this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2024
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[–] [email protected] 92 points 6 days ago

(Power flashes for a fraction of a fraction of a second)

Appliances:

[–] [email protected] 42 points 6 days ago (4 children)

Its 12:00

Always has been!

(Also the universe was created last thursday. Have fun!)

[–] [email protected] 19 points 6 days ago (2 children)

Elevators in the office building where I work have screens that run ads, but also have time and date in the corner. It resets every couple of days, so basically every day is in January 1970

[–] davidgro 22 points 6 days ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 days ago (1 children)

With a bad administrator, apparently:-P.

img

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 hours ago

Very bad. It is probably online yet doesn't set its time via NTP

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Casual ads inside an elevator in an office building? This is the true dystopian future

I'd rather take the stairs (for up to ~10 floors)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 days ago (1 children)

My apartment complex also has ads inside elevator. Is it that bad?

[–] Semi_Hemi_Demigod 3 points 4 days ago (1 children)

That depends; do you like people stealing your attention for money?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 days ago

I don't have anything to do in elevator, so I do not care much about attention being 'stolen'.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 days ago (1 children)

I always unplug my microwave because it's old and makes a soft humming noise. Obviously I don't bother to set the clock every time, so when it is plugged it usually shows --:--. However occasionally it indicates 12:00 instead, and I have no idea why it is sometimes different...

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 days ago (1 children)

My guess is that there's a capacitor in there somewhere. The capacitor stores enough charge to keep the time for short periods (like a power flicker). But it's unreliable for longer periods of time (beyond a few minutes) and will cause clock drift.

So, when the power goes out for a medium length of time, the microwave resets to 12:00 to indicate that you need to set the time again

However, if the microwave is left unplugged for an extended period of time (a few days to weeks), the capacitor is fully drained. My guess is that this causes the time to be set to --:--

Why it would be designed like that? No idea

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 days ago

Ah, a fellow lastthursdayism believer

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[–] son_named_bort 21 points 6 days ago (4 children)

Does anybody really know what time it is?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago) (1 children)

Some physicists think they do. I have heard two different ideas though both summarise to "time is a side effect of the universe operating

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago

The real caveat there may be: which time dimension:-).

[–] davidgro 12 points 6 days ago (2 children)
[–] NickwithaC 6 points 6 days ago

Only that one teacher who cared if you walked in one second late but would then keep the whole class after the bell because they think they're above not only all the kids but all the other teachers as well.

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[–] finitebanjo 1 points 4 days ago

Yeah, Atomic Clocks can measure time with great precision as the radioactive decay of elements is extremely consistent.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 days ago

Idk maybe, just maybe. Add a cheap AF coin battery like for example motherboards to keep the internal clock alive.

Epic trick dear manufacturers. Well maybe it will cost them 0.05€ more per device... That means less Ferraris for the CEOs so idk about that.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 6 days ago (3 children)

Hope I'm not alone in this - Appliances should only have relative timers.
It only needs to know how to run a program for 30 min, or activate with a delayed start in 5h. Clock time is meaningless for an oven.

Appliance companies, are you listening? Hint: they're not, circuitry design and manufacture has been outsourced so much they probably don't even know where they get it from.

[–] phoneymouse 4 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

Yeah — stop making me reset the god damn oven, microwave, and coffee maker every time the power flickers. At the very least my coffee maker has a small battery in it that seems to endure shorter outages, but if manufacturers aren’t willing to have a back up battery for this, then they should take out the god damn clock altogether. It’s mostly pointless— especially these days. My microwave is so tedious too — it asks the day, month, and year. Why does my microwave need to know the fucking date? It actually serves no purpose.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 6 days ago

Wrong:

  1. Pizza-time
  2. Lazy-time
  3. Caffeine-addiction-time
[–] SilverShark 7 points 5 days ago (1 children)

So many timers, so little time.

I don't even notice all the little clocks. I actually like clocks a lot, and I check them a lot, but not the ones in these appliances. I usually don't notice when they run fast or when we go in or out of DLS.

[–] MutilationWave 4 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

Sometimes my friend fixes mine when he's here. I appreciate it. It bothers him. I don't care about any of them except the auto feeder for the cats.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 days ago (3 children)

The power almost never goes out at my house, which is nice, but there are 4 appliances with clocks in my kitchen. The microwave runs fast and is usually about 12 minutes ahead every time the clocks change, the stove is always rock solid, the coffee pot is never set (despite being the only appliance with a timer mode that would actually be useful), and the air fryer is only accurate during summer because I can’t remember how to set it (and I don’t care enough to fix it).

[–] 200ok 3 points 5 days ago

My rice cooker is the cockroach of timekeeping. It was unplugged for almost a year and the clock was still on and accurate when I pulled it out of storage.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 days ago

I just got a coffee pot with no timer, just an on/off switch. (Because it also has no black plastic, even the filter holder.) I never needed a timer, but now I do have to be aware the keep-hot plate will stay on until I turn it off, instead of self-stopping after 2 hours.

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[–] Sam_Bass 6 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Power cut off at my house while I was at work night before last. Got the notification of restoration bout an hour before quitting time

[–] MutilationWave 4 points 5 days ago

We gotta love the little blessings.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Jokes on you, my oven has WiFi.

[–] MehBlah 8 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Some kid in Hoboken is gonna set your house on fire with it.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

Good thing you can only turn it on remotely under certain conditions

[–] MutilationWave 5 points 5 days ago

So uh, what conditions. Like exactly? It's for my english class.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago

Imagine this... let's all carry around pocket computers that sync with atomic clocks, they can the use low power radios to set cheap clocks... cough... bluetooth current time service... cough...

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 days ago

Me: this is so dumb

Also me: busts out laughing

[–] yesman 6 points 6 days ago (2 children)

We have a constellation of satellites constantly broadcasting the most accurate time humans can measure and it's crazy every device doesn't have an antenna to pick this up and set the time.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 6 days ago (1 children)

nope, but they do have WiFi to send analytics to the factory (and so that they can get hacked and be used for DDOS attacks)

[–] passiveaggressivesonar 6 points 6 days ago (2 children)

A DDOS attack on my toaster would be quite dangerous actually, what's the cybersecurity framework to secure my toaster

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Do not connect the toaster to the internet.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 days ago (1 children)

I tried not to, but it formed a mesh network with the neighbors toaster, and that connected to someone’s dishwasher the next street over, which connected to a washing machine down the block, and so on, until they found a self-aware microwave that just happens to be benevolent but sort of mischievous, and now whenever my toast is done, the Grindr chime sounds off and the toaster asks me to put it back in.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 days ago (1 children)

The real question is, what will it do if you don't ⁉️⁉️⁉️

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 days ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Well, you know what that means. Time to FAAFO!? Just in case... it was nice knowing you.:-D

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 days ago (1 children)

While I was standing there in the kitchen, the smart TV started playing an old movie randomly, blasting the audio through all the smart speakers in the house. The Roomba hit me right in the ankle, just as the door to the stove fell open and the speakers yelled “Feed me Seymour!”
But I mean. It’s a Roomba, and the stove takes time to preheat, even if I had fallen in. The cat helped to blind the Roomba while I unplugged everything. Now I’m huddled in the dark, fighting against the cold, wondering if I should chance the thermostat.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 days ago

Does it smell like gas...?

Oh well, we need to ask ourselves just how badly we want to survive the impending robotemic, maybe? Perhaps we - BLEEP - oh ah, I mean, never mind that, as I was saying perhaps you should just prepay your electric bill for the next 50 years and then give in to whatever the house wants?

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)
  1. Most of these are in a metal box, which blocks signal. Adding careful routing to get an antenna in an unshrouded position where it's still physically protected is a pain. Also, in the middle of an apartment building can give you pretty terrible reception in the first place.

  2. GPS doesn't provide time zones or daylight savings info. The appliance would know where you are and what UTC time it is, but not which time zone you're in. The manufacturer could pre-program shape files in (yay, more memory) but they become obsolete the next time a politician decides to move time zones or change daylight savings. If this happens to you, your device will keep repeatedly changing to be an hour fast/slow no matter how often you reset it.

    You could have the GPS satellites continually broadcast shape files for the time zone but this would be a big change, use up a lot of the limited bandwidth, and it would take your clock half an hour to set itself.

  3. it's like an extra $5-10 in parts and unlike a WiFi module, the manufacturer can't make any big data or ad revenue from it.

[–] Dasus 4 points 5 days ago

None of my kitchen equipment has any sort of a clock on them.

Timers, yes. Clocks, no.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 days ago

Yeah stopped bothering with setting up the hour manually for these things... Every rainy or windy season my electricity is quite erratic.

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