Yesterday morning at work I noticed that one of my coworkers had a LED Binary Clock. We got to talking, and I mentioned how bogus it was that it wastn’t actually purely binary, and still represented digits from our normal 24/60/60 system. I joked that I would whip up a web version that did it right. I didn’t actually intend to. But over lunch I needed a break, so I did. Most of it was done in 20 minutes over lunch. (I was slow since I hadn’t done this kind of thing in years.) I ended up refining it slightly more during another short break I had in the afternoon, then once I got home I started cleaning it up for posting here, made new images, etc. Anyway… my new binary clock is now ready!
A number of places sell items like the ThinkGeek LED Binary Clock. These proport to show the time in binary and thus be all geeky and cool. But they fake it. They just take the normal standard time in HH:MM:SS format and show each of the six digits as a binary number… This is simply NOT geeky enough. True geeks will want a clock like what I present here.
This is a true binary time clock where the time is represented by one binary fraction representing the portion of the day that has passed. The first bit is half days, the second is quarter days, then eighths, etc. as well as their on and off graphics. The clock shows the local time from your computer and reflects the time zone you have set, so it is only as accurate as your own computer’s clock. The last bit flips once every 1/65536th of a day, otherwise known as approximately every 1.3184 seconds. This is truely a binary clock. Not like those wannabes that use 24/60/60.
Hmmm… Now I just need to get someone to make an actual physical one of these so I can have one on my desk or hanging on my wall!
geek.
Who? Me?
NOooo not you.
I knew you had to be talking about someone else.