A small atelier
for honest
time.
RealTime123 is a workshop, not a platform. It serves precise time, tools, and city pages from the edge—quietly, on a domain that has been running since 2008.
The realtime123.com domain was registered in 2008— long before the modern web's norms around hardware honesty, performance budgets, or edge runtimes. Through three browser eras and a dozen framework cycles, it has accumulated a small but real amount of search trust.
We are spending that trust deliberately. Each page is finished before the next one starts. Nothing “world's first.” Nothing claimed without measurement. The clock on the front page is the most honest clock you'll find on the open web—not because it's better hardware, but because we don't pretend otherwise about its ceiling.
The site is operated by Cryptosam, a small workshop that has been building digital products since the same year the domain was registered. We pay for the domain ourselves. We make money from advertising, when it makes sense.
Why sub-millisecond,
not microsecond?
After the Spectre and Meltdown disclosures in 2018, modern browsers coarsened the resolution of performance.now() to roughly 100 microseconds. The exact ceiling varies between vendors and security contexts, but it is universally above the microsecond level.
A clock that claims to display true microseconds in a web browser is lying about its ceiling. Our clock displays six decimal digits because the visual is satisfying—but the effective resolution is ~100 µs, and we say so on every page.
This is the kind of detail that doesn't affect day-to-day use, but it is the difference between a serious instrument and a stage prop.
- Spectre side-channel disclosure (2018)
- MDN · Performance.now() time precision
- W3C · High Resolution Time Level 3
- Chromium tracker · 100µs minimum granularity
Made with
boring decisions.
Every choice is the safest long-term bet. Edge hosting because physics. A boring, type-safe framework because the React ecosystem made it boring. Serifs for the type because they will read cleanly in twenty years. Boring ages well.
- Hosting
- Edge runtime · global
- Rendering
- Server-rendered, statically prerendered
- Type
- Two serifs, one mono
- Data
- Static city dataset · ISR-cached
- Analytics
- Consent-gated · GA4 via GTM
- Source
- Private repository