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What is the best way in Ubuntu to attach a small screen (say, 5 inches by 7 inches) -- maybe one of those digital picture frames -- and have it continually display Unix epoch time?

I'm a DB developer and always looking at timestamp columns in various backend systems. By having epoch time on my screen at all times, I can instantly tell if the timestamps in the DB are somewhat fresh or not (rather than have to look it up at the moment.)

However, the more windows I open, eventually the window with epoch time is covered -- so I'd like to have a physically separate screen (could be a repurposed mini tablet, picture frame or any other small LCD that can be " talked to" by Ubuntu

Jerome Wiley Segovia
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  • If it helps, here is a command to display an epoch clock in terminal: clear; while true; do echo -en "\r$(date +'%s')"; sleep 1; done – wjandrea May 03 '17 at 16:06
  • Well, you could always have one of those small monitors that are used for raspberry pi, and connect it via HDMI, and treat it as external monitor. At that point, you could simply have a terminal window open there and have watch -n 1 date +%s command running ( which will run date +%s every second , basically giving you epoch clock) – Sergiy Kolodyazhnyy May 03 '17 at 16:15
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    Or you could add epoch time to Ubuntu's built-in clock. See this answer on "How to change the date format?". Just at %s at the end of the custom time format. – wjandrea May 03 '17 at 16:16
  • @wjandrea that's a good one ! – Sergiy Kolodyazhnyy May 03 '17 at 16:19
  • Thank you @wjandrea and sergiy-kolodyazhnyy, also willem-k! Will try a combination of these suggestions! I'll find a $10 monitor someone is discarding on Craigslist (maybe 15"?), then have the large version of the Epoch Time page with the seconds display running on it, maximized (I'd love the 8" monitor, but $70 is a bit steep for FY2017.) This is always a conversation starter when other employees at my company come and ask my what my "timer/countdown" is for. Little do they know that in less than 3 months, we'll be celebrating the "One Point Five Bil" milestone! 1.5 billion seconds on 7/13 – Jerome Wiley Segovia May 03 '17 at 17:29

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I trust lack of physical space on your desk made you ask this question ;-)
I would suggest you search Amazon or eBay for an 8inch monitor (I found Eyoyo 8" for $69.99). That would be the easiest solution I think because multi-monitor support is default in Ubuntu.