Christmas is a time for relaxing, reading and spending time with family, but for me it is also a time to come up with ideas.
Weirdly I find the most relaxation in doodling with a bit of paper and creating something new. It is also a time to do something fun and a bit random just for the hell of it.
So my here is my contribution for 2024 … the infinite clock.
What's the big idea?
Imagine a clock that ticks not towards midnight, but towards infinity. That's the basic idea behind this project. It's a website that displays a number that keeps growing, one tick every 100 milliseconds.
But it's more than just a counting machine. The infinite clock is designed to be a calming and meditative experience. As the number grows, it forces you to confront the immense scale of time, the universe, and existence itself.
A Multi-Sensory Experience
To enhance the meditative experience, the infinite clock also features:
- A gentle heartbeat: Focus on the steady rhythm of the beat to clear your mind and find inner peace.
- Inspiring quotes: Every 10 seconds, a new inspirational quote will appear, chosen by Google's AI tool, Gemini.
How does it work?
The project is split into three parts:
- Code written in node and running on a raspberry pi to keep the current count and to share it when requested.
- Frontend Javascript to read the current count and keep counting on the users web browser while you view the page (in an effort to minimise the volume of requests hitting a small device and the potentially disastrous prospect of tying down the family wi-fi at xmas the backend is only called once).
- HTML & CSS to make it look "pretty".
All the code is available here:
How do I access it & how long will it last?
The frontend I hosted on Cloudflare and is accessible here: https://infinite.jamesdare.co.uk I intend to keep this running as long as I can. The infinite clock adds one to the count every 100 milliseconds. In Java the max length of a number is around 300 digits long, at this rate it would take approximately 3.17 x 10^290 years for the program to reach this maximum, so we should be ok for a while.
What should I do?
Why not create something of your own, have some fun and enjoy the process. And let me know what you create so I can have a play with it.
