Here is a gift for you at the end of August.

Sometimes you have a rummage around to find something and you turn up another thing entirely. Recently I was looking through some old CDs I’d burned in the 2000s with backups and old pictures on them to find something, and found a little file I’d forgotten about. 

In about 2000, when I was supposed to be revising for my A-levels, there was a part of my revision where, for some reason, I needed to do something in a certain amount of time. I could do that by looking at a clock, but what would be much more productive, I decided, was halting all work on revision while I coded a small Windows application to count seconds and minutes. I am happy to embrace the very obvious fact that this says a huge amount about the person I was aged 16.

This was a terrible use of my time, and plainly an afternoon spent procrastinating instead of revising, and the program has only grown less relevant with the passage of time as smartphones have given us all sophisticated stopwatches with lap timers and other features in our pockets at all times. 

Still, the nice thing about it is that, 24 years on, it still works perfectly on any Windows PC, so if you need to time something in a very feature-limited and inconvenient way, I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Timer.exe