twclock - Amateur radio clock

twclock

This manual page documents the twclock program. This manual page was written for the Debian GNU/Linux distribution because the original program does not have a manual page.

Twclock is a clock program which will prove to be very helpful for ham operators. It is implemented with Motif widgets, and will displays the current time in major cities around the world.

The current time at some point on the globe is determined using the time zone information contained in the files located under the directory /usr/share/zoneinfo. A file selection box allows you to pick the area and city of interest, and the environment variable TZ is set to the pathname for that time zone file. The clock will then display the current time for the selected location. Don't worry, this only changes TZ for the clock process - other processes are unaffected.

The GUI uses scale widgets to display hours, minutes, and seconds. There is a label for date and time zone info and a button which you can give any name. This button acts as an alarm clock when pressed. The time for this alarm clock can be set in the application defaults file.

Very few properties were hard coded. This way you can set widget properties (colors, fonts, labels, etc.) as you like in the defaults file - Twclock without recompiling.

There are no pulldown menus, instead there is only this one "UNDOCUMENTED" popup menu (via mouse button 3). Two of the menu buttons, "Local" and "GMT" set the clock to that time. The third menu button, "Others:", pops up a file selection box dialog that allows you to select an area and city. The OK button will set the clock to the selected zone. The Cancel button can be pressed at any time to popdown the dialog, leaving the time unchange.

The application defaults file Twclock can be changed to fit your needs. Instead of changing this system-wide file, you can also add some lines to your ~/.Xresources file. For example, to change the timer, add these lines: twclock.minutes: t1

twcock.seconds: t2

Some other things you can play with in Twclock are the x and y values to position the clock, foreground/background colors, the font and some labels.

The application defaults file is in /etc/X11/app-defaults.

/usr/share/doc/twclock/README.*

This manual page was written by Joop Stakenborg <pa3aba@debian.org>, for the Debian GNU/Linux system (but may be used by others).