Complex DIY Project: As DIY-er Tom Igoe writes: “I have a lot of anxiety about email. Every kilobyte in my Inbox destroys another minute of my life, but I can’t stop checking it. So I decided to embody my anxiety in a device that would worry about my incoming mail for me.” In short, this DIY Email Clock counts down the kilobytes of email you’ve received, putting an unorthodox counter on your procrastination.

Here’s how each tick—representing one kilobyte—gets clocked down. The microcontroller driving the clock connects with a mail-server query program over the Internet, which is responsible for passing the number of kilobytes going unread.

The complete instructions to make one are available here, but even for veteran home workers, is this email clock worth the time and effort? Why go analog then? Digital indications dominate our lives for a good reason: they provide much more info at a single glance. After all, wouldn’t you rather see “2:33″ right away, instead of figuring out just how far that minute is from the four?

Still, this would be a great product idea for a manufacturer to pick-up, novelty-nature and all. How about making a wireless version? Igoe’s DIY project relies on an Ethernet connection to pull data from the net.

(image from the MAKE: Blog)

Post from: The Gadget Blog