For years the US Naval Observatory would generate a precise .gif of the master time clock. Alas it seems the service has been discontinued, unless someone here can find the new home for the .gif generator. This is the dead link:
I tracked down someone with knowledge of the old .gif generator, this is their reply:
"Mr. Paddock:
When we were directed to move our websites to a cloud-based system, we found
that the animated GIFs and the SimpleTime Perl script were not compatible
with the new server system."
Love the concept of being able to find and read a bunch of these. Real quick put together a quick redirect URL that jumps to a random text-and-code-on-a-page thing https://textandcode.page (can add more if there's other recs!)
I've added a bunch more to a comment that's a sibling to yours, but you might want to open the links once to ensure they're appropriate for your redirector.
Or just generate 86400 gifs, each 86400 frames long, and have the server deliver the correct one depending on the current time. But that wouldn't be nearly as cool as generating and delivering the gif in real time.
Interesting!
It's so funny when he says that the computer was too old to maintain so they replaced it with raspberry pi - it's weird such big thing can be controlled by something so small
Author here. The bandwidth usage was high with many open connections, I fixed that quickly by using LZW encoding instead of sending uncompressed data. I think you are referring to this thread: https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/6t8gpq/timegif...
A while back I had the pleasure of working on a system that generated large-ish (up to ~800x600, but typically low fps) personalized gifs at the rate of hundreds or sometimes thousands per second. It was fun balancing the various constraints, like encoding/flushing raw frames ASAP to keep latency and memory usage down, but also trying to do as many transparency tricks and size optimizations as possible without being allowed a second pass. (no global color tables, etc)
Author here, my bad. There was a DoS attack against this a while ago and I set too strict limits after that. Didn't expect it to hit Hacker News again. Should be fine now.
http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/cgi-bin/nph-usnoclock.gif?zone=es...
The last message from Tycho about the gif clocks: https://web.archive.org/web/20191015032841/http://tycho.usno...
The Precise Time Department is here now:
https://www.cnmoc.usff.navy.mil/Our-Commands/United-States-N...
They now refer Time Displays to https://www.time.gov