Internet Time Now script

George Leslie-Waksman — Fri, 05 Feb 2016 19:40:05 GMT

On account of being mentioned by Reply All, I've been listening to back episodes of [TLDR]. Listening to #15 - Internet Time caught my attention and made me aware of Swatch Internet Time. It's kind of impractical but also kind of fun, especially as I've been a little annoyed at recording times across timezones for something meant to persist, like this blog.

For fun, I whipped up a quick python implementation:

import datetime
import decimal

def decimal_time(ts):
    mus_ts = (ts.hour * 3600 + ts.minute * 60 + ts.second) * 1000000 + ts.microsecond
    mus_day = 24 * 3600 * 1000000
    dec_time = decimal.Decimal(mus_ts) / decimal.Decimal(mus_day)
    return dec_time * 1000

def internet_time_now(precision=0):
    precision = int(max(0, min(25, precision)))
    precision = 0 if precision < 1 else int(precision)
    format_len = 3 if precision < 1 else 4 + precision
    format_str = '@{{:0{l:d}.0{p:d}f}}'.format(l=format_len, p=precision)
    it_utc_p1 = datetime.datetime.utcnow() + datetime.timedelta(hours=1)
    return format_str.format(decimal_time(it_utc_p1))

Or, if you don't care about precision:

import datetime

def decimal_time(ts):
    s_ts = ts.hour * 3600 + ts.minute * 60 + ts.second
    s_day = 24 * 3600
    return int(1000 * s_ts / s_day)

def internet_time_now():
    it_utc_p1 = datetime.datetime.utcnow() + datetime.timedelta(hours=1)
    return '@{:03d}'.format(decimal_time(it_utc_p1))

gwax (Posts about time)

Internet Time Now script