Read about crop circles, make your own temporary tattoos,
and take crystal-clear photos with a circular polarizing filter.
TOOLBOX
Tokyo Time Hackers
$100 and up tokyoflash.com
We geeks love to hack the wetware (aka our brains) as much as the
hardware and software. Puzzles, brainteasers, math problems,
games with complex rules and devilish stratagem, anything to
keep those neurons sparky. So when a propeller-head chooses
a watch, if given the choice between one that tells time via
mechanical hands or digital readouts versus one that rewrites
the very rules of time-telling, displaying it in some unspeakably nerdy way, you know what the choice will likely be.
For many a high-dome and wired hipster, the choice is
TokyoFlash, the Japanese chronograph merchant specializing
in unique, and some might say, insanely odd, timepieces.
Their Morse Code Watch tells time by sounding it out in Morse
code, “refracting the sound through your wrist,” as well as
displaying the code on the watch’s face. The Scope uses X and Y
coordinates and a flashing LED scope-like screen to point and
flash out the time. One of TokyoFlash’s more well-known watches
is the B Version by Twelve 5-9. It uses a radar-like display to indicate the
hours, a row of five LEDs for the 10s and nine lights for the intervening minutes. The High Frequency PU uses LCD technology to display
a dance of brilliant blue (or green) lights that spike and die like a
graphic equalizer. Eventually, all the lights fade away except for
the ones that indicate the current time (or month/day).
If you really want to play Play-Doh with your thought forms, get
several of these watches, ones that use very different methods of
time-keeping, and switch off wearing them. Just be prepared to get
the snot kicked out of you if somebody asks you for the time on the
subway and you shove one of these weirdo watches in his face.
—Gareth Branwyn
172 Make: Volume 09
