
Arduino Death Clock - adamtait
https://github.com/adamtait/ArduinoDeathClock
======
Sukotto
A variation on this that I love is Tim Urban's "Your life in weeks"
visualization.

[https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/life-
weeks.html](https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/life-weeks.html)

This is a progress bar, not a countdown clock. Personally, I find it super
helpful in keeping perspective on the value of my time.

I do not mean to detract from OP's work (which is cool), I just thought others
reading the comment might enjoy this other article too.

~~~
wheresmyusern
i will never forget when, in early 2016, i saw this for the first time. when
looking at the visualization in terms of weeks, i simply cant believe it, even
today. i just looked at it again now. it simply cant be so few weeks. it just
cant. and yet it is. i cant believe all the time i wasted.

~~~
greggman
Here's a day version I saw in the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo

[https://imgur.com/HnYCtlU](https://imgur.com/HnYCtlU)

Unfortunately it hasn't helped me do better with my time. I'd love to here
more people's changes for not wasting the little time they have (like me
spending hours a day on HN, FB, Netflix, etc...)

~~~
jerrre
>like me spending hours a day on HN, FB, Netflix, etc...

If you enjoy it, or relax, or get inspired, it isn't wasting your time.

Can't be productive 100% of the time, and punishing yourself when you aren't
makes you feel worse.

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magnat
ATmega's EEPROM has a lifetime of 100k write/erase cycles. The program stores
current time every 10 minutes, giving it ~2 years of lifetime. It looks like
the clock will die long before you.

~~~
struppi
Totally off-topic, except for the EEPROM:

A colleague once told me about a bug in it's audi where it would write the
current volume of the radio to an EEPROM after every volume change. So, after
a few years, the car stopped remembering the last volume setting when turning
the radio off and on, because the EEPROM died.

~~~
garaetjjte
It's much worse: on every knob turn, modified value is written to EEPROM, and
then real volume is set to value immediately read from EEPROM. So after some
time volume control stopped working at all! (Audi Concert, Chorus)

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leggomylibro
Cool - it'd be fun to wear one of these on your sleeve, and glare meaningfully
at it when people start droning on about nothing in a meeting or whatever.

Although, it'd also be some embarrassing morbid irony if you run into an
accident somewhere.

~~~
sushid
I essentially have something like this on my laptop (Chrome new tab) and it
was awkward having to explain to the interviewer who saw that on my screen
what it was counting down for.

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frandroid
...did you get the job?

~~~
sushid
Lol no but actually I think I did pretty well on his portion of the interview
FWIW. Just set an awkward initial tone that I had to dissipate with some small
talk before the actual programming interview.

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matt_wulfeck
I’ve seen a similar low-tech version of this clock (sorry I can’t find a
link). You setup two jars. Fill one with 365 * (years of life left). In the
morning you move a single bead from the full jar to the empty one. It’s
supposed to help you visualize “spending” your days, and encourages you to
live them more deliberately.

~~~
Devencire
I recall reading about this technique as used by Chris Crawford, a veteran
video game developer with a lofty goal. (Intriguing article if you have the
time.) [https://kotaku.com/30-years-later-one-mans-still-trying-
to-f...](https://kotaku.com/30-years-later-one-mans-still-trying-to-fix-video-
gam-1490377821)

~~~
matt_wulfeck
Yep this is the source.

> _Chris Crawford owns 29,216 small plastic beads. Each bead is one of eight
> colors, and there are 3,652 beads in each color group. One bead represents a
> single day in Crawford 's life. Each color group, therefore, represents one
> decade. The yellow beads are his childhood. The black beads are his teens.
> The greens are his inexperienced twenties, the oranges his restless
> thirties, the navy blues his settling forties and so on, all the way up to
> bead 29,216, which will represent his eightieth birthday._

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dallbee
A simple improvement would be to use the average life expectancy given a
certain age. This can be calculated with the age specific death rates for a
population:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_table](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_table)

~~~
vinchuco
That topic would make for a lovely birthday card

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sillysaurus3
Tangent: I see example.jpg added to the main repo, just for the readme. If you
don't want to store binary blobs, there's an alternative: open a new issue,
then copy-paste the image into the issue. It'll give you a link that you can
use in a readme permanently.

~~~
avian
This is another small step to being depedent on GitHub for hosting your
project. A “git clone” won’t clone images hosted in the issue tracker.

~~~
kiliankoe
It won't, but it will still be displayed when rendering the readme, just like
if it were hosted on any other webserver. Of course only as long as the
webserver is around, but still better than adding several MB to your repo just
for a few screenshots.

~~~
majewsky
If it's only a few MB, I'd value the ability to backup the image together with
the rest of the repo more than shaving a few MB off the repo.

(Also, hi Kilian. Long time no see.)

~~~
kiliankoe
Depends on the "worth" of the image I'd say :P

And hi!

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matznerd
I actually designed one of these with the opposite mindset for a longevity
researcher friend of mine. It was her 30th birthday and I was unable to
attend, so I told her I would make sure to attend her 130th birthday instead
and I gifted her a clock counting down until then.

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DINKDINK
"The Lindy Effect is real (up to the biological limits of the human body)."

The Lindy Effect is explicitely for non biological systems: i.e. the car, the
chair not your mother.

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tjwds
Cool project. I first saw Aubrey de Grey's TED Talk "A Roadmap to End Aging"
[1] when it was first released online and it really impacted the way I think
about mortality in a similar way.

[1]
[https://www.ted.com/talks/aubrey_de_grey_says_we_can_avoid_a...](https://www.ted.com/talks/aubrey_de_grey_says_we_can_avoid_aging)

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koepke
Read Michael Ende's 'MOMO' to realize that one can not 'waste time'! I should
do so again as well. One tends to forget while being in the rat race.

~~~
ivm
Increasing the amount of money and social status is not only possible
direction in life. For example, one of your directions could be building
better connections with people around you. This way playing games or watching
movies instead of moving towards your goals is still a waste of time.

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Tempest1981
So clearly defined...

#define FINAL_EPOCH_TIME_SECONDS 2895868800 // this is the expected epoch time
of your life expectancy

Which is October 7, 2061, a rainy Friday.

~~~
tomjen3
How did you get the weather for that day?

~~~
zingmars
Why, do you not get 50 year weather forecasts on your phone?

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fastball
Fuck you that's depressing.

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magnat
After power failure, clock will be 0..10 minutes behind the schedule. If the
value written to EEPROM was ahead of actual wall clock by half of timespan
between writes (instead of current time), each restart would contribute -5..5
minutes of drift, averaging out to zero over long time and multiple power
failures.

One could in fact set it to update EEPROM only once a day, but write time half
day ahead of current time. This will prevent wearing out memory for hundred of
years while still maintaining decent accuracy.

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jessriedel
If the tinkering isn't an end unto itself, an easier alternative is to buy a
simple countdown clock on Amazon for ~$15. I got this one for $12 to countdown
until the end of my postdoc.

[https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004TSC1X8/](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004TSC1X8/)

Just pull of the retirement sticker.

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unixhero
Nope. Backing the hell out of here.

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wheresmyusern
i wanted to make one of these but in the form of a watch you wear on your
wrist. its interesting how some people are fascinated with these kinds of
countdowns and others hate looking at them. me and my other cs buddy both
think its interesting -- he has the tim urban poster on his wall. another
friend of mine doesnt even want to look at it.

~~~
TheAdamist
perhaps we should implant them in everyone, then monetize their time left.....
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1637688/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1637688/)

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wruza
Split format (ymd/hms) doesn’t feel as fatal to me as e.g. 1 167 607 224
seconds remaining, where each week eats 0,05% and each year is ~ 31 557 000.
It would be also nice to make time much slower at the beginning and much
faster towards the end, as it really is IRL.

~~~
ashark
> It would be also nice to make time much slower at the beginning and much
> faster towards the end, as it really is IRL.

I find this effect kind of terrifying. I'm in my early 30s and would estimate
my perception of time is at least 3x as fast as it was before age 16 or so,
maybe 4x. It's definitely getting worse. Even assuming some leveling off, I'm
guessing a year at age 70 will feel about as short as a kid's month.

~~~
wruza
I’m 30+ too. When I discussed with my 70+ grandma on this topic, she laughed
and said it will be decades, not just years passing by in a click, starting
with 40-50+. We actually crossed our subjective time equator pretty long time
ago, dude, no matter how healthy we are.

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mrguyorama
This caused a reaction I did not expect. I find it horrifying, and it gave me
a serious pit in my stomach.

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realo
That is nice and everything, but why 5 (five!) digits for the years?

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dzonga
I ride motorcycles, could die anyway!! pretty cool project though

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n0mad01
a problem i see is that humans tend to manifest thoughts they believe in.

when you see something that often (daily) you could think it is real (for the
good or the bad).

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asciimo
Countdown the the busiest day of a procrastinator's life.

