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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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!
You can also just attach a 3:1 gear.
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)
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.
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
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!
> 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.
There's also daily bin collection in Spain https://www.expatica.com/es/living/household/recycling-in-sp...
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.
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/HW3_2010_presentations/C_...
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.
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.
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.
Why?
Doesn't your council give a fridge magnet which has the dates in the calendar printed clearly?
Why overcomplicate?
Because it's fun (:
Huh, I wish American municipalities did this. Maybe some of them do, but certainly nowhere I've ever lived.
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 :)
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!
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.