File this under “fun class/side projects.” A watch that shows one Pokemon per minute instead of a numerical minute. (no hour hand.)

Memory Palaces are a great way to remember a list of things. Take the rooms in your house, associate each one with an item, and then “walk through” your house to remember all the items. But I only have ~5 rooms, and that’s being generous – what if I want to remember, say, 60 things? It’d be great to have a go-to list of 60 things that I could just pull up whenever and use them as loci for whatever list.

Enter Pokemon. These little critters (there are over 750 now) are unique, distinctive, named, and numbered. Learning the first 60 would give me a pretty universal memory-palace list. Furthermore, they’re chunked into groups of 2-3 (Bulbasaur evolves into Ivysaur evolves into Venusaur), and I still remember some characteristics of them from the Pokemon video game when I was a kid, making for even easier learning. And they’re cute.

Screenshots:
2:17pm, or 2:Pidgeotto, if you will.
2:19 is now 2:Rattata.

More info on some hacking around to fit 60 144x144 images in the watch here. Code’s here. Images are from http://www.marriland.com, for example http://www.marriland.com/forums/updates-and-announcements/featured-weekly-poll/444268-poll-6-which-is-your-favorite-kanto-starter. Code includes uPNG port from Matthew Hungerford:https://github.com/mhungerford/png_demo, which is itself derived from LodePNG version 20100808, by Lode Vandevenne and Sean Middleditch.