Re: Paper sundials

[Tom Egan]

Dave, The WayBack Machine is truly a marvel!  Thanks for pointing me to it.  The converter at http://web.archive.org/web/20030202191330/http://www.cyberspace.org/~jh/dial/ doesn't seem to be working, though.  I tried a latitude other than the default 45 deg. and got ... 45 deg.  The author warns that the system is rather dicey: "This project utilizes several different programs running on different machines around the web, all of them provided at no charge. Sometimes (more often than not, lately) they aren't all up and running at the same time. If you get a message that a server isn't responding just try again later. Tripod, one of the free service providers I use, utilizes cookies and puts an advertisement on your screen. I have nothing to do with it. "What I really need is a nice free web host who will let me run cgi scripts and has Adobe Acrobat (not the free Reader but the commercial product which includes Distiller) or Ghostscript installed so I can convert PostScript to PDF and Gif files. In the meantime, if you can't get the current customization and file translation features to work for you and you are still wanting to use these sundial programs you can easily customize the PostScript manually. "NEW The customization features have become so unreliable that I've set up a list of PDF sundials, one of which will probably be near your latitude." I ran a thoughtfully provided PDF to get the latitude approximately right, but I'd still like to customize the text so I can have the recipient's name on the dial, along with a holiday greeting.  Maybe the servers will be aligned for me next time I try! Tom 33.642N  117.943W Dave Bell wrote: Quick, Mr. Peabody, to the WayBack Machine!!! It doesn't always work, but there is a wonderful archive of internet pages, available to all of us: http://archive.org Go there, and enter any URL, and it will attempt to find old, archived copies of the page. John's appeared in 12 versions, from August, 1999 to Feb, 2003. I tried the latest one, and all the links appear to work fine. http://web.archive.org/web/20030202191330/http://www.cyberspace.org/~jh/dial/ Dave 37.28N 121.97W -