ANNOUNCE: xfce-panel-hexclock 0.1 released

[Felipe Contreras]

Hi,

There's a bunch of binary clocks available in the wild and in
xfce4-panel, but they are not truly binary (not even the "true" binary
clocks).

In a true binary clock $noon would be $day >> 1, which is called
"binary time" [1].

I wrote a simulation where you can see how a day goes by in this
clock, and as you can see one second before midnight all bits are on:

https://felipec.github.io/hexclock/?test=true

While I did implement this binary time in xfce4-panel's clock plugin,
the patches were rejected with no reason given [2] three years after I
sent them.

However, binary numbers can be represented in hexadecimal easily, and
a binary time represented in hexadecimal is called a hexadecimal time
[3] (or hexclock).

In hexadecimal time noon is 0x8000, so a day is 0x10000, and one
second before the end of the day is 0xFFFF.

Pretty straightforward.

xfce-panel-hexclock is a very very simple xfce4-panel plugin that
shows the current hexadecimal time (BE93 at the time of writing this).

It's so simple it's 86 lines of code, and the resulting binary is 15K.

This could easily be implemented in xfce4-panel's clock plugin itself,
but I'm not waiting another three years for feedback.

The code is in github:

https://github.com/felipec/xfce-panel-hexclock

If you can't wait to check your current time in hexadecimal:

https://felipec.github.io/hexclock/

Enjoy.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_clock#Binary_time
[2] https://gitlab.xfce.org/xfce/xfce4-panel/-/issues/235
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexadecimal_time

-- 
Felipe Contreras