Category: Timepieces

After years of not wearing a watch because my mobile phone had a clock on it, I adopted a smartwatch. You won’t find me without my Pebble any more. It makes it very easy to tell if I need to send my wife to voicemail while I am working rather than digging my phone out of my pocket first.

Watchmaker Analog Watch Co. takes advantage of the smartwatch craze to drum up some publicity with what is most probably an April Fools’ joke. It’s called the Ant Watch, a small ant farm in the shape of a wristwatch. The watch supposedly comes as a ready to assemble kit that contains sand, a dropper for food and water and live harvester ants.

When it comes to things like watches and other wearable items, I am rather cheap. For instance, I plan to stick with my Pebble for as long as it works rather than spend hundreds on a new Apple Watch.

We’ve seen a felt model of Apple’s polarizing smartwatch. Professional LEGO builder Chris McVeigh aka Power Pig made an equally cute LEGO version of the watch and showed it off on his blog and Facebook page. His fans liked the model so he made a building guide for it.

I’m certainly not a timepiece connoisseur; I like my Pebble smartwatch and that’s enough for me. I have seen some of those high-end mechanical watches though, and I very much like the idea of a watch that has lots of exposed gears.

No matter what you think of the Apple Watch, it’s definitely got a distinctive look – especially the user interface. For those of you jumping on the bandwagon, you’ll have to wait until the end of April before you’ll be able to wear one.

While the rest of the world is voicing their want, disgust or lack of an opinion on the Apple Watch, a nerdy watch made by one man has become so popular he quickly sold out of his initial stock and had to outsource the assembly of the succeeding batches.

We’ve known what the Apple Watch would look like for a while now, and now Apple has finally revealed all of the details we’ve been waiting for, including pricing for every version, as well as the features slated for its April launch. Apple is hoping the Apple Watch will become highly integral to the daily life of those who wear one.

We’ve seen our share of Nixie tube clocks, but the Blub Uno is different. This is a clock that displays time with just a single Nixie tube. One tube, many possibilities.

This cool James Bond-like lighter and watch in one will make you look cool, and might even make you a Time Lord, because you are creating fire with TIME itself.

A long time ago, I bought a Leatherman multitool that has a pouch you are supposed to attach to your belt. I found quickly that I don’t like things on my belt and stopped using it.

If you like watches, you probably have strong feelings about smartwatches. On one hand, you’re probably in favor of watches that do as much as possible, even if it’s not something you’d use (what lunar phase is it?),

You’ll never be late for class again with this X-Men Xavier’s School watch. It’s what all of the cool kids like Wolverine, Storm, Rogue and Beast are wearing.

Making watches out of unusual materials is quickly becoming a trend. The wood face watch is very much a thing, and I’ve seen a number of all wood watches. I like a number of the ones with wood faces, and I’ve even liked one or two of the all-wood designs, despite the general clunkiness of most of them.

We’ve featured a variety of clocks made from hard drives. It turns out you can make a wristwatch out of a hard drive as well. Watchmaker Jean Jerome used the obsolete 1″ hard drive aka Microdrive as the base for his HDDWatch. Jean got the idea for HDDWatch from a photoshopped joke that he saw in a watch forum.

Maker Daniel Rojas came up with an affordable – albeit smaller – alternative to Biegert & Funk’s prohibitively expensive QLOCKTWO word clocks. Daniel made it using an 8×8 LED matrix, an ATMega 328p microcontroller and a DS1307 real time clock. Daniel printed the necessary characters on a transparent sheet then programmed the LED patterns to display the time with words. Head to Daniel’s website to get the Arduino code and board design files for the clock.