A sound so iconic, it was embedded into The Empire Strikes Back. //

"The beginning of the long dash indicates exactly 1 o'clock Eastern daylight time."

Millions of Canadians grew accustomed to hearing a version of this daily affirmation on CBC Radio One. The National Research Council Time Signal, and the series of 800 Hz "pips" that preceded and followed the time-setting dash, worked its way into everyday rituals. Human listeners, automated radio receivers at railways, shipping firms, and other entities, could set their mechanical clocks to it. That is why it started broadcasting on November 5, 1939, the same year Canada entered World War II.

The long dash's last broadcast was, somewhat unexpectedly, October 9, 2023.

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and the NRC have cited accuracy as the reason the 84-year ritual was halted. The CBC told its reporters that because the CBC is now heard over satellite and Internet connections, not just terrestrial radio, there are delays when people hear it. A spokesperson acknowledged Canadians' "fondness" for the daily ritual but said it "can no longer ensure that the time announcement can be accurate."

In a sudden move that was noted not only by Canadian media, but also international media channels, the National Research Council Time Signal that was broadcast by Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) on CBC Radio One since November 5 1939 was turned off on October 9th, after eighty-four years, one world war, countless generations, and the rise of modern technology. Although perhaps obsolete by today’s standards, this 15 to 60 second long broadcast at 13:00 Eastern Time every single day has been a constant in the life of Canadians, whether they tuned into local radio, or (increasingly) via Internet radio.

The NRC Time Signal consisted out of a series of 800 Hz sinewave ‘beeps’ followed by a second-long signal to indicate the top of the hour. Back in the day this was extremely useful to sync one’s clocks, watches and other time-keeping devices to. Yet between the transmission delays caused by Internet radio and the increased availability of NTP and other time sources on modern-day devices, the signal’s main use appears to have become a nostalgic reminder of what once was a constant of each and every day.

Measuring 3-meters tall, the Schiphol Clock presents a fascinating 12-hour video of Baas using a paint roller to consistently create—and repeatedly erase—the hands of the clock minute by minute for 12 hours straight. To Baas, this tireless and tedious approach to time-telling is the heart of the piece, which he describes as a “hyper-realistic representation of time.” He explains: “Real time is a term that is used in the film industry. It means that the duration of a scene portrays exactly the same time as it took to film it. I play with that concept in my Real Time clocks by showing videos where the hands of time are literally moved in real time.”

In the video, Baas is dressed in a pair of blue coveralls. In his hands, he holds a bright red bucket and vivid yellow rag. Though this look is predominantly inspired by the “many faceless men who sweep, clean and work at an airport,” it is also based on less obvious muses: distinctive Dutch artists (and primary color enthusiasts) Piet Mondrian and Gerrit Rietveld.

The Prime Meridian is the universally decided zero longitude, an imaginary north/south line which bisects the world into two and begins the universal day. The line starts at the north pole, passes across the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England, and ends at the south pole. Its existence is purely abstract, but it is a globally-unifying line that makes the measurement of time (clocks) and space (maps) consistent across our planet.

The Greenwich line was established in 1884 at the International Meridian Conference, held in Washington DC. That conference's main resolutions were: there was to be a single meridian; it was to cross at Greenwich; there was to be a universal day, and that day would start at mean midnight at the initial meridian. From that moment, the space and time on our globe have been universally coordinated.

Finding North Using an Analog Watch
The watch must be operational and the time accurate for this to work. 

1) Lay the watch flat horizontally in your palm, with the watch face up. 

2) Position the watch so the hour hand is pointing directly at the sun. 

3) Note the angle between the hour hand and the 12 o’clock mark. The center of the angle marks the north-south line, with south on the side closest to the sun. 

Please remember that this information is in standard time. Daylight Savings Time is a government construct that the universe does not follow; ergo, when the watch is set to DST, substitute 1 o’clock for 12 o’clock. 

Listen to Short Wave on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts.

Time is a concept so central to our daily lives. Yet, the closer scientists look at it, the more it seems to fall apart.

Our impatience with waiting—and our demand for efficiency—betray our mistaken beliefs about time. We think that time is a commodity, something to be spent and wasted and saved. But a Christian perspective on time begs us to see that time is first and foremost a gift, given to us by our Creator God.

From God’s good and generous hands we are given every moment called now.

As the Apostle James reminds in his letter, we’re not in control of time, not even able to reliably plan for tomorrow. “Come now, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit’—yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time then vanishes,” (James 4:13, 14).

We learned this truth, of course, during our earliest pandemic days when normal life was overturned by the global crisis. Graduations were cancelled, weddings were postponed. Days blurred one into another, and tragically, people grew sick and died, reminding us that tomorrow is never a guarantee.

Where do we find hope in the midst of these sobering truths about time? James gives us a simple and yet profound answer. He says that God’s people must live in surrendered trust to his will—and his good time. Instead of presuming on tomorrow or next month or next year, we ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that,” (v. 15). This isn’t to say that planning is wrong, but it is to say that counting on time is a presumption we can’t exercise. It is to say that alone we must learn the ancient monastic wisdom of remembering that we die.

Living in time requires gratitude: for every gift of every new day. And it also requires humility: to recognize that only God can make sure and certain plans. This gives us a freedom to believe that our time is a gift received from God and rendered back to him in worship.

We won’t get everything done that we hope and plan, but that’s okay. Because God’s never in a hurry—and never out of time.

Time Stamp Authority

freeTSA.org provides a free Time Stamp Authority. Adding a trusted timestamp to code or to an electronic signature provides a digital seal of data integrity and a trusted date and time of when the transaction took place.

IdenTrust Timestamping Authority Server is a service that binds the digital certificate used to sign a digital file with the data being signed, creating a unique sequence of characters or encoded information known as hash, and also identifies when a certain event has occurred. The result is a trusted accurate digital date and time stamp seal embedded within the digital file that contains X.509 digital signatures. Any change in the timestamped file will break the timestamp seal alerting the user that the file is no longer in its original state. //

Users who wish to add timestamping to PDF files that are signed with IdenTrust personal or business digital certificates must add 'http://timestamp.identrust.com' as the Timestamping Server to their local Adobe® Acrobat or Adobe® Reader configuration. Our article How to Add IdenTrust Timestamping Authority Server to Adobe will guide you through this process.

Users who wish to add IdenTrust Timestamping Authority Server to Microsoft® MS-Office® digitally signed documents can do it following the instructions in our article Apply IdenTrust Timestamping Authority to Microsoft Office Digitally Signed Documents.

Leap seconds cause network turmoil. Meta wants to end them before the next one. //

Meta’s call to action might not be the first, but it could end up being great timing.

Plesk Password Strength Policy

Levels of strength

Time to crack

Plesk uses a 3rd-party open-source solution to identify the password strength. The solution could  be checked at:
https://zxcvbn-ts.github.io/zxcvbn/demo/

On Tuesday, the US Senate lodged a rare unanimous vote on a bill that could have drastic technological and transportation implications: a permanent, year-round adherence to daylight saving time (DST).

The one-page "Sunshine Protection Act," as co-sponsored by Sens. Marc Rubio (R-Fla.) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), is now cleared for a vote in the House of Representatives after passing by unanimous consent in the Senate. This bill, as originally filed in 2018 and reintroduced in 2021, would reverse the Calder Act's introduction of a twice-a-year clock-change process in 1918, along with its eventual reinforcement by the Uniform Time Act of 1966.

The result would permanently leave clocks and timetables in the "spring forward" state of DST beginning in 2023, with the exception of states that had previously established specific time-change rules based on issues like different time zones in the same state. In terms of US politics, it's unclear whether either major American party will mount serious opposition in the House to its eventual vote there—and President Joe Biden has yet to announce his stance on the bill.

The Science-Fiction series STAR TREK uses an alternate Date/Time format: STARDATE.

Marginal note: Astronomers also use the word "StarTime" (or "Sidereal Time"), but this differs totally from StarTrek startime. 1 Astronomer staryear (= sidereal year) equals 365 days, 6 hours, 9 minutes and 9.54 seconds.

So far there are several definitions of calculations between STARDATES and our Gregorian Dates

Spec revision № 1.0

Time Card is the heart of the Open Time Server Project.
This spec can be accessed using http://www.timingcard.com

Time Master is a critical part of a PTP enabled network. It provides accurate time via GNSS while maintains the accuracy in case of GNSS failure via a high stability (and holdover) oscillator such as an atomic clock. Exisiting products in the market are often closed sourced an far from sufficient features. The Time Card project presents an open source solution via a PCIe card.
Form Factor

• Standard PCIe Stand-up Card
• Single Slot - Passive Cooling Solution

....

Repository content

• Bill of Materials (parts from Digikey)
• Schematic and PCB of the time card
• Driver (Kernel Module) CentOS 8
• CAD files for the custom PCIe bracket

Where can I get one?

You have all necessary source code, BOM, Gerber files and binaries to build it youself. However, we are currently working with several suppliers and will have their contact info soon available to allow you to puchase an out-of-the-box ready Time Card.

• Facebook engineers have built and open-sourced an Open Compute Time Appliance, an important component of the modern timing infrastructure.
• To make this possible, we came up with the Time Card — a PCI Express (PCIe) card that can turn almost any commodity server into a time appliance.
• With the help of the OCP community, we established the Open Compute Time Appliance Project and open-sourced every aspect of the Open Time Server.

In March 2020, we announced that we were in the process of switching over the servers in our data centers (together with our consumer products) to a new timekeeping service based on the Network Time Protocol (NTP). The new service, built in-house and later open-sourced, was more scalable and improved the accuracy of timekeeping in the Facebook infrastructure from 10 milliseconds to 100 microseconds. More accurate time keeping enables more advanced infrastructure management across our data centers, as well as faster performance of distributed databases.

The new NTP-based time architecture uses a Stratum 1 — an important component that is directly linked to an authoritative source of time, such as a global navigation satellite system (GNSS) or a cesium clock.

http://ocptap.com/

http://opentimeserver.com/

https://github.com/opencomputeproject/Time-Appliance-Project

bout the Atomic Reference Time Card (ART Card)

The Atomic Reference Time Card (ART Card) developed by Orolia is intended to work in pair with OCP’s PTP-OCP driver, which offers a PTP Hardware clock (PHC) interface to use for time synchronization.

The architecture of the ART Card as well as the software architecture that will manage the card are intended to be embedded in any Open Compute server to build a PTP Grand Master.

This new timing card has been developed in the framework of the Time Appliances Project (TAP), a sub-project initiated by the Open Compute Project (OCP).

What is SWaP-C?

Size, Weight, Power and Cost.

Multiplied together, they produce a number that limits the possible use cases the higher it is, particularly in application areas where these factors count:

• When payload is measured to the gram
• When you don’t have an inch to space
• When power needs to be conserved
• When cost is critical

The Spectratime mRO-50 is a breakthrough low SWaP-C Miniaturized Rubidium Oscillator designed to meet the latest commercial, military and aerospace requirements where time stability and power consumption are critical.

It provides a one day holdover below 1µs and a retrace below 1 x 10-10 in a form factor (50.8 x 50.8 x 19.5mm) that takes up only 51 cc of volume (about one-third of the volume compared to standard rubidiums) and consumes only 0.45W of power, or about ten times less than existing solutions with similar capabilities.

The Spectratime mRO-50 Miniaturized Rubidium Oscillator provides accurate frequency and precise time synchronization to mobile applications, such as military radio-pack systems in GNSS denied environments. Its wide-ranging operating temperature of -10°C to 60°C is also ideal for UAVs and underwater applications.

Late July 2019, Galileo, “the European GPS” suffered from a week long outage. I’m a proud European, and I think we should have our own well-functioning navigation system, so I tried to figure out what was going on. Surely someone was monitoring this stuff in public? I come from the internet where we monitor all the things, if someone asked for it or not.

This led me on a journey to monitor Galileo, but quickly also GPS, the Russian GLONASS and Chinese BeiDou systems. Along the way, I found out out how positioning satellites really work. This also helped me understand what went wrong with Galileo, more about which later.

In this post, I want to share what I learned, firstly because it is fascinating, but secondly because it serves as documentation of what the monitoring website “galmon.eu” is actually showing.

Galmon, which we should really rename to Navmon, is a lot like the RIPE Atlas Probes, but then for space. Based on a network of volunteers literally around the world, we monitor the output of each and every navigation satellite and make the results openly available as a pretty website, JSON but also as raw data (messages). Galmon is GPL licensed open source and lives on GitHub. //

How do navigation satellites work?

Let’s imagine we launch a bunch of metronomes, musical devices that tick at a precise frequency. We’ll make them tick precisely once a second and, unlike a regular metronome, we’ll also make them tick exactly on “whole seconds”. So they emit a tick at 0 seconds past the hour, 1 second past the hour etc, one tick every second, on the second.

We put the metronomes in different orbits around the earth, so at any time, some of them are further away than others. Then, we listen to their ticks, which are conveniently transmitted over radio.

Because of the speed of light, a metronome that is 30000 km away will send out its tick on a whole second, but it will arrive with us 100 milliseconds later. A metronome that is closer to us, say 25000 km, will have its tick arrive slightly earlier. These differences are large enough that if we would put the ticks on a loudspeaker we could hear the difference.

Because we can measure the precise delay, we can tell exactly how far away each satellite is from us. In itself however, this does not help us determine our location, because we don’t know where the metronomes are! //

In two dimensions, we only need two satellites to do this, assuming we already had an accurate clock that also ticks once a second, on the second. In three dimensions, we need three satellites ticking away at us.

(Note that in the figure above, we could also be in a second position where the circles intersect - we can rule out that solution by assuming we are not actually in space ourselves).

But, at a very elementary level, this is how GNSS works: satellites tell us where they are, and they send out a ‘tick’ exactly every second (and on the second), and by timing how late that tick is in arriving at our location, we know how far away the satellite is. And by drawing some circles (actually spheres), we can discover where we are. This technique is called multilateration.

What if we don’t have an accurate clock?

We want to use GNSS to figure out where we are, even if we aren’t dragging an accurate clock with us. The speed of light means that for every nanosecond that we get our clocks wrong, our position will be off by 30 centimeters. Nanosecond accurate clocks are delicate machines that do not fit in phones.

Luckily, through some clever math, it is possible to use the satellites themselves as an accurate clock - to do so, we do need an additional satellite and a guess of the time. Such a guess could be derived by taking the average of all GNSS clocks received combined with a rough knowledge how how far away such a satellite could be. Armed with this rough guess, we might end up with:

Note that the three circles do not all cross in a single point. Because our rough clock estimate was wrong (let’s say it runs late a bit), all satellites appear to be a little bit further away than they actually are. Or in other words, all the circles are a little bit too big, causing them not to intersect in one point.

A receiver can based on this observation adjust its internal clock until all circles intersect in one point:

Once this happens, we know that the correct time has been derived.

Leap seconds are controversial things. Since the Earth does not rotate at a steady rate, over time the Earth could get ahead or behind “atomic time”. Whatever solution you propose for this, someone is going to be unhappy.

I take no position on what the best thing to do is here, except that one day I would like to do the math on the “great leap second gyroscopes” that we could mount near the poles to steady the Earth’s rotation, so we can stop talking about this. We may occasionally have to desaturate these gyroscopes with huge rockets also.

Anyhow, some new minor leap second drama is coming up, and for once we can’t blame astronomers, geologists or the International Earth Rotation Service. Imagine if they ever went on strike, by the way!

Every now and then, we add a leap second to our clocks to synchronize them with the Earth's slowing rotation.