> it adds an undeniable “rhythm” to the day, chopping it into chunks
The gods confound the man who first found out
how to distinguish hours! Confound him, too,
who in this place set up a sundial,
to cut and hack my days so wretchedly
into small portions! When I was a boy,
my belly was my sundial — one surer,
truer, and more exact than any of them.
This dial told me when ’twas proper time
to go to dinner, when I had aught to eat;
But nowadays, why even when I have,
I can’t fall-to unless the sun gives leave.
The town’s so full of these confounded dials
the greatest part of the inhabitants,
shrunk up with hunger, crawl along the street.
> With Durr you become aware of how your brain alters the length of a bus ride, how fast you finish a beer, how time flies by when you enjoy yourself, and drags along when you wait in line at the post office.
Let me propose the 20% case that'll feel like the 80% case. Having a beer with a friend and sharing laughter, and ...buzz.buzz.buzz... being reminded mid-laugh that you're having a beer with a friend sharing a laugh.
I enjoy the moments where my brain adjusts the volume of the world around me, I get lost in thought and time becomes my bitch.
This reminds me of feelSpace[1]. It is a belt which has vibrating motors all around it and a compass. I believe the point is to give you an extra "sense" which after you have worn it enough you incorporate with your other senses.
I built exactly that device, but as an ankle bracelet. I also used GPS so you could have it continuously point you to a specific location. It was for a college project and I never took it past prototype so you had to carry around a breadboard and an Arduino.
It was interesting to wear and after some time it started to feel like a "sixth sense".
Two guys I know through the local hackspace have had this done.
One is a cable/internet tech, and claims that it may have saved his life - you can't perceive voltage potential, but you can "sense" current flow.
He was standing in a puddle of water, and was reaching towards the inside of a cable box on a house, and "felt" current flowing through it. Investigated, and found that the line into the box had been rubbing against a household electrical wire, and had worn through the insulation on both, causing a short that was carrying power through the box.
That's for sure. I wonder how safe these sort of implants are even when just playing around with other rare earth magnets. Having the implant ripped out because you absentmindedly picked up another magnet would really suck.
I know literally nothing about this, but would posit the hope that if multiple people have cared enough to implant an object under their skin, at least one of them would have considered a less-permanent solution like a ring before hand and tried it out.
This must be a gag, or the worst example of western opulence I could possibly think of.
Seriously, an electronic gadget made to disrupt your day every 5 minutes. I think this requires a better explanation of the purpose before I take it seriously. Right now all the marketing speak combined with the banality of this device makes me think it's the perfect april fools but a few months too soon.
Let's assume it's for real, why would you want to get reminded that 5 minutes have passed when you've lost yourself in a fun life moment? Or when you're waiting for something a long time, that would be even worse.
I'm sure it would seem interruptive the first few times. But after that, it would become familiar. If you've ever lived near a clock that ticks or chimes, it eventually becomes part of the background, a subtle reminder of the flow of time.
Your approach to consciousness, to get lost in pleasant things and to be oblivious of unpleasant things, is one way to be. But other people are after different things. Plenty of people want a better sense of the flow of time. Note, for example, the popularity of the Pomodoro Method.
I grew up in a terraced house that was immediately adjacent to the back of a convent/nunnery. There would be frequent bell-ringing to call the sisters to prayers, etc.
I slept right through it. Always.
Until we moved house, then I'd find myself waking up at, say, midnight for the first few weeks being slightly disturbed that the bell hand't run.
I'd wear this thing while working. Sometimes I get caught up reading hacker news (like now), this thing might give me a feeling of how much time I'm wasting and make sure I get back to doing something productive.
Some people like to monitor their experiences or ruminate on how they perceive things. This is simply a tool that may potentially provide insight towards that end. Nothing to get pissed about.
There is an interval trainer app for running but I think it will work for this. Set it up for 5 minute intervals and you should get a similar functionality. The only thing is it won't run in the background so you have to keep the app open.
Does this work in the background, or do you have to have that app running?
For a while I was using an iOS app called BuzzClock. I liked the feature that it would give a different # of buzzes as you went through the hour. I found this helped reduce the need to check the time when I was heads-down on some work, or give a subtle reminder that I might be lingering too long on something.
But having to keep the app in the foreground ultimately killed it for me.
I was thinking the same thing but could you imagine your phone vibrating in your pocket every 5 minutes? If I didn't expect my phone to also vibrate for phone calls and messages all day long, an app would be viable... sadly, you probably need to distinguish in an obvious way
From TFA:
> Oh, and no, it's not waterproof, so don't shower with it.
Water resistance just seems to be a requirement these days - even my Pebble which I'd never wear in the shower is water resistant so when I am forced to react to a bath incident, I don't worry about the watch, and my kids instead.
Sounds like a pet project - maybe they should hire a real watch designer who can get them from hobby to actual product at some point.
"Even my Pebble which I'd never wear in the shower is water resistant"
One of the things I love about my Kickstarter Pebble is that I have gone swimming with it, and I've even gone diving down to about 20 feet with it and it still works brilliantly. It's nice to not have to worry about it around water.
I'm definitely a risk taker with electronics and water though. I actually put my new iPhone in a ziplock bag to see if it would make an effective underwater camera while diving. (Just so you know the ziplock bag did succeed in keeping my iPhone safe, but the video was too blurry to be useful because the lens didn't focus right under water.)
Between that, the pleather, and the price, I think I'd be more inclined to make my own than to buy one of these. It's a neat idea, but I am not satisfied with this execution.
The idea might be good, but the price is extravagant. I think the parts should cost only $60-70, maybe less, so charging nearly $148 is laughable. Especially when I can get a nice, brand-name watch for $118 or so.
Generally you want to charge 4x your BOM (bill of materials) to cover shipping, fulfillment, customer support, etc. For such a small run (50 pieces) your costs are probably a lot higher than that of a large manufacturer; in their case they'd probably want to do > 4x to actually turn a profit. At $148 I'd be amazed if they were doing more than breaking even – these guys are doing it for the learning experience (and it says so on their blog).
Thinking back on this, I think it's entirely possible to build this product without an RTC or microcontroller. It should be entirely possible to wire up a switch, 555 timer(s), vibrator, and a battery... and easily build it for less than $10 in electronic parts.
Apples and oranges comparison: this is not a watch in the traditional sense. It's more analogous to a timer. In any case, it's a completely new product which means there probably aren't many efficiencies of manufacturing like there would be with watches.
I have not been able to find a good solution to having a personal vibrating timer with me.
Requirements:
Easy to set so no frictional cost to starting a pomodoro for instance. Does not beep. Keeps vibrating until silenced rather than vibrating once and then stopping (I don't notice these).
Sorry, but the price I "specced out" was with the modules from Adafruit. If you actually made a custom PCB, etc, you could easily hit the $50 mark with only 10s of units, in my opinion. Especially since the processor is unimportant: there are no complex calculations to perform.
> "I think the parts should cost only $60-70, maybe less"
Consider that the thinkgeek 'annoyatron' is sold for $10. So the guts of this device cost far less than $10. A cheap watch band, better looking than the one this has, can be had for under $20 on Amazon...
Throw the rest of the money into having a nice brass enclosure machined, then pot it with epoxy to make it reasonably water-resistant as well...
Maybe you could use it for something, like a reminder to stop browsing internet sites and do some work :) There was a write recently of someone who got a ton more work done by hiring someone on craigslist to slap them in the face if they ever go off task, like spending a lot of time on facebook.
Better: Install "Multilingual Speaking Clock" instead (windows only I think) and set it up so it announces the time every 5 minutes through your computer speakers.
It. Is. A. Mind. Game.
When your brain "idles" you lose track of time. Time in the mind only exists as a comparison of one moment in the past and another moment in the present. So when you're daydreaming (mostly brain idling) time appears to fly by because there's less datapoints for your mind to use to compare. But when you're checking the time constantly time appears to go by very very slowly.
It can become mentally exhausting when you do it too much though because it speeds up the mind. You become aware of every little moment. It can make you extremely productive but you really do have to take "brain idling" breaks every now and then. Also when you first start off, time will appear to fly by, it'll feel like "5 min" are flying by every 30 seconds. But after about 30 minutes your brain will stop idling so much, you'll become aware of more time points, and it'll feel like time is slowing down and you're thinking "faster".
Wow... I've been having this idea for a watch for a while.. someone with the hardware knowledge pulled it off. Did the creators try having a short vibration for five minutes and than a longer vibration for an hour?
I'm curious to see the results of this. I wonder if there are any negative impacts to consciously acknowledging the passage of time with a device like this considering that when "time flies", it does so because you aren't conscious of its passing.
From TFA:
> how time flies by when you enjoy yourself, and drags along when you wait in line at the post office
I suspect my experience at the post office be made worse by the fact that there's something vibrating on my wrist reminding me of how long I've been waiting?
Check out TicTocTrac (http://www.tictoctrac.com/). Open source watch that monitors when you check the time, and lets you track time perception whenever you want (instead of buzzing you every 5 minutes, you tap to start the test and then tap when you think X minutes have elapsed). You can save the data and use the site to visualize it later. The BOM comes to about $55.
"It was tragic, all right, but George and Hazel couldn't think about it very hard. Hazel had a perfectly average intelligence, which meant she couldn't think about anything except in short bursts. And George, while his intelligence was way above normal, had a little mental handicap radio in his ear. He was required by law to wear it at all times. It was tuned to a government transmitter. Every twenty seconds or so, the transmitter would send out some sharp noise to keep people like George from taking unfair advantage of their brains. "
Yes, search for interval timer, repeat timer...
The closest free app I found for ios so far is "wake me up."
It repeats forever but doesn't run in the background.
I love stuff like this. I've been doing some of my own work around this idea by measuring the time it takes me to do certain everyday tasks.
My morning routine is about 15 minutes. So is going to the coffee cart on the corner for coffee and a doughnut. However, I often perceive and think about the latter as taking much longer.
I think a lot of its cost comes from the fact that the device is made in Oslo. In Norway, labor prices are upwards of $125 USD per hour. If hamburgers are $50 there, then it makes sense that this thing is priced like a couple of hamburgers.
Your figures are quite a bit off. A Big Mac is $7.51[1], and the average wage in Norway is around $6440 a month[2], or around $40 an hour (based on a 170 hour work month).
They are high - they're nowhere near as high as you're making out.
