08 December, 2011

All I want for Christmas is a nerdy watch

As a self appointed nerd I have a special fascination for watches with binary displays or with morse code readouts. It seems as if such watches now have become designer objects. One reason may be that since everyone has a mobile phone with a clock these days, design can be promoted at the cost of functionality. Anyway, here are some nice watches to choose from for your wish list!

Personally I find the watches from The One to be among the nicest. Here is the Slim Square. The display is a bit hard to read, binary as it is. The trick is that the left-hand side shows the hours and the right-hand side minutes. Then just add up to get the hours and the minutes.


Lexon's E8 is a bit simpler. It has been created by a designer and is supposedly patented. Time is shown in a kind of decimal system. The two columns to the left show the hours and those to the right indicate the minutes. Just simple counting. That should be simpler than adding, at least if you are short on time and wonder if the train is late or not.

Press image for audible morse code!
Tokyflash is really the place for nerdy watches. Here the nerd factor is more important than design. Personally I like best their morse watch. Unfortunately this watch is no longer produced, for some inexplicable reason the market seems to have been too small. It could also be because, presumably there was an error in the morse code for one of the digits. The nerd market has little tolerance for faults like that. As a guide to the readout I should say that there are two digits to the left for the hour, two for the minutes in the middle, and then that to the right it says PM. The morse code is read from the top down.

I must admit that I favor morse code for the ear rather than for the eyes. With a little practice it is so much faster. Therefore I have recorded the time also - just press the image. The world record is about 75 word per minute, where one word is 5 letters. My recording runs at a mere 21 words per minute.

All the work I put into learning morse code some years ago gave me one extra point in the geek test which I just recently took. My score was 17.89668% and therefore I am quite a normal geek. (For real geeks there cannot be too many digits after the decimal point it seems).

Here are some questions to the nerds and geeks among the readers, assuming that if you have read as far as this you for sure qualify as one:
  • There must be many more beautiful, nerdy and special watches that I could have included here, so I welcome suggestions!
  • How much do these watches really show? Complete the poll below!


How much is the binary watch?

How much is the decimal watch?

  Press image for audible morse code!

How much is the morse watch?


4 comments:

  1. Well I must say I never realized there were so many funky watches around. As for me I like the morse code watch.

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  2. Nice, aren't they?

    I would like a morse code watch also, but it must give correct code. Preferably it should also have an adjustable code speed. The Tokyoflash watch seems to have had a speed of only 10 words per minute.

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  3. Yes, they are nice - and I never would have thought to even look for them...never knew such things existed! I followed the links you provided and ended up losing about a half hour of my life. Time well spent though from a fellow nerd!

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  4. Good to hear - next step is to spend some $, € or £ or whatever, Norwegian Kroner is what we have here, on one of them also!

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