Literary Clock

The time, told by a sentence from an old book that mentions that very minute, with the time phrase picked out in colour and the title and author quietly beneath. It changes on the minute. Every passage is bundled with the page, so it makes no outbound request at all: nothing to fetch, no key to rotate, and nothing upstream that can disappear or start charging.

Live demo →Setup Put it on a screen

Literary Clock on the paper theme: a passage from Thomas Hardy’s Desperate Remedies set large in a Garamond serif on warm off-white, the phrase thirty-three minutes past seven picked out in red, the title and author small beneath. — PaperWarm off-white with dark ink, the time phrase in red.

Literary Clock on the ink theme: a passage from J. M. Barrie’s The Little White Bird, at eighteen minutes to four, set large in a serif on near-black with the time phrase in gold and the title and author small beneath. — InkNear-black with soft light text, the time phrase in gold.

Where the passages come from

Only public-domain books: 1,131 passages from 278 novels and story collections, mined from Project Gutenberg texts whose authors died before 1956 and which were first published before 1931. The rule is enforced in code and checked by the tests, and nothing is copied from any commercial literary clock.

Never blank, never a wrong time

Not every minute has a book to its name. 352 of the 1,440 do; a further 143 borrow a passage whose phrase is itself approximate from a minute either side; every other minute gets a plain sentence in the same type, each one checked by reading it back as a time. When a minute has several passages the day number picks one, so two screens in a room show the same line.

What it wants

A screen and no network. The type is sized to the biggest that fits, so one URL looks right on a 16:9 TV, a portrait phone or an ultrawide. Paper or ink, 12- or 24-hour wording for the plain sentence, and a time zone if the screen’s clock is not the room’s. The text drifts a few pixels each minute so nothing burns in.

Setup

Put Literary Clock on a screen.

A browser is genuinely enough — the Mac app and Fully Kiosk below are conveniences, not requirements.

Any screen

nothing to install

Open the display in whatever browser the screen already has.
Go full screen: F11 on Windows and Linux, ⌃⌘F on macOS.
Or give it a browser of its own, which is what a dedicated panel wants: chrome --kiosk <url> — on macOS, open -a "Google Chrome" --args --kiosk <url>.
Turn off display sleep in the machine’s power settings and walk away.

Mac desktop

LivingKiosk app

Get the app and its install steps at livingkiosk.com/mac. It isn’t notarized yet, so macOS asks you to approve it once.
Menu bar → Library… and pick a display for each screen.
Configure… on any screen for its reload schedule, dim, and saved configs.

See the Mac app →

Wall tablet

via Fully Kiosk

On any Android tablet, install Fully Kiosk Browser.
Settings → Web Content → Start URL: the display’s address.
Under Device Management, keep the screen on and set a dim schedule so it isn’t glaring at 3am.
Turn on Start on Boot so a power blip brings the display back by itself.

fully-kiosk.com →

Displays are ordinary web pages, so anything that can hold one open works: a Raspberry Pi on a monitor, a retired iPad, a Fire tablet, the browser built into a TV.

Configuration

URL parameters.

Everything below, plus a live preview and a URL builder that writes the link for you, is at literary-clock.livingkiosk.com/setup.

Parameter	Default	Meaning
`theme`	paper	`ink` for near-black with soft light text.
`hour12`	on	`off` for the 24-hour wording of the plain sentence for minutes no book has.
`tz`	the device’s own	An IANA zone, e.g. `America/New_York`. An unknown name is ignored.
`at`	—	`HH:MM`. Holds the display on one minute of the day, for photographs.
`dim`	0	Black scrim over everything, `0` to `0.8` (fleet-wide convention).

Literary Clock is open source under the MIT licence. Run it yourself with one command. The source opens to the public soon.