The Binary Clock, the ultimate gizmo for people who laugh in the face of time, play tiddlywinks on the lap of destiny, and boil bratwurst in the kitchen of fate. Anyone can have a clock that every Tom Dick and Henrietta (21st century version) can read, so where’s the fun in that? This one sails freely against the wisdom that it should be easy to tell the time by having no hands at all, and displaying the time in Binary Code via blue LEDs.
The gently blinking lights mark out the passage time in what appears to be a completely random way – except of course there’s nothing random about the passage of time, even if it does seem like it sometimes. There are three brightness settings for the LEDs and the clock’s mains powered. Telling the time is a simple as doing a killer sudoku in the dark. The clock uses six columns of lights, each column represents a number value from 0-9. The 2 columns on the left indicate hours, the middle 2 are minutes, the right 2 are seconds. With us so far? The value of each column is determined by which lights are on. Yeah right, whatever, look it’s not about being able to tell the time (even if you are clever enough), it’s about being odd, cool and slightly strange – also it looks great as the seconds flash by in different patterns that only R2D2 can understand.

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