It's my understanding that they've known the folks at Bantam for some time now, and that given how hard it can be to run a physical product company (especially one that does some in-house manufacturing for your own products!) in the bay area, that they're looking forward to having such niceties as 'pto'.
They're really excellent people, and made a huge difference to me when I first moved to the bay area, so while it's sad to see them leave, I understand it, and hope this leads to a better situation all around for them.
It doesn't make it any less sad, however. It's just... the end of an era, it feels like.
I also have issues with M&A practices to begin with. While I can't speak for this particular case, I do worry that in general the frequency of M&A is trending toward harmful to our society. That may be coloring my view.
I just hope they release the MOnSter 6502 someday. That thing is cool, and if I happened to have the money, I'd probably pay a grand to be able to hang one on my wall...
[1]: https://www.bantamtools.com/blog/bantam-tools-acquires-evil-...
Not necessarily, or at least without explicit calculation. Good sundials are marked with a calendar that does that for you. Large analemmatic dials have places marked for each month where you stand the gnomon, which can be a person. There is one by the river in Stratford Upon Avon
https://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/6232719
There are also dials that include a kind of circular slide rule that implements the equation of time:
http://www.short-humour.org.uk/Heliochronometer/Heliochronom...
The actual issue is that sundials reflect the movement of the sun, whereas we mainly use an averaged out mean time to describe when it is noon. Solar noon (when the sun is at it's highest point) is sometimes ahead of mean time noon, sometimes behind it. This is due to the movement of the earth around the sun (including whether the earth is east or west of the sun looking down from the above the sun), the earth's axial tilt, and your latitude. However, the variation is entirely predictable, as encapsulated in the so-called equation of time, which shows the variation that needs to be applied to get mean noon. Of course, none of this really matters if you aren't bothered about synchronising geographically distributed clocks, time zones, etc.
As an example of the other weirdnesses that can result from using solar time, consider how day length changes as we go from the shortest to the longest day. Where I am in the southern UK, sunrise continues to get later until about two weeks after the shortest day, and the major change of day length (at that time of year) is in the evening. This is the same effect captured by the equation of time and reflects the fact that we are on a wobbly planet that doesn't have a perfectly circular, perfectly vertical orbit around the sun.
[Edit - minor rewording for clarity]
Easy, except for reliably powering the LEDs.
https://webglfundamentals.org/webgl/lessons/webgl-shadows.ht...
It doesn’t match the other clock we made, sure, but boy that would’ve been a weird thing to explain to any human at all 200 years ago.
wow, I never knew!
I missed the part where they explained how you get a moving shadow, without either moving posts or moving lights.
Https://digitalhorology.com
Also, sundials don't suck.