Hello all, My attention was drawn to this list by Jay Respler. I wrote the tiny WWV32 program that plays time ticks on the PC. I have some additional details about this program, plus some information on how to get your PC time accurate (if this has not been previously covered). The WWV32 program is inspired by WWV's broadcasts, and plays silence interrupted by beeps each second. A longer beep marks every ninth second, and a special pattern of beeps marks each minute. Assuming you already know the time, the beeps can help you keep track of the passing minutes and seconds. Another program available on the same page, which I just put out there in beta version, is WWV3. This program plays audio tones that are identical to those of the real WWV broadcasts. If you want authenticity, this program is useful. However, since the WWV tones are continuous tones with ticks interrupting them, and with fewer markers for the minute, you might find this program more annoying than WWV32, depending on your preferences. I hope to add audio announcements of the time at some point, once I can find or make good voice recordings (my voice is ill-suited to this). Another thing that might be useful is optimizing your PC for accurate time. If you are running Windows XP or a later version of Windows, the system already synchronizes your PC over the Internet with central time servers, using a protocol called NTP. NTP is a very accurate way to synchronize time of day across all the computers in a network, and has been in use for ages on servers to keep all machines within milliseconds or even microseconds of each other. The Windows XP built-in NTP function version is capable of this accuracy, too, but by default, Windows only synchronizes the time once a week. And most PC clocks are off by many seconds a day, so a once-a-week synchronization makes the PC useless for time checks that have to have sub-second accuracy. Fortunately, there's a parameter you can change in your PC that will vastly improve this. Here's a Microsoft page that describes the parameters: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314054 For purposes of accuracy, you really only need to change the SpecialPollInterval parameter mentioned on the page above. By default, this parameter, which controls how often the PC synchronizes, is set to one week. However, you can set it to, say, one hour, in order to get your PC to stay accurate to within a fraction of a second. A value of 3600 (one hour, in seconds) can work well. With this parameter changed, your computer should be more than accurate enough to produce ticks that are accurate to within a small fraction of a second. There are also other parameters you can change, such as the servers from which your PC gets the time, but those aren't as important as changing SpecialPollInterval. You need a continuous Internet connection to make this change (like ADSL, cable, etc.). If you still use dial-up to reach the Internet, this won't help. You can double-click on the time in the taskbar of your machine and select the Internet Time tab to see the last time your machine synchronized, and the next scheduled synchronization. You can also change the time server if you wish (the NIST and some other organizations have free time servers you can access). With this optimization carried out, you don't need any special software to maintain extremely accurate time of day on your PC. -- Anthony _______________________________________________ Seesat-l mailing list http://mailman.satobs.org/mailman/listinfo/seesat-l
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