The Ming 29.06 Peep Show Is The Coolest Watch You'll See Today; Mido's Midnight Green Multifort 8; ochs und junior's Four-Year Calendar; UN's Miniatures; Urwerk Says Goodbye To UR-10 Spacemeter

Hey friends, welcome back to It’s About Time. Looking at the stats of the Swatch x AP post from yesterday and it’s easily one of the top 10 most polarizing posts I published. You guys either hate it or love it. Which is expected.

In this issue

• The New Ming 29.06 Peep Show Is The Coolest Watch You Will See Today

• Mido Adds A Midnight Green Colorway To Its Octagonal Multifort 8 One Crown

• ochs und junior Introduces Its First Four-Year Calendar, With A Brilliantly Economical Mechanism

• Ulysse Nardin Commissions Chinese Artist Rendao Liu For Four Hand-Painted Miniature Dial Classicos

• Urwerk Says Goodbye To The UR-10 Spacemeter With A Blue Dial

👂What’s new

1/

The New Ming 29.06 Peep Show Is The Coolest Watch You Will See Today

This newsletter has a very established structure of the five posts every day. I open every issue with the most mainstream release I can find since the goal is to attract as many people as possible to it. Then I follow that up with major releases from lesser-known but still very cool brand. Then we have something from an indie or a microbrand, followed by an expensive watch. Very rarely do I mix this order up and its even rarer that I open with a watch from a brand that’s not well known to the large masses — these issues usually flop in performance, but I still do them because I’m blow away by a watch and think it deserves top spot. This is one of those occasions because the new Ming 29.06 Peep Show is just the coolest watch I’ve seen in months.

Photographer-turned-watchmaker Ming Thein has been building his brand on the idea that light is a material. Layered dials, transparency, guilloché interacting with its environment… every Ming release is an optical argument. The 29.06 Peep Show takes that logic further than anything the brand has done before. The name is bold and the effect is wild. Those two dials in the photo above? They are the same watch photographed at different points in its rotation.

The 29.06 sits in the same family as the recent 29.01 Worldtimer but strips out the travel complication. The titanium case measures 40mm wide and 11.8mm thick, built with Ming's characteristic smooth bezel design where the sapphire crystal runs flush across the front. The "flying blade" lugs interlock with the caseback. Water resistance is 50 meters, which could be a hair better.

The dial is where things get interesting, and the effect is very familiar to photographers. It works through polarisation. Instead of conventional hands, two discs of linearly polarised sapphire rotate over the dial. When the discs align, light passes through and the dial becomes visible. When they fall out of alignment, the dial goes nearly black. As the watch runs, the dial phases continuously between visible and invisible. Beneath the discs sits a deeply machined guilloché plate with Ming's multiphasic coating, first introduced on the 57.04 Iris. When light hits it, it shifts across a full colour spectrum. How cool is that?

The movement is the second-generation Schwarz-Etienne calibre ASE 200.M1, developed specifically for Ming. It runs with a tungsten micro-rotor, an open-worked architecture with skeletonised bridges, a visible barrel showing remaining energy, and a rotor guard finished with diamond-cut anglage. Power reserve is approximately 86 hours. The strap is a Perlon-textured calfskin by Jean Rousseau, closed with a titanium tuck buckle and micro-adjustment.

The Ming 29.06 Peep Show is limited to 50 pieces, priced at CHF 22,000 excluding taxes. See more on the Ming website.

2/

Mido Adds A Midnight Green Colorway To Its Octagonal Multifort 8 One Crown

The Multifort 8, especially in the single crown setup, just might be Mido's most attractive mainstream watch — an octagonal-bezel sport watch with roots going back to a collection the brand launched in 1934. It’s now updated with a color that sits somewhere between teal and forest green. Mido calls it Midnight Green, and it’s good looking.

The stainless steel case measures 40mm wide with a lug-to-lug of 44.86mm, finished in a combination of satin and polish. The eight-sided bezel is the design anchor of the watch, each facet catching the light at a different angle as the wrist moves. On top is a double-sided anti-reflective sapphire crystal. The screw-down crown and screw-on caseback round things out, and water resistance is rated to 100 meters.

The dial is midnight green with a horizontal relief texture across the surface — a fine pattern that gives it some depth. Applied polished indices with white Super-LumiNova and tri-faceted hands in satin and polish. There's a date aperture at 3 o'clock and a white minute track around the flange. The overall effect is legible and tidy, and the metallic sheen of the indices plays well against the matte texture of the dial itself.

Inside is the Mido Calibre 80, based on the ETA C07.611. It runs at 21,600 vph, uses a Nivachron balance spring for improved magnetic and shock resistance, and delivers up to 80 hours of power reserve. The oscillating weight is decorated with Côtes de Genève and visible through the transparent caseback. The watch comes on a midnight green rubber strap with horizontal reliefs that echo the dial texture, closed with a satin-finished PVD stainless steel pin buckle.

The Mido Multifort 8 One Crown Midnight Green (Ref. M055.507.17.091.00) is priced at CHF 810. See more on the Mido website.

3/

ochs und junior Introduces Its First Four-Year Calendar, With A Brilliantly Economical Mechanism

ochs und junior has been making complicated watches for years, and every time Ludwig Oechslin builds one, the question is the same: how few parts can this possibly take? The moonphase a couple of years back needed five additional components on top of the base movement and could stay accurate for over 3,400 years. The new calendario quattro anni, or cqa, takes a different target — not the perpetual calendar with its hundreds of corrective parts, but a four-year cycle that accounts for every month length variation and skips leap-year logic entirely, requiring manual correction once every four years. The result sits between ochs und junior's annual and perpetual calendar offerings, and it is exactly as elegant as you'd expect.

The case is 40mm wide in grade 5 titanium, with the brand's familiar short-lugged round profile and circular brushed finishing. The case has super short lugs that make the watch incredibly wearable. On top is a flat sapphire crystal and you get 100 meters of water resistance.

The dial is classic ochs und junior. The base is the signature oj blue with circular graining, and the display is built entirely from square apertures arranged in two concentric rings. The outer ring has 30 apertures — two rows of 15 — each representing a day, with the edges of the apertures doubling as minute and second indices. When a month runs to 31 days, the 31st appears in the upper portion of the first day's aperture. The inner ring has 12 apertures for the months. All date and month displays are in orange, matching the seconds hand. Hour and minute hands are white gold-adorned. It sounds complicated to describe; in practice, it reads like a diagram of time itself.

Inside is an ETA 2824-2, the same base movement used in the brand's moonphase, with ochs und junior's calendar module on top. The three-toothed wheel governing month transitions adds switching impulses depending on month length — one for 30-day months, three for February — so the watch advances past non-existent dates without a perpetual calendar's corrective apparatus. The calendar is adjusted via the middle crown position. February in a non-leap year requires no correction; in a leap year, you manually advance to March 1. The watch comes on an Enzian Ecopell calfskin strap in small, medium, large, or extra-large, with or without orange stitching.

The ochs und junior cqa calendario quattro anni is priced at CHF 6,900 without tax. Orders placed now ship no later than early October 2026. See more on the ochs und junior website. 

4/

Ulysse Nardin Commissions Chinese Artist Rendao Liu For Four Hand-Painted Miniature Dial Classicos

There are almost two separate Ulysse Nardin brands running under the same name. One is the heritage-conscious Marine collection, keeping a 150-year history of marine chronometers alive. The other is the Freak: silicon escapements, orbital satellites, cases that function as winding mechanisms. What tends to get lost between those two poles is the Classico line, which is where UN does its most classically watchmaking-adjacent work. That includes, occasionally, Métiers d'Art dials. The new Classico Rendao Liu Make Waves collection is exactly that: four rose gold watches with hand-painted miniature compositions by Chinese contemporary artist Rendao Liu, each one a seascape rendered in ink.

The case is 40mm wide in 5N rose gold. It’s about as classic as a case can get, with its gold sloped bezel and short lugs. Water resistance is 30 meters — this is a dress watch and makes no pretensions otherwise.

Liu worked in ink to create the four compositions — Zhi Yin (Kindred Spirit), Miao Yin (Resonance), Xuan Qu (Mystic Melody), and You Ya (Graceful Ease) — all depicting the sea in motion against brooding landmasses. Ulysse Nardin's in-house micro-painters then studied each image and reproduced it on the dial, a process that takes around 50 hours per dial. The compositions is somewhere between Turner's turbulent seas and Hokusai's formal approach to waves.

Inside is the calibre UN-320, an automatic movement with a 48-hour power reserve running at 28,800 vph. It's one of the simpler UN calibres, but it uses a silicon escapement, the same technology UN helped develop under Ludwig Oechslin's oversight, which means reduced friction and improved magnetic resistance. The watch comes on a dark brown alligator strap.

The Ulysse Nardin Classico Rendao Liu Make Waves is priced at CNY 450,000 (approximately €60,000), limited to 25 pieces per design. Available through Ulysse Nardin boutiques in China and Geneva, and by special request globally. See more on the Ulysse Nardin website.

5/

Urwerk Says Goodbye To The UR-10 Spacemeter With A Blue Dial

Urwerk is not a brand that does conventional well. Founded in 1997 by Martin Frei and Felix Baumgartner, it built its reputation on satellite hour displays and cases that look like they were designed for a different atmosphere entirely. So when the UR-10 SpaceMeter appeared in 2025 with a round dial and central hands, the reaction was understandable confusion. Then you looked closer and it made sense, even with the seemingly conventional time-telling.

The SpaceMeter was inspired by an antique astronomical clock restored by Baumgartner's father. The hours and minutes are handled by slim syringe-style central hands, just like you would expect from a conventional watch, but then you see the sub-dials. The Earth counter at 2 o'clock tracks the planet's daily rotation in 500-metre increments, registering every 10 km. The Sun counter at 4 o'clock measures Earth's solar orbit in 20 km increments, ticking over every 1,000 km travelled. The Orbit counter at 9 o'clock folds both trajectories onto two synchronised scales simultaneously. Urwerk calls it an instrument of cosmic awareness, which is exactly the kind of thing Urwerk would say. And I love it.

The case follows the octagonal sandblasted titanium language of the UR-100 family, with the crown positioned at noon. At 45.4mm across, 44mm in length, and just 7.13mm thick excluding the crystals, it wears slimmer than its dimensions suggest.

This final edition of 25 pieces gets a wonderful blue dial. The domed dial has a circular satin-brushed finish, mirrored inside the bull's eye Orbit counter, where white and light blue rings create a clean, layered depth. The Earth and Sun counters are slightly recessed and sandblasted. All three sub-dials share open-tipped luminescent hands.

Through the caseback you can see a large blue rotor with spoked architecture at the centre, ringed by a 24-hour peripheral scale that tracks Earth's complete rotation via an arrow-tipped hand. Through the rotor's blades, you can see the Vaucher-developed movement below, an automatic double-barrel base with a 43-hour power reserve, topped by Urwerk's own complication module. The Dual Flow Turbines, two stacked propellers spinning in opposite directions, regulate the winding mechanism by creating resistance, protecting the movement from over-winding. It comes on a single-link sandblasted titanium bracelet with a folding clasp.

The new Urwerk UR-10 Spacemeter Blue - Final Edition is limited to twenty-five pieces, priced at CHF 70,000 before tax. See more on the Urwerk website.

⏲️End links

A bunch of links that might or might not have something to do with watches. One thing’s for sure - they’re interesting

• With work in television drying up, Ruth Fowler is looking for new ways to make the rent and, reluctantly, turns to the bizarre world of AI training. The money can be good—but the work is soul-destroying. Interviewed by AI and managed by recent graduates, Fowler enters a new hellscape, helping to build the very systems that could erode her screenwriting career even further. Bring back waiting tables.

• For The Verge, Mia Sato explains the super-short clips that saturate your TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube feeds—videos created by largely anonymous accounts whose sole job is to farm views from podcasts and viral content. “Hundreds or even thousands of clipping accounts might be sharing similar videos, all in competition with one another,” writes Sato. “It is the cartilage of the internet, the placeholders for the algorithm to suck in and spit out.” A depressing look at yet another force hollowing out the web.

• In this story, in partnership with The Guardian, The Enduring Wild author Joshua Jackson takes us inside a community of seasonal nomads who descend on Arizona’s public lands each fall. Tens of thousands of van dwellers migrate to the Sonoran Desert—notably Quartzsite, or “Q-Town”—to wait out the winter. Jackson, whose writing and photography document the untold stories of BLM lands, brings to life the people who call Quartzsite home. His account of VanAid, a gathering where van dwellers offer free labor and share expertise with each other, captures their spirit and lifestyle. What emerges here is a portrait of a community looking for freedom from America’s broken systems—one built on generosity and the open road.

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I adore these Anbernic handheld consoles and they’re getting better with each release.

Thanks for reading,
Vuk