Got $342,275 USD to blow on a clock?  Look no further than a wind-up clock that writes the time on a piece of paper.  Bleeding-edge Swiss watch-maker Jacquet Droz invested ten years in engineering and building “La Machine a Ecrire le Temps” (the machine that writes time).  Personally, I was thinking that when I staff my mansion in New Zealand after overthrowing its government and installing myself as a dictator, I could use this machine for punching employee time-cards.

By some coincidence, in the 18th century, Jacquet Droz’s founder used to build automaton dolls to help sell his watches. Manuel Emsch’s idea was to build a similar machine that would be useful for the new millennium.

There are more than 1,200 components, including 84 ball bearings, 50 cams and 9 belts inside the machine. Wind it up, press the button, and the time is written on a small pad using a stylus. Manuel Emsch, creative head of Montres Jacquet Droz, came up with the idea and passed it on to the engineers and artisans of the company. The mechanism is kept inside a case made of liquid crystal, so that you can conceal or reveal it whenever you want.

Via DVICE

Without a doubt, my favorite type of video game is Adventure.  Hours of hunting for the exact correct pixel to click on so that I can solve the friggin puzzle at last and move on with the plot.  I’ve played them for years, and I think I’ve played most of them, from King’s Quest on.  Most of us are now into Xbox 360 Xbox One modern gaming console 1st person shooters like Gears of War (including me), and the often-overlooked Adventure type of game is slowly dying out.  But, if you’re ever going to play an Adventure game, Syberia is the one to play.  It came out in 2002 and is simply the best game of its type ever produced, even today in 2022.

What might interest you is the game’s environment.  Beautifully rendered artful backgrounds, a clockwork train (it winds up), mechanical automatons, gears, springs, airships, dystopias, all presented in a well-thought-out and compelling story.  The game is challenging, but not so much that you need to turn to a walk-through.

Available for the PC, Original Xbox, and recently the Nintendo DS.  Play it on GameTap (or similar service), or get it and load it into a virtual machine like Microsoft’s VirtualPC or VMware.  Official home page with screenshots and videos: http://www.syberia-series.com/en/ [defunct]  Also, stay away from the sequel Siberia II, it wasn’t all that good.