those things didn't have the RAM to even hold a single JPG image, much less serve them from a tape cassette player!
But still...there's one born every minute...
you obvously didn't have a trs-80... I had one, and I used a audio tape to save my basic programs. Yeah, its a joke, you can't save 4GB on an audio cassette, but using a cassette tape for a TRS-80 is quite real.
The term "Slashdot Effect" is so passe, so...nineties.
Now "Slashdot-Gangbang"...much better!
All in favor??
Co-founder and designer at Music Nearby: http://musicnearby.com
(110) Connection timed out
Reminds me of some sage advice once imparted unto me that many here can benefit from.
Do not go straight home from work for the first week of marriage. Hang out, go to a park for an hour, park and read a book, do anything, but do not go straight home to your new wife. If you go straight home, she will expect it to be that way for the rest of the marriage.
Trust me on this one.
Yes, this may seem sexist, but I don't know any guys who flip when their spouse shows up at 6:05 instead of 6.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Is just me or does anyone else here read "TRS-80" as "Trash Eighty?" It's just automatic for me now.
Well, it looks like it only took three weeks from putting the site up until it got Slashdotted. I've been building the site and taking pictures for the last two months. I haven't had time to write a FAQ for the site yet. But the reason the picture filenames are MD5 hashes is so you can't easily see other times. A lot of people want to just be able to clickity click their way through the entire set of pictures as if it were a p0rn site...and I didn't want that. If you want to see a certain time, you have to wait.
There are some interesting photos on the site. Jimi Hendrix's grave is at 8:15pm, Richard Buckner is at 8:14pm, and there is an entire hours worth of pictures from 1am - 2am that were taken at a Goth party in Pittsburgh. (thanks D33!)
Now I gotta go downtown and reboot the server... (on -> off -> on)
Is there someway we could also add a humanclock slashbox? You know I need that right below my 'Oblique Strategy' box.
-Jeff
Imagine, playboy-esque models posing to the time of day, ticking along on your desktop...
It'd be almost like the Naked News
~ now you know
20 PRINT "LOGIN: "
30 INPUT LOGIN$
40 PRINT "PASSWORD: "
50 INPUT PASSWORD$
60 GOTO 10
You don't notice this until you actually try: after a few years of Perl programming, it's hard to put those dollar signs at the end, and even harder to leave off the semi-colons. :-(
Mike
--Ask a silly person, get a silly answer.
Better yet, use a looping tape. So, the real question is, if you encoded the information onto a fibre-optic line, how long would the line have to be to hold enough data in-transit that youwould need no other storage medium. And, would all the data go past fast enough that you could display a new image every minute (or even second), or, would you have to interleve the data. Or, spread it out...
Take a look at the page source on one of the pages with a clock picture on it - The web programmer who put the site together was having a little fun (The joke changes every time the page reloads) :)
Umm... the fact that they claim the webserver is running off a TRS-80 is a total sidebar to the story. The original story, if you notice by the title of the posting, and most of the content, was about the Human Clock they're hosting. Try to read things a little closer next time, m'kay?
please don't /. the hell out of the site before 4:20, I kinda want to see that.
Hammer of Truth
So my calculator uses as much power as his server... ouch
No sig for you.
I wonder how a TRS-80 is going to handle the Slashdot effect...
Hoax. Right up there with the potato server.
if the answer isn't violence, neither is your silence / freedom of expression doesn't make it alright
Assuming it does work (which it looks like it might), calling that a port of apache is like calling INPUT $NAME: PRINT "HELLO "+$NAME a port of MS Word for my Apple II. Sure, it prints some stuff out... Configurable stuff, at that... But...
That site is great -- funny as hell.
-Puk
p.s. Sorry if my BASIC is rusty -- it has been like 15 years.
Slashdot comment wrapping may break this URL:
& mo de_w=on&site=www.humanclock.com&submit=Examine
;)
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph/?mode_u=off
Besides, the webserver page claims all the data for the images is stored on a TDK cassette tape. They say "we estimate we can get 4gb on the tape before we have to turn it over".
Its a joke guys. A funny one, but a joke
Lord Pixel - The cat who walks through walls
A little bigger on the inside than out
Why not? It is a nice example of people coming together, making some funny pictures out of real life and go and make them a clock. I don't care if this is "too much time on your hands production", but I like it. It is a waste of bandwidth ... So what? Stupid people talking on their mobile phones about things like "honey I left the office and I will be home in half an hour" and jamming up the capacity of the mobile phone cells during rush hour are wasting bandwidth, too ...
From the site:
On Tuesday the server went down for about 12 hours because the AA batteries in it died and I had to go out and buy new ones.
And you think this thing can stand up to the usual slashdot-gangbang? Novel idea but you'd better invest in some real hardware if you're gonna put up Geeky cool content like this!
Unless they were overclocking it, the TRS-80 isn't fast enough to crash in anything less than seven seconds. =)
--
E2 IN2 IE?
With names like Western Family, Realistic, Tandy and TDK; humanclock.com's middle-management attempts to cut every corner possible when it comes to industrial-strength webhosting. Many web hosting companies use expensive servers with complex software for their web operations. Our engineering staff rewrote the popular Apache webserver software to run on an 18 year-old portable computer with 32k of memory.
Humanclock.com runs on a Radio Shack 2.4mhz TRS-80 Model 100 portable computer, using a stripped-down version of the Apache webserver software (version 100-BASIC.12 beta). The graphic files are stored on magnetic tape accessed via a modified Radio Shack personal cassette player (CAT NO. 14-1215). The webserver is powered by a 6 volt TRS-80 AC Adaptor (CAT NO. 26-3804). We take our web hosting very seriously at humanclock.com, therefore we have installed 4 "AA" batteries in the webserver in case of power failure. Whereas some battery backup systems last for only 20 minutes and cost hundreds of dollars, our power backup solution lasts for 20 hours and costs $2.49, (due to it being double coupon Tuesday). In the case of power outage however, it takes our webserver about one second to come back online, something that would take a common UNIX/NT system over two minutes.
Apache software in action We hired a crack team of crafty crack monkeys that were able to modify the Apache source code and reduce it down to a 25k text file that runs under the BASIC interpreter native to the Tandy TRS-80 Model 100. Those were some smart monkeys. Our engineering department was able to rewire this ordinary personal cassette player (not to be confused with a "walkman"), to handle the vast storage needs that humanclock.com requires.
All I/O is performed through the headphone jack. The storage media consists of a single TDK type I cassette tape. The "Rigid-Construction cassette mechanism" gave our IT deparment an overwhelming sense that it was 65 cents well spent. We estimate that roughtly 4 gigabytes of data can be stored before we have to turn over the cassette and record over the side labeled "Kick ass Toto mix tape".
SIGSIG -- signature too long (core dumped)
4:20 is, at least in the USA, the "smoking time" for all the pot smokers out there.
;-)
There are tons of stories about why, because it's the police call sign for a marijuana bust or because it's Bob Marley's birthday. But you're supposed to smoke at 4:20... and don't even get me started about 4/20 @ 4:20... that's a national holiday for tokers
Damn, that's hysterical.
If anyone's wondering, the TRS-80 Model 100 really does look like that, it really does run 24 hours on 4 AA batteries, it really does have 32K of RAM, and it really is 2.4MHz. The reason it takes one second to reboot is because there are no drives; everything is stored in 32 of RAM (including the operating system, all programs, and all files).
The port on the left side that these guys have an Ethernet cable plugged into is a DB-9 port labeled BDR (Bar Code Reader). I've never tried connecting anything to it; the manual says nothing about how to use it (it just says "special Bar Code Reader software is required" and has pinouts in the appendix). I'd imagine it's probably RS-232 serial...
My casette player is the CCR-81 Model 26-1208A, looks quite a bit different from theirs, and doesn't seem to have a catalog number printed on it. The TRS-80 itself is catalog number 26-3802.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;