If you're not done playing with it, you can make it dynamic so it's always accurate, haha! Show the smallest "uncompleted" unit of time available with a fallback for December 31st evenings where tintin simply says nothing...

At night: select the week.

Also end of the week: select the month.

Also end of the month: select the year.

Also end of the year: fallback.

As-is, if I visit and see "what a day / it's Friday", that's kinda missing the point.

Dec 31 2030 will be monumental.

I was scratching my head for a while wondering why you need an IP address to determine the current time… I’m inferring this means geo-locating the IP to determine the client’s time zone and then using that to convert server time to the user’s local time, right?

Makes me think, it would be nice if there was a standard request header to specify preferred TZ for 'local time', just like Accept-Language (which sadly quite a few websites ignore and show me German-language content anyway just because my location is in a German-speaking country).

Still, great work OP :-) now can anyone tell me why Tintin is trending at the moment? Did I miss something? All my feeds seem to be suddenly full of Tintin content right now.

The Tintin character entered public domain in many countries in January 2025.

I think this “What a week” image is from a 1930 album (“The Crab with the Golden Claws”), so it’s part of the public domain now and can legally be used for things like this meme generator.

The situation in EU is different though. Hergé died in 1983, and I think his entire oeuvre has 75 years of protection after his death. I’m not 100% sure.

Many countries or only US (which uses the publication date)? Considering that the original publication is in Belgium and that almost all countries use the author's death as the benchmark, I am not so sure (even with the rule of the shorter term).

> Also note that this image may not be in the public domain in the 9th Circuit if it was first published on or after July 1, 1909 in noncompliance with US formalities, unless the author is known to have died in 1954 or earlier (more than 70 years ago) or the work was created in 1904 or earlier (more than 120 years ago.)

And links to this footnote (https://guides.library.cornell.edu/copyright/publicdomain#Fo...):

> The differing dates is a product of the question of controversial Twin Books v. Walt Disney Co. decision by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in 1996. The question at issue is the copyright status of a work only published in a foreign language outside of the United States and without a copyright notice. It had long been assumed that failure to comply with U.S. formalities placed these works in the public domain in the United States and, as such, were subject to copyright restoration under URAA (see note 10). The court in Twin Books, however, concluded "publication without a copyright notice in a foreign country did not put the work in the public domain in the United States." According to the court, these foreign publications were in effect "unpublished" in the United States, and hence have the same copyright term as unpublished works. The decision has been harshly criticized in Nimmer on Copyright, the leading treatise on copyright, as being incompatible with previous decisions and the intent of Congress when it restored foreign copyrights. The Copyright Office as well ignores the Twin Books decision in its circular on restored copyrights. Nevertheless, the decision is currently applicable in all of the 9th Judicial Circuit (Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, and Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands), and it may apply in the rest of the country.

Also, Disney lost here (Accordingly, we reverse the summary judgment in favor of [Disney & co.]). It might not even PD in the US if this is upheld (and it seems so).

> No JavaScript is sent to the browser.

Is a design goal. I doubt it is possible without JS. Especially inside SVG.

It is probably technically possible to have the time continue to update with just CSS on the client (based on [1]), but the initial time still has to be set server-side.

[1] https://css-tricks.com/of-course-we-can-make-a-css-only-cloc...

I'm in the UK but my work PC's Internet exit node is in New York due to enforced use of corporate proxies, so the time shown to me is 5 hours out. Javascript would report the correct timezone.

It is not possible to correctly identify physical location from IP addresses. Not just because of proxies and VPNs and the accuracy of the data: you can go near a border and find your mobile phone connects to a cell tower in a neighbouring country, without even visiting! IP Geolocation is accurate enough for statistics and marketing but probably shouldn't be used for anything user-facing.

- you could render the page using puppeteer server-side, getClientRect/calc and apply the dimensions to the path, then spit back the markup, OR

- you could use HTML + CSS to render the bubbles

I mean in the 2000s there were a number of other options (flash, silverlight, java, probably more) but that era is behind us, and that would be extra pedantic.

WASM esp in the browser offers a great opportunity to "Do Things Right" that JS in the browser got all wrong in hindsight. I'm not talking about language design, but about what JS can do, access, control, etc: from telemetry to security issues.

The modern DOM apis show how this can be fixed. But there's no way we can fix "the old APIs" which are also used for fingerprinting, tracking, DOSing clients, breaking your back button, annoying scrolling etc. We can see this clearly in how browsers bolt stuff on, like popup blockers early on, and "copy to clipboard only after a human interaction" or "detect too many dialogs" or "detect CPU hogging".

WASM seems to head in the right direction: sandboxing, careful exposure to resources, proper permission systems etc.

But, as a bystander, I don't see much public discussion on how the WASM runtime/sandbox/layers in browsers can and should be shaped to i) fix and avoid mistakes JS made, and ii) while also having better DX and UX in this regard. As mentioned, just a bystander, maybe this discussion is happening, and I just missed it?

That's a another data point for fingerprinting, sadly. Not that Chrome would care, but Firefox and Safari teams do, I guess.

Firefox’s “resist fingerprinting” does a lot of things to stop fingerprinting. One of those things is that it fakes my time zone as being UTC. 99% of of the time I never notice this being an issue. But occasionally I’ll try to pull up the wordle late in the day and get tomorrows puzzle.

And I feel like this is a lost cause at this point. Just assign every one of us a unique online ID and be done with it.

This recent HN submission is relevant.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43083151

> All HTTP date/time stamps MUST be represented in Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), without exception.

according to [rfc2616](https://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec3.html#sec3....). Presumably that makes a lot of awkward conversions unnecessary, but a separate TZ header would be a great addition.

[0] https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/002/125/139/0ff...

I just went with the original background made by the person who seemingly invented the meme format on Tumblr: https://www.tumblr.com/incorrecttintin/162088281738

I own all TinTin comics in Dutch (some old collectors items) and a very few in French. Dutch is often a lot longer than French, and sometimes shorter - it doesn't use the same amount of letters, let alone the same width of them. The French is ever slightly more pleasing, but noticable so.

The English translation you linked to, is even ugly in some places, it lacks the balance and spacing that Hergé often meticulously and deliberately used to convey extra meaning or balance.

¹ From The Blue Lotus on, Hergé devoted far more attention to accuracy. Which is all the more impressive because he then distills all that accuracy to the most simple lines. I am a fan. And yes, there is certainly controversy, his early work is clearly very racist and colonial - which shows the ideas of the times they were drawn in clearly.

[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/me...

In a similar vein, you can also use `Link: foo.css; rel=stylesheet` instead of `<link href="foo.css" rel="stylesheet" />` to specify stylesheets. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Li...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-serving_site

The former brought massive amounts of spam and the latter brought real identies which broke the freedom of the internet.

Or in other words, both brought the Internet and made it real and connected with the real world. And I think that's not a good thing. The Internet was supposed to be a virtual space for exploration, learning, fun, and it should have had no bearing on our actual day-to-day living experience.

But now here we are where Google is a spam filled search engine which hardly returns any products and Facebook is a dystopian wasteland and its founder is walking around like a teenage pimp.

Replace "The Internet" with previous communications technology and maybe that will demonstrate how completely unrealistic that sounds. Television should have had no bearing on our day-to-day existence? Phones? Radio?

I guess you can arbitrarily draw the line at the Internet, sort of like the Amish did with electricity. But it seems arbitrary to me.

The moral of every sci-fi story is that technology is morally neutral and it's how you use it that matters. Why would The Internet be different?

This was the ideal final form of the internet and we lost it forever. Now, we have sludge.

If you'd like to read more: https://blog.kagi.com/small-web

https://wiby.me

That's sad, that site was great.

(no affiliation)

(also no affiliation)

https://cosmic-clock.vercel.app

PS. I made it for myself just for fun. Haven't checked issues such as time for other countries. Just checked, time still stays local (Indian) for me even if I use VPN to change my location. I am using p5 and JS for the two times.

https://tintin.dlazaro.ca/day would be easy to make into a very much usable clock. I'm actually a little disappointed it didn't already update as a minute passed ;-)

Kick a man while he's down why don't you? /s

It takes courage to admit not being able to do anything!

But I'm also trying not to overthink this too much... It's just a silly little website I made in an evening.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herg%c3%a9

Thanks :)

That’s a strange design. If you sent just ~10 lines of JavaScript to the browser, you could achieve an actually live-updating version (i.e. not only on page refresh), and you could use the actual time zone of the user instead of assuming it based on GeoIP. Your page could exist with zero server-side code.

Captain, you're 84!

>"In the episode, the character Liz Lemon, portrayed by Tina Fey, complains to character Jack Donaghy, portrayed by Alec Baldwin, about having finished a hard week of work, with Donaghey reminding her that it is still Wednesday"

I don't know any context beyond what's in this clip of Liz Lemon saying it to Jack https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1z3uGyBM_1c

but "what a week" by itself does not indicate that the week is over, you can say "what a week" in the middle of a week; it would imply more the multiplicity of things that have already gone wrong, and "it's Wednesday" as a response has the sense "and it's only Wednesday, more things can still happen"

"What a week, thank god it's over!"

"it's wednesday"

would work for your lowest common denominator.

Saying “a week full of mondays” doesn’t mean it’s over either.

Slapstick is cool, but irony needs to be understood.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9K4-jllrPrE&list=PLy3-VH7qrU...

source: https://i.redd.it/to3v225w8nlz.jpg

“Captain, it’s Sunday” … I don’t get it.

Nitpick: /anyotheruri should return 404, no?

"Captain, it's week 5"

[1] https://xkcd.com/now

That would be more work with the risk of things being misplaced because you'd need to figure out alignment. The font will also not be rendered the same way, adding some small imperfections. The SVG text is also more accessible.

I believe sending the text as an SVG text is a vastly superior solution in every way :-)