So, the last days I saw a few posts here about binary clocks. Somehow I wasn't able to read them, until I read a comment they had to be read horizontally.

As far as I know binary clocks are supposed to be read vertically. Am I missing something? 🤔

No, that's some kind of weird clock, not an actual binary clock.

Binary is the same kind of thing as our normal numbers (base 10) and hexadecimal (base 16). Binary is base 2. The base is how many different symbols there are. When a number gets to the highest symbol is moves to the next. In hexadecimal there is more than 10 symbols so we move into letters (0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,A,B,C,D,E,F) and then, F+1 (15+1) = 10 (16).

This is the same with binary except there is only two symbols (0,1). 0 (0) ++ 1 (1) ++ 10 (2) ++ 11 (3) ++ 100 (4).
That's how it works.

Another method people use to convert is rememberering the place values, with base 2 it is easy, they double; right to left it goes: 1,2,4,8,16,32,64,128 so, 10011 = 1+2+16 or (1*1)+(1*2)+(0*4)+(0*8)+(1*16).

Looking at this may help you understand:
https://kyran-gostelow.me/misc/...

Binary clocks represent these numbers as ons and offs (on being 1 and off being zero) with one line per time type (hours, minutes, seconds).

@qwerty77asdf I know what binary is man. 😂

But do a quick search for binary clock and most clocks you will find are in the format I posted.

@jerodev oh woah, hadn't seen any like that before.

Haha sorry didn't realise.

imho splitting the base10 columns might be easier to read/convert but at the same time doesn't fit the original intent. i had a watch once that had only two rows for hours and minutes. made more sense to me.

Saying that binary clocks have to be vertical and not horizontal is the same as saying that analog clocks have to have Arabic numerals and not Roman.