It knows what time it is. The board never joins a network to scan, but it already joins one for the update check at boot and for UPDATE OVER WIFI, so the clock now rides along: one NTP round trip while the radio is up anyway, measured at half a second on the Phantom and a second and a bit on the soak board. The built-in time client was tried first and waits a random five seconds before asking, which was longer than the whole boot check; a single packet by hand answers in the time a DNS lookup takes. A board with no saved network takes the time from a squad member's hello, from the web flasher, or from a TIME line on the console. The clock survives a reboot and not a power cut, and every boot check puts it back.
And where it is. The zone is yours, three ways. The web flasher has a SET TIME & ZONE button that sends this computer's clock and zone down the cable right after flashing, the zone kept for good. The first time the clock is set with no zone chosen, a card on the main screen asks, with the live time in the zone it shows so you can see when it's right, and THIS IS RIGHT is the last you hear of it. TIME ZONE on the SYSTEM page changes it later. Twenty-one zones, daylight saving handled. Until a zone is picked the board is honest and on UTC.
The squad shares the clock. Every hello now carries the sender's version, clock and zone. A board with no clock takes a member's, a board with no zone takes a member's, and a board with its own keeps it: the network is the first-hand answer and a hello is second-hand. Flash one board from the site and the rest of the squad know the time within a minute of meeting it.
The LOG tells the time. Real times on every row, "14:39" instead of minutes since boot, and the date for a catch from another day. The alert card says AT NIGHT for anything caught between eleven and five, and Squachy's line after it sharpens to match.
Squachy's day. He knows the hour: dawn patrol, the morning shift, lunch, the three o'clock slump, the evening commute, the night shift, and the hours after eleven each have their own lines, and Monday, Friday and the weekend theirs. One idle line in three comes from the clock. He says hello once a day with the date in it, worded for the hour, and he counts the days since the board first knew the date: a week, a month, a hundred days, a year, each said once, ever. Nothing about how he looks changes; the hour changes what he says.
Desk mode. DESK MODE in Settings turns the board into the thing beside the keyboard: the date, the time in seven-segment digits on a plate over your background, Squachy underneath doing what he does, and a focus timer. FOCUS 25 clears the scene, he goes still and quiet, and when the twenty-five minutes are up the light on the back goes green, he tells you to stand up, and a five-minute break counts itself down. The desk keeps its own background, picked with a tap at either edge and remembered on its own. Switch the board off on the desk and it boots back to the desk. BACK is the main screen.
Detection doesn't stop for the desk. A catch is a small card by the buttons with the type, the name and the signal, the light in the type's colour, and a tap opens the full ALERT, which returns to the desk. A squad message stands beside him: the sender's Squachy in a tilted polaroid, four letters of their name in the margin in marker pen, and the message in an XP-style MESSAGE box that drops out from behind the clock and climbs back when it's read. Landscape puts him beside the box, portrait under it, and while the box is up his own bubble waits its turn.
More freelance-police banter. Sixteen idle lines and eight catch oaths in the register of a calm detective who says alarming things flatly and dull things grandly ("Well slap me with a spectrum analyser. AIRTAG."), and fourteen two-Squachy exchanges in setup-and-undercut form ("Any last words before another quiet hour?" "Crime!" "You always say that.").
Squachy's sunglasses join up on the left now. They didn't.
Getting this version: from v1.7.4 or later, UPDATE OVER WIFI, Bluetooth, or a squad member's UPDATE SQUAD. From anything older, the USB flasher. The flasher's new SET TIME & ZONE button is untested against a real board from the site; it was proven with the same two lines sent by hand over the cable.
The actually-useful part
- Added: the real clock, set over WiFi at boot, from a squad hello, from the flasher or over serial
- Added: TIME ZONE on the SYSTEM page, the once-only zone card, and ZONE over serial
- Added: SET TIME & ZONE on the web flasher
- Added: the clock and zone in every squad hello
- Added: real times and dates on LOG rows
- Added: AT NIGHT on the alert card, with a sharper line from Squachy
- Added: hour, weekday, once-a-day and anniversary lines for Squachy
- Added: DESK MODE with the focus timer, its own background, the small alert card and the polaroid message box
- Added: sixteen idle lines, eight catch oaths and fourteen two-Squachy exchanges
- Changed: a board switched off on the desk boots back to the desk
- Fixed: the gap in Squachy's sunglasses bridge