CLOCK

Remember the orrery clock that you "read" analog-style by looking at the "planets" from a certain angle and reading their positions? Well, here's another gadget that you can file under "clocks from Japan that are only really smart people can read." And by smart people, I mean "not me."

This Modern Metal Tix Clock looks like it came off the wall of the Batcave in the old 1960s Batman TV show with Adam West. (BANG! POW! ZAP!) But it's actually a brushed-metal clock that displays the time by illuminating a … Read more

The pages of Crave have seen many a strange clock recently. In fact, we may or may not have imposed a moratorium on writing about creative clocks, even the kind that wake you up with bacon. But this one, featured on Technabob, is really worth a mention because of its sheer convolutedness.

Basically, this Japanese clock, which doesn't even look like a clock, is modeled off that classic old astronomy gadget called the orrery. A number of little aluminum "planets" circle a central body, and you decipher the time by "reading" the position of the … Read more

The alarm-clock sadists are at it again. Someone somewhere is having a grand time thinking up ways to rudely awaken us, literally, whether it be making clocks that run away or force us to disarm fake bombs.

But this new one crosses the line into a bizarre experiment in cruelty, if you ask us. (Which no one ever does, of course.) The "Shocking Alarm Clock" does just what its name implies: When you hit the button to turn it off, it gives you a "minor electrical shock" just for kicks--and you pay $30 for the privilege … Read more

Needless to say, we're fairly sick of all the alarm clocks that continue to flood the market, regardless of how sycophantic they may be. So we thought that we'd perhaps feel differently about a clock that lets us compose our own music to awaken us. We were wrong.

Hammacher Schlemmer's "Desktop Music Composer" has seven plastic modules of varying colors and shapes that provide sounds of different instruments depending where they're placed--up to 1,159 variations, to be exact. But as Ubergizmo says, "It will probably take a lifetime to find a tune … Read more

Now this is our kind of alarm clock. Forget about those other ones that blow out your eardrums or fly and run away from you.

The "Jeeves" clock from Voco awakens you with one of 49 British quips from the voice of Stephen Fry himself, classically designed with Roman numerals and Ionic columns. An example from Pocket-lint: "Good morning, Sir. The prime minister phoned again. I told him you were not available. We shan't be treated like THAT again!" Indeed.

Imagine, if you will, this conversation between members of a product development team: "Man, waking up is hard."

"You know what else is hard? Saving money."

"We should make something that will help us do both at the same time!"

Maybe it never happened, but it's the only way we could explain the Banclock, an attractive, cube-shaped alarm clock that requires you to deposit change to turn off the alarm--no snooze, no off button, no wimps need purchase. (Though if your pockets are empty after playing too much pinball the night before, the … Read more

Here at Crave, we stay paranoid so you don't have to. Where else, for example, can you find cautionary notes about an eavesdropping table lamp and a spy-cam clock in one place?

The latter was brought to our attention by Chip Chick, who says the "WiLife Spy Camera" is the "only networked camera concealed in a digital alarm clock." (Talk about esoteric claims.)

So far as we can tell, it's pretty much like other Wi-Fi spy cams we've seen that send video feeds back to a remote PC or other screen. The option … Read more

Dear Microsoft,

What the heck is wrong with you people?

Let me ask you the question another way. When I set up a birthday in Outlook, what makes you think that when the time zone changes, a birthday should move forward or back accordingly? But that's just what happened when I got my automated patch for the new daylight-savings time. Between March 11 and April 1, all my appointments moved back one hour. My father-in-law's birthday became a 24-hour event that takes place from 1 a.m. on March 21 to 1 a.m. on March 22. Since … Read more

In today's high-paced, BlackBerry-powered world, a lot of things have been made more expedient (and more annoying) through the use of high technology, but there are a few things that gadgets just can't seem to solve easily. One of the biggest ones: waking up. We've seen loads of crazy alarm clocks recently, from the one that you have to chase around to the one that flies to the one that you have to dismantle like a bomb. But here's a prototype for an alarm clock that actually might work: instead of an alarm, it wakes you … Read more