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I've added an hourly chime to my work computer's clock, similar to a Casio wristwatch. It's a subtle reminder of the passing time, prompting me to pause, reflect, and reassess my actions to stay on track and avoid procrastination.

I like this constant on screen reminder though and might give it a try myself :)


  The gods confound the man who first found out
  how to distinguish hours! Confound him, too,
  who in this place set up a sundial,
  to cut and hack my days so wretchedly
  into small portions! When I was a boy,
  my belly was my sundial — one surer,
  truer, and more exact than any of them.
  This dial told me when ’twas proper time
  to go to dinner, when I had aught to eat;
  But nowadays, why even when I have,
  I can’t fall-to unless the sun gives leave.
  The town’s so full of these confounded dials
  the greatest part of the inhabitants,
  shrunk up with hunger, crawl along the street.
— Plautus (c.254-184 BC)

(Originally posted 11 years ago: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7007731#7008338>)



I did something similar with a Telegram bot in order to remind myself to look away from the screen, get up and stretch for a bit. However I started to ignore it in favor of "more pressing" tasks and now the chime has become just a faint signal somewhere on the outer edge of my awareness, too easily forgotten about. You need to condition yourself to not ignore it or it will lose its effectiveness.


It probably depends on what your goal is. To get up and stretch every n minutes, a more forceful approach could work better.

But a just an hourly subtle sound can *just remind you that time passes.


I have a similar thing in my WFH office where Home Assistant will play a chime during at canonical hour[0], plus it plays the Westminster Quarters[1] at 5pm to remind me when the normal work day is ending. I find the chunks of time match up well to work/eat periods[2] versus the granularity of each hour.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canonical_hours#Western_rites ; for the work day the main chimes are at 7am, 10am, 12pm, 2pm, 7pm

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westminster_Quarters

[2] I originally stole the idea from the game Pentiment, which uses the canonical hours as it's in game time system since you're working in a 16th monastery. A web app version of the clock is at https://pentiment-clock.vercel.app/


If anyone is searching for a way to do this in macOS, the dato[1] app implements this rather nicely

[1]: https://sindresorhus.com/dato


When there is a meeting too starting at the hour, its a bit too much :)


Pairing that with the on-screen focus prompt could create a nice feedback loop.


I personally don't host my own Mail Infrastructure, If I where forced to do so, I would probably run a Mailcow.

Especially the "dockerized" Mailcow is reasonably easy to setup.

You will still have to setup SPF, DKIM and the other DNS records. But Mailcow is a solid package!


I opened this on my Notebook, and it's Fan spun out of control!

it might be my ancient hardware, but this is rather CPU intensive it seems.

But the effect is fun, and cool non the less!

(on Linux, Xorg + Frirefox)


I suspect that Firefox is relying on modern-ish GPU features to make things "fast", but Mesa is straining the CPU to emulate those features, which are missing from your older GPU. (Software going "I'll use the GPU, that must make things faster!" is what finally pushed me away from using an x60 as my daily driver).


I have a water-cooled i7 6700k and the rising fan speed was the first thing I heard as well. Normally this does not happen when browsing the web.


I am currently working on a side project that aims to provide the defunct on-line / multiplayer functionality for an old game.

The positive feedback and joy I get back from the community, is really awesome :)

Also fiddeling with unknown file Formats and stuff, reveres engineering and re implementing defunct stuff is great fun :D


How awesome is reverse engineering! I absolutely love it.


Yeah, it is security through obscurity, I do it anyway on my Internet facing systems because then I don't have to bother with most automated SSH Scanners.


HTTP2, Multithreading and finally no more lost TCP Connections on Service Reload!

Awesome! Thank you!


HTTP2 on the frontend only though, a bit disappointing


Maybe wise though. Biting off http2 on both sides in a load balancer all at once might not be smart. Especially at the same time as multithreading.


I agree. I already offload SSL in HAProxy. I'm sure we'll see HTTP2 for frontend/backend communication eventually down the line, but this is a huge and big first step.


AFAIK, this is true of nginx also and from what I've heard in the past, they see no reason to change it.

I can't find it now, but I'm sure they had pretty compelling benchmarks that showed that with keepalive & low-latency networks, performance wise, there's little, if any, performance difference.


> AFAIK, this is true of nginx also and from what I've heard in the past, they see no reason to change it.

http2 backends support is on the roadmap https://trac.nginx.org/nginx/roadmap - so you can expect it to be implemented.


The reason would be so that the backend can take advantage of H2 features.


Look at Lyft's Envoy:

https://www.envoyproxy.io/


LOL this software does not even understand HTTP/1.0...


Based on your comments, I assume you're involved with HAProxy?

Is HTTP/1.0 (vs 1.1) actually used anywhere? Both versions are also compatible so what's the issue? Also seems rather disingenuous to say "even" when Envoy has plenty of other advanced features.


Server side is on its way for next release, haproxy 1.9.


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