While pondering an off-grid microcontroller project, I got to wondering: A light sensor can obviously detect day vs night. So it could be used as a very cheap way to set a device's clock - but how accurately? To within an hour? A few minutes? How would you do it?

Questions that arose from this include:

• Should it detect dawn/dusk (light <-> dark transition), or noon/midnight (brighest/darkest time) ?
• How do dawn/dusk times relate to clock time? Does it depend on lat/long?
• If using dawn/dusk, what light level threshold to use?
• The same threshold for dawn & dusk, or different ones?
• Better to detect a darker threshold (start of dawn, end of dusk) or a lighter one?
• Some days will be lighter/darker than others, so how to manage averaging of times?
• How accurate could it be made?

My naïve first stab at this would be: Pick a light threshold. Record the dawn/dusk times according to that threshold. Average them, call that "noon", and gradually tweak the clock time over several days to bring it into line with the sensed/calculated "noon" - but a searching for graphs of sunrise/sunset times quickly showed that the midpoint of sunrise & sunset is not noon.

Googling threw up lots of results for sensor lights combining a clock and a photocell, but I couldn't find anything about using the photocell to set the clock. So does anyone know if this has been tried before? Is it a non-starter for some reason?

Edit:

Perhaps it's worth sharing the project I had in mind, which is a rain alarm so I can rush out and get the washing in from the line when it starts to rain. I was thinking how annoying it would be if I left it switched on and it rained in the middle of the night and the alarm woke me up. So I decided should automatically avoid triggering during the sleeping hours of night (say 10pm to 8am). My first thought was a photocell so it wouldn't trigger when it's dark. Then I remembered that it gets light at 3am at the moment, which wouldn't work. So it needs a clock. How to set the clock:

• Manually - Needs a user interface with buttons and a display. Seems overkill just for a clock.
• Serial port - Clunky to plug a laptop in just to set the clock.
• WiFi - Needs a username and password or WPS, and an ESP32 or similar - again seems overkill just to get the time.
• GPS - also overkill and expensive.

Maybe it's just because I've lost my bookmarks so many times, one way or another. I now avoid using website-specific bookmarks, you never know when the website could shut down or you could lose the bookmarks some other way. not saying Tildes will shut down; I'm sure it won't be any time soon, but I still can't get myself to use it even though it's so convenient ☹️ does anyone else feel the same way ?

Mixed feelings about it all.

I think Reddit suffers from the same ‘1 discussion keeps you coming back for ten years in hope of a repeat’ that most if not all social media struggles with. It also has excellent dogs in hilarious situations and because of the amount of users, a constant refresh of what should be a tired genre but which just dosnt seem to die.

I have enough respect for r/pics for the John Oliver death march, that I cant go back.

javascript:window.location='[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=UU%27+ytInitialData.metadata.channelMetadataRenderer.externalId.substring(2)](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=UU%27+ytInitialData.metadata.channelMetadataRenderer.externalId.substring(2)

This puts every video of a channel into one playlist. Makes listening to music channels so much easier.

I also use Pilgrim.

P.S. https://tildes.net/~tech/10ko/little_12ft_io_bookmarklet

Good morning. This is a thread to discuss new album releases arriving at our doorsteps today (and until next week!). Feel free to comment albums that have caught your eye and interest.

Looks like Lil Uzi spotted a slower week to release what is likely the biggest album in terms of sheer numbers (the best thing about it might be the interview from Nardwuar). I think folks here will get the most from the new Japanese House - sleepy, melodic, nostalgic indie pop. I'm looking forward to hearing this new Angelo De Augustine after his fantastic collab with Sufjan Stevens in 2021.

Discussion Points

What are you looking forward to listen to?
Have you listened to any of these releases?
What are your thoughts?
What have you enjoyed from these artists in the past?

Why Friday?

Most (but not all) new LPs release on a Friday, as labels want to give the the release a full week of sales before entering the charts.

~~ Any feedback on the format welcome!

As the games industry continues to grow there are many new things introduced which sometimes players don't like, but then overtime we either get used to them, while still disliking them (only a bit less maybe) or we realize "hmm, yes it's good to have this actually". Of course any such mechanic can be implemented very well or quite poorly. I'm not asking about specific implementations, but the mechanic itself as a whole.

Personally I can think of some quality of life changes that at first I thought are not needed or would make a game needlessly easier. When playing I would always try to go for full immersion, but overtime as I've had less and less time to be able to play in long uninterrupted stretches I've come to appreciate things like fast travel and quest markers and other features which would help resuce "wasted" time when playing.

I would like to have a discussion of the season finale and season as a whole of Silo with other book readers who know the overarching plot. Non book readers are welcome obviously, but spoilers will be here.

Overall, would watch season 2. I wanna know what ends up happening.

I realised I relied on Reddit a lot for my news sources, but I generally meant to get my news closer to the source of possible, even before deleting my account. I already follow ISW, but that's daily and quite conservative in its analysis (which is good). Do you have good more frequent sources that you trust?

I was nervous to post this in ~news, because it's more of a question than a story, but here goes.

I'm looking to turn down the temperature, pace, and volume of my news consumption habits, as well as limit how much time I stare at a screen (I do that enough professionally). I've recently experimented with subscribing to fewer, higher-quality news sources and getting them delivered via RSS*. This works pretty well, but I'm still left looking for something even slower. Something like a weekly news publication, which is delivered once a week in a print format that I can read away from a screen.

I've subscribed to Sunday papers in the past, but it's too much and there's a lot in it - I think I'm looking for a little .. less. A slimmer publication, fewer pages. Almost as if someone selected the top five to seven stories covered on the Wikipedia current events page in the week, then wrote a few thousand words apiece on each. Something I can make it through with my coffee on Sunday mornings in a few hours.

Does anyone do this or have recommendations? If so, what do you read and how would you assess that publication? I think I've tried a fair number in the past, but I will take anyone's suggestions. Thank you so much in advance.

--
*I use Reeder for macOS / iOS - which is great btw, and it's shocking how much of the modern web still supports RSS. Highly recommend folks reconsider RSS in general.

I'm talking about this 2 TB LaCie Portable SSD and this Samsung T7 2 TB SSD. They both have the same ~1 GB/s read-write speed, the same 3-year limited warranty, and the same USB 3.2 Gen2 connector. But the LaCie drive is $369, while the Samsung drive is $130.
Am I missing something? Or is it just luxury tax?

I make candy as a hobby, but don't usually mess with chocolate because I know it can be finicky af. I decided to try making some peanut butter cups as it seemed easy enough, but the stupid chocolate chips would not melt. They went from hard to a chalky mess immediately. I was microwaving them on 30 second intervals at 50% power. I made sure my bowl and spoon I was using to mix were completely dry. Is it because they were sitting opened for a while? I don't know what they want from me

In a few weeks I'm participating in a three(ish) day nonstop sailing regatta. My friend and I have been put in charge of making and bringing food and drinks for the entire crew. We also have no idea what we are doing, so any advice would be appreciated!

My first thought is sandwiches/wraps but for morale I think it would be nice to have a variety of things.

We won't have a kitchen/stove/way to heat the food. No fridge, but a cooler full of ice. (It will probably not remain very cold the entire time.)

The primary goal is to sail fast so no stopping to assemble anything complicated- someone might even be on shift sailing and eating at the same time. Probably nothing involving sharp knives as the boat will likely be heeled over and that seems needlessly risky.

What kind of sammies? Brownies or cookies? What are we going to do about caffeine? Are two day old room temp breakfast tacos gross or okay?

For every big Steam sale r/gamedealsmeta does a Hidden Gems topic which is always one of my favorites to browse through. Given that the July 1 reddit fallout is upcoming though, I figure it's worth trying to roll our own version here too.

The purpose of this thread is for game discovery: surfacing games that are hard to find about elsewhere. As such, try to recommend things that are less well-known.

For general game recommendations of all popularities, use this thread. For general Steam Sale discussion, use this thread.