Another Guy with a Computer

Date: June 14, 2025

Introducing Clock Chimes!

With Clock Chimes, your computer can simulate the hourly chiming of a clock tower.

Clock Chimes is a service for *nix based computers which simulates the chiming of a clock tower. I first experienced this functionality with the menu bar clock found in Mac OS versions 7.5 through version 9.2.2. The menu bar clock included options (pictured below) to play sounds under specific conditions such as:

• Playing a sound on the hour
• Playing a sound the number of times as the current hour
• Playing a sound at 30 minutes after the hour and/or at 15 minutes and/or 45 minutes after the hour

With the introduction of Mac OS 10, these options were removed.

After a flash of nostalgia and inspiration, I decided to recreate the functionality utilizing a shell script paired with a systemd timer and service.

Learn more about Clock Chimes!

Experiencing a device failure can range from a mild annoyance to catastrophic. Through the years, I have heard many people speculate whether failures are due to a component costing a nickel or some other seemingly infinitesimal amount. In the case of a television which recently failed, I can confirm that suspicion was correct. A failed capacitor costing the manufacturer a nickel was the source of the failure. Continue reading…

TLDR

HTML is a mark up language and the last two letters, the M and the L literally stand for Markup Language!

The Longer Version…

Like many people of a certain age, HTML was among the first computing languages learned. The first paragraph from almost every teaching resource related to HTML explains the letters as an acronym for HyperText Markup Language. It is likely nearly everyone reading this knew that already. Why state what everyone seemingly already knows? The reality, at least reflected by job postings is, not everyone knows this. Continue reading…

Using GPIO pins with OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, Manjaro Arm, Ubuntu for Arm and Linux distributions other than Raspbian is challenging but not difficult. The challenge arises primarily from documentation gaps which lead most people to simply give up and go back to using Raspbian. While Raspbian is suitable and gets the job done for many, one should not feel compelled to give up on their Linux distribution of choice due to documentation gaps. Continue reading…