This is a question I get asked quite often from people stumbling on my new blog, “What are those Moving Blocks?” Or I’ll get some funny suggestions like a mini doomsday counter, horizontal Tetris thingy, some type of unseen Google ad, subliminal advertising tool and many more, keep them coming though, I’m getting some pretty cool ideas for my quest on world domination :P

They are obviously referring to my Binary Clock sitting in the top left corner just below the temporary logo.

After the inquiry on what it is, I usually get, “So how do you read the time on it?”

That’s actually really simple, the first row represents the hours in binary, the second row is the minutes in binary while the last row is the seconds in binary. It works as follow, a red block is considered a one while a black block is considered a zero, you read it from right to left and the value of each trailing block is the previous block’s value times two. Simply count all the red blocks times their respective position value for each row to get the hours, minutes and seconds respectively, let’s work out the time in the image as an example:

Counting only the red blocks will give the following values:

H: [32][16][08][04][02][01] => 08+04=12

M: [32][16][08][04][02][01] => 16+08+01=25

S: [32][16][08][04][02][01] =>16+04+02=22

And there we have the time 12h25 and 22 seconds.

Hmmm, think it is time to build a hexadecimal clock running from 000000 to FFFFFF and simply displaying a block of colour, 00h00 will be displayed as black and 23h59 will be very close to white, as the time goes on, the colour will change accordingly, lunchtime will be displayed as a reddish gray and as lunchtime passes by, green and blue will gradually blend in with the red until it’s a new shade of red.

Comment with any suggestions on interesting ways of keeping time, would love to hear from my fellow geeks :P