Gizmodo: digital clock

Art Lebedev Verbarius Word Clock Lightning Review

Jason Chen — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 13:00:00 EST

The Gadget: The Verbarius electronic clock by Art Lebedev, a design firm that's also given us fancy gadgets like the OLED Optimus Maximus keyboard, icon fridge magnets, folder flash drives and the upcoming Optimus Aux keypad. The Verbarius displays time not by numbers, but solely by phrases like "Twenty-nine past eleven a.m." or "Half past ten".

The Price: $190

The Verdict: Amazing, but pricey. The clock works just as described, displaying phrases instead of times. You can have up to ten different variations on a single "minute", so 10:10 could be "ten ten", "ten past ten", "ten minutes past ten", "fifty til eleven", or whatever other weird notation you can think of. To make your own language packs (it already comes with English, French, Russian and Spanish), just make an .xls file and send it to Art Lebedev. They'll convert it to Verbarius' proprietary format.

There are a few quirks to the clock though. First, it's not battery-operated, so you'll have to plug it using the included USB AC adapter or any USB source. Second, the internal CPU is slow (as you'd expect in a clock), so adjusting the time is actually incredibly sluggish. It takes more than a second to change the hour or minute, and you can only change it one tick at a time—no holding it down.

The biggest oddity is how the default English language pack sometimes displays minutes. Ten three? Ten two? Nobody says this. It's easily fixed in a software update, so we're not going to dock off too many points for this.

After having actually used the clock for a while, we have to agree with our first instincts. It's definitely a very, very cool time-telling device, but $190 is a bit steep. If it were somewhere down in the $120 to $140 range, we'd be all over it. [Art Lebedev]

DIY Super Nintendo Digital Alarm Clock

Sean Fallon — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 13:15:00 EST

I wouldn't sacrifice a working SNES for this mod, but if you have a broken one in your closet somewhere, transforming it into a digital alarm clock is an interesting (and inexpensive) way to give it new life. As you can see in the video, the display can be set using the standard controller. Plus the cartridge is still removable, making it possible to expand on the mod and develop alternate displays.

[Mavrinac via Hack-a-Day]

Digital/Analog Clock Does Digital Time with Physical Display

Kit Eaton — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 06:19:30 EDT

Design student Alvin Aronson has rethought our interaction with digital timepieces by making a robotic LED/LCD display, with parts that slide in and out to form numerals. So, really its more a "physical digital" clock, rather than properly analog, but you get the point. Once you see the video of it gently transitioning its display between two time states, you'll be just as filled with gadget lust as we are.

Alvin apparently built his one-off mashup device from Corian and wood, using custom electronics to drive those digital segments with servos. Awesome, isn't it? The only issue we foresee is that you'd get so captivated by the slow zen-like time changes that you'd watch the clock, rather than get on with whatever it was you should be doing. [Vvork via Technabob]