this post was submitted on 06 May 2025
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The appliance that elicits anger and frustrated at it's mere sight. The treacherous device that never worked right.

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[–] tal@lemmy.today 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 20 hours ago)

I can't think of anything that quite fits that off-the-cuff, at least not in the US. A quick search doesn't turn anything up. I can think of some related things:

  • The AC signal is used as a clock in a number of devices. This isn't a "clock" in the common-language sense of the word, but in the electrical engineering sense -- it provides a reliable frequency over the long run. Some (common-language) clocks and timers have used this to keep them running at a steady pace, but it's not really a time signal, wouldn't help restore an on-device clock setting after power loss.

  • X10 is a low-speed networking protocol that runs over local power circuits for home automation. I'm sure that at some point, someone has made some product that permits setting a clock with it. The limitation is that your signal doesn't span across household circuits, which I suspect one would want for a "whole house time signal".

  • There have been powerline-based ISPs, where the power company shovels data over the line using high-frequency modulation. In theory, you could use one of various Internet time protocols over that. I think that that was kind of a dead end, technology-wise


there's just not that much data that you can push over an unshielded, non-twisted-pair, metal power line.

  • I would not be surprised if there's some data protocol that power companies use to talk to smart meters that includes pushing a time signal out specifically for them -- they do push and pull data over that -- though I don't think that that's accessible to other devices.

That being said, could be some company out there that did that locally. Not technically impossible.