Months are annoyingly irregular. They come in 28-, 30-, 31-, and sometimes even 29-day lengths, which means a typical calendar will always have some surplus days hanging off the edges (open Google Calendar to see what we mean).

Shiura has solved this problem with a mechanical calendar, which he says has several advantages over paper/screen-based alternatives. “It can display all four types of months from 28 to 31 days… When the current month is selected by the top wheel, the day of the week is automatically adjusted. Setting is necessary once a year, on 1 March. Setting is valid from March to February in the next year.”

We’ll admit that this hadn’t seemed like a problem to us before, but now we think about it, it’s really annoying, and this project is a brilliant workaround to our flawed system.