The Time

Version 2.0.1 - -

"The Time" is a stupid little html document that has lived on my desktop for the past few years. All it does is show me what the current time is.

I wrote this simply because I switched over to a two-monitor setup, and I found that I had a few problems when running fullscreen applications:

  1. My desktop background would display on the second monitor - I needed something dark on that screen to offset the obnoxious brightness in my peripheral vision.
  2. Pop-OS GNOME only displays the time on the primary display.
  3. I'd lose track of time if I were engrossed in a fullscreen app, e.g. if it's a pretty good game that I don't want to task-switch out of.
  4. Task switching often sucks if you're playing games in Proton - so it's not good to check the time that way.
  5. Most clock apps on Linux sucked in one way or another
  6. Websites that show you the time because your clock app sucks are full of obnoxious advertising.

So I just wrote a stupid page that gets the current time with Javascript and updates the value every second. I've been using it for years now.

The original version just showed the local time. Later, I added the current Unix time underneath it. Then for a brief period, I had a countdown to a particular event included also. The countdown text would gradually shift from green to red text as the timer counted down to zero. After that event had passed, I commented all that countdown stuff out.

I decided to include the Time on Starbase Zebra, just because I'm lifting and shifting every small project onto Starbase Zebra, since that's the point of Starbase Zebra.

Here is the version that was on my desktop as of December 8, 2024. I have retroactively declared this to be version 1.

This is version 2, which reads events from the database and displays a countdown clock for each one. It is also styled with Bulma.