Nifty objet d'art of the day: the Pong clock:
It's an embedded computer with an LCD display screen, which plays a perpetual game of Pong, with one round per minute. The right-hand side wins once a minute, except on the hour, when the left-hand side wins (and the right's score is reset); hence, the score displays the current time. Clocks go on sale next year, though there will be a downloadable screensaver soon.

In a sense, this seems to be the computer-age equivalent of those mechanical clocks from centuries past, in which tiny figures promenaded around illustrating the time of day.

(I wonder what it's implemented on. If the device contains, say, a Mac mini or an entire Linux system and X server, it would seem somewhat decadent.)

Posted by: Chrizi | http://chrizi.lundstedt.org | Tue Nov 29 23:12:44 2005

Decadent or not, its something I would put on my wall for sure. :o)

Posted by: acb | http://dev.null.org/ | Tue Nov 29 23:44:05 2005

I would too; though, if it's a large computer with a display, takes 30 seconds to boot up, keeps a hard disk spinning while it's running, emits the sound of a cooling fan, and uses hundreds of megabytes of RAM to host an OS, a window system, and a Flash interpreter, as well as redundant services that come with the OS, it would detract somewhat from its charm in my book.

Posted by: Sander | http://www.burovormkrijgers.nl | Sat Dec 3 18:38:28 2005

Hi there, i am the designer responsible for this Pong Clock. The photographed and filmed version is only a prototype, therefore it includes a full PII laptop, for easy tuning of the script. The final product, currently in development, which will be launched in Januari 2006, only uses one chip and a smaller LCD. Theredore it will be affordable, less decadent, less powerconsuming etc, but still cool :-)

Sander Buro Vormkrijgers

Posted by: acb | http://dev.null.org | Sat Dec 3 23:28:20 2005

That sounds a lot more elegant.

Want to say something? Do so here.

Note to spammers: This comment system applies the rel=nofollow attribute to the poster's URL and all links. Posting links to this page will not improve their search engine rankings.

Display name:
URL:(optional)
To prove that you are not a bot, please enter the text in the image on the right in the field below it.

Your Comment:

Remember my details.

Please keep comments on topic and to the point. Inappropriate comments may be deleted.

Note that markup is stripped from comments; URLs will be automatically converted into links.