Nixplay
This title is stolen from the brand name of a digital device I was given by my daughter. It is a photo frame (perhaps 9”x6’) that is WiFi connected and to which any number of authorized contributors may submit photographs for my viewing pleasure. While the manner of display has many settings optionalities, I imagine that I employ the most common of simply having the photographs rotate through their sequence for several seconds each. This is hardly earthshaking technology. In fact, while I’m sure a representative of Nixplay might say I am greatly understating what their product is capable of (the intersection of product functionality breadth and user product education desire being somewhat challenging to estimate), this type of product has been available for a long time. I seem to recall getting one of these fifteen or more years ago and using it for a while before it got lost or discarded in the shuffle of life and moving from here to there. This version of the product can be set to come on at a specific time (pick your time zone) and then it just runs until it is scheduled to shut down. While I have finally gotten the time zone and the correct time (these things all set their own time) to show on the frame, I am still a ways away from getting the sleep function to turn it on and off at the times I prefer. I often glance in the office before going to bed and see the glow of the frame from the distant corner of the room, showing the bright and shining faces of my granddaughters.
The first thing I want to unwrap is this whole automated time-setting thing. We are all used to clocks, especially the ones on our cell phones and tablets, that set themselves. In fact, if everyone is like me, we always adjust our wristwatches and other unconnected clocks based on the time on our iPhones. I long ago gave the responsibility of having the correct time to my iPhone. One would think this is all a standard as set by some international consortium. Isn’t that implied by the term Greenwich Mean Time (GMT)? Yes and no. What about UTC (Coordinated Universal Time)? The truth is that as much as time should be handled consistently globally (just as with all weights and measures), it is not and we in the United States rely on the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). These folks keep a bit of cesium in Boulder, Colorado that is deemed the official atomic clock housed at the Physical Measurement Laboratory. This has been the standard for twenty years and is now considered accurate to the point where it will not vary by a second every 100 million years, so pretty damn balls-on accurate as Mona Lisa Vito would say.
This atomic clock, called NIST-F1, in Boulder does its thing continuously based on a very specific protocol. A second is defined as the time it takes a cesium atom to go through its paces. That means to reach its natural resonance frequency. This process involves a bunch of lasers moving and measuring the cesium and has been used since 1967, since the International Bureau of Weights and Measures established this measurement criteria.
NIST runs its own radio station in Fort Collins, Colorado called WWVB, broadcasting at the low frequency of 60 kHz. Therefore all radio-controlled clocks have a miniature receiver designed to receive this low frequency, usually once per day so they can keep themselves synchronized with the national atomic clock. This is more or less the same approach used in other countries except to varying degrees of absolute accuracy. Apparently NIST is feeling the hot breath of foreign competition on its neck and feels that they can improve on the current cesium methodology by introducing something called a “quantum logic clock” that does with an aluminum atom what has heretofore been done with a cesium atom. THe big difference is that it takes that 100 million year problem and turns it into a 3.7 billion year level of precision.
So, with all that fancy science going on behind the scenes of my iPhone, I am more than a little embarrassed that I can’t get my Nixplay digital photo album going on and off at the time I would like it to. I have knuckled down to solve the problem at least twice and failed twice. It now shows the correct atomic clock time, but it goes on and off at whatever damn time it likes.
The nice thing about this Nixplay device is that during sometimes long days writing or listening to Zoom hearings, I can distract myself by watching the two types of pictures which are loaded on my frame. There are those of my lovely granddaughters Charlotte and Evelyn, or of my motorcycle journeys with my biking friends. Since the frame was a gift from my daughter, she is diligent about uploading the latest pictures of the girls. The ones that stir my heart the most are the ones taken in the backyard of my house in Ithaca. Especially now that we have had to postpone our road trip east for a few months. I enjoy a very strange relationship with Ithaca, as did my mother. It was her home for a century, but she hadn’t lived there for eighty years. She visited regularly and stayed particularly close to her sister when she was alive. Everything about her linked back to Ithaca, just as everything about me links back to Ithaca. I spent only five years living in Ithaca, but I have owned a house there for twenty-five years. It means more to me than I had ever realized that my children and now grandchildren are also linked to Ithaca. They, like me, still enjoy chasing fireflies on warm summer nights and listening to the bell tower chimes playing one of the many Cornell songs in the crisp autumn air. There would usually be the drumbeat of the marching band in the air, but socially distant Ivy League football is not amenable to such frivolities it seems.
Today I saw pictures of the girls in matching Cornell sweatshirts with the rust-colored tree leaves of October in the background. It was the first time I missed the changing seasons and being back East. I got over it when I was able to go outside to sit on the deck in the warm sun of the afternoon. The Nixplay is my friend, but it is also my arch-enemy. I fight the technology and I fight the emotions it evokes. It seems an appropriate name that it is called Nixplay. Life is not a game, but of what value is it without the pleasures of the flesh, which I shall call play in the broadest sense of the word. Nixplay says to me that the memories of the linkages in ones life are perhaps the most important things we carry forward in our lives. My mother didn’t have the benefit of a Nixplay frame like I do, but she understood the importance of the things that matter in life and kept the linkages alive. I clearly need to get my Nixplay time-synched and keep it connecting me to all the things that matter to me in life.