Sour Swinger Predominantly follows my Army & Iraq Deployment. Also has some Geek, School, and other talk.

What better way to show ones inner geek then by owning a binary watch? Having stumbled across this watch on ThinkGeek, I couldn’t resist. With a quick click of the mouse, charge of the card, and a few days wait, I found myself to be a proud owner. Though it’s priced at $70, I was expecting the equivalent of cheap $20 watch from Walmart. A kin to one those really weird but ridiculously priced items that can only be found at a Spencer’s. Where they know you can’t find it anywhere else so they slap on some absurd price while making the damn thing as cheap as possible. Thankfully this watch is no where near that. In fact, what I received is a fabulously crafted and quality product.

The enclosed box was well designed and had a strong modern tech feel. It was the same feeling one gets upon dropping a few hundred on an iPod or a pair of Oakley glasses. AKA, The package showed care and thought. To my surprise a nice manual was on the inside depicting other binary watch models from the same company! You have to understand that before buying I spent a long time searching for other binary watches but found no other. ThinkGeek also made no mention of who made the device or the model name I bought.

The Compay, 01 The One, specializes in making just binary watches. Google “binary watch” and see how they don’t show up anywhere. Odd? Their website reminds me something from Calvin Klein or Zoolander. That ridiculous modern look with crazy looking models standing around. They certainly advertise well as modern, expensive, fancy….and they sure do deliver on mark. Compared to their other products, mine seemed old and outdated. It wasn’t far from the truth.

My watch, The Samui Moon (SMB107) appears to be a discontinued model. At $70 dollars, its far cheaper to their other $200 dollar models! Guess I got a steal? It’s made from stainless steel and has quite a hefty feel. Not overly heavy, just enough to know its tough and will last. Its also rated to 3 ATM for water resistance. The interface is fairly easy. One button lights the diodes that display the time, the other is used for setting the time. Top row of diodes is hours, bottom row is minutes. It only displays the time in standard 12 hour format. There is no AM/PM light. Light on means 1, light off means 0. Above each diode is a number “cheat” for determining the time. I.E. 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, etc. The circuit board design helps add to the geek feel.

I do have a few minor gripes. In direct sunlight, the diodes cannot be seen and requires the hand shadow and look technique. Even then, its tough to see the glowing lights. Also, I was hoping for the option of 24 hour time. Its just one more light on the hours row. Seems too easy to include. My biggest complaint, though, is that number “cheat” above each diode. The only people who would buy this watch are geeks. Seriously, what causal Joe Shmoe wants this? Its a niche watch for a niche set of people. As a computer programmer, I had hoped to drastically improve my binary reading ability. When I can blatantly see the numbers to add, I can’t help but read that instead.

In all, I’m very satisfied with the watch and what 01 The One has made. My overall intent is to use this as my official Army watch for use in Iraq. What better way to test the durability? As you can see in the pictures, I replaced the normal leather straps with the Army’s own camo velcro band. They sell at any local military base.


Fyi, apparently Steve Wozniak wears this very watch. Video Proof.

Two days ago I decided to use Picasa Web Albums as my main online photo gallery. I had a few reasons why. One of which was that all the blog reviews I found recommended Picasa. After a rather in depth discussion with Clint in comments I decided to give Flickr a try anyway. In case you didn’t read -> Online Photos Posted. Well two days later, after a lot of tinkering I’ve come to a conclusion. The quick answer…I choose Flickr and am now actually a Pro user. Now this doesn’t mean my original answer was entirely wrong. I plan to continue to use Picasa as well. BTW, my Flickr link.

Considering strictly the free accounts, Picasa slightly pulls out with a win. They offer 1 gig of space. Where as Flickr only allows 200 pics. Were one to semi shrink some of their photos, you could easily fit more then 200 pics on 1 gig. Picasa also has a very clean interface. Flickr’s takes a little getting used to as it’s not straight forward. With a little playing around though, one gets used to it. Picasa’s upload works very easily too. For what they offer to Flickr’s is identical, the only difference is Flickr’s doesn’t work. I spent 3 hours trying to upload 4o some pics. I only managed to get a 1/3 uploaded. A good portion (for some reason) were duplicates. The whole processes wasted most of my upload allowance for the month, which is 100 mb. Considering a 3-5 mb per pic size, one can’t upload all 200 allowed pics in a month. Picasa, on the other hand didn’t have any upload limit.

Flickr’s tag system is far superior. You can very easily edit captions, tags, and titles in groups. Picasa only allows one at a time. Picasa also doesn’t let you view all the tags. I found that most annoying. What’s the point of offering tags when you cannot search them? Picasa will only display your top 8 or so tags. It also doesn’t seem to be designed for networking in mind. On the other hand Flickr is all about befriending people and setting up contacts so you can share each others photos. Speaking of contacts, Picasa only allows you to change an Album’s privacy status. Where as Flickr allows you to change it per picture. Can be very annoying when you only want to share a few pics from an album.

Ultimately I found Flickr site more useful and quite frankly worth the $2 dollars a month price. You get unlimited upload and storage. Picasa only offers 7 gigs. As for the uploading, a quick fix would be to say frack you to Flickr’s Uploadr and download a third party program. (Anyone else see that? FU to FU?) I ended up using ‘1001′? Odd name but it works fantastic. So why did those blog reviews hype up Picasa? Possibly due to the ease it takes to link each pic. It’s literally a press of one button to select the pic size and then a copy and paste and your done. Most blogs more then likely only need a lot of tiny pics. Hence a 200 pic limit is more restricting then a, “as many photos as you can fit in 1 gig of space” limit.

So now Flickr will be storing all my personal photos I wish only to share with friends and family, while Picasa will store only those pics I plan to post on my blog or future websites. Word to the wise, if you don’t have a Flickr account get one. As I’m not dishing out guest passes to view all my private photos. :P

*UPDATE*: For some awful reason, Wordpress deleted all my paragraph upon submission. Everything should be fine now Problem was my web browser. Was using WebKit and apparently the “its alright factor” just dropped to “its lame”. Posting via Firefox fixed everything.