Clock 2

I made another clock. Much simpler this time.

Clock

Since the electricity was turned off briefly a couple of months ago, it has permanently been --:-- o'clock in my sitting room. Over the weekend I finally resolved to do something about this. Faced with a choice of either Googling the instruction manual for my ancient Philips DVP 3100V combo DVD+Video or just nipping down to Poundland to buy a cheap wall clock, I decided to go with option 3. And so I wrote a simple clock app using Corona and repurposed a 1st generation iPad to run it on.

Oh, the hours I could waste watching those little balls bounce around. It took a bit of fine tuning the trap door to stop them from clogging-up the workings but the current version has been running for a day or so now without grinding to a halt.

I've got a few other ideas I'd like to try out, so I think I'll make changing this clock a regular event.

Xerox

After seeing both the Swedish and US film versions of The Girl with the Dragon Tatoo I felt compelled to find a copy of the book just to read the canonical version of the story. While the two movies where identical in so many respects — almost down to the framing of some shots, which I assume is a testament to the descriptive clarity of the source narrative — there were a couple of notable differences. Was Blomkvists's religious daughter invented by Fincher, or did the Swedes choose to remove her and instead give Lisbeth her pivotal revelation? The remake of Total Recall offers a similar chance to examine what is considered the soul of a story.

Most importantly, Total Recall is a remake of the 1990 film, rather than a further re-imagining of We Can Remember It for You Wholesale. PKD is listed as writer of the original inspiration in IMDb but I can't say I remember seeing his name up on the screen. All that has been kept of his story is the central premis of a spy whose suppressed memories are re-awoken after a visit to Rekall. Mars has been discarded entirely, apart from as a throw-away line.

So what's been brought forward from the Arnie version? The names have been kept the same; we get the same double-tripple-bluff plot; the "this is all a delusion and you're still at Rekall scene" (although minus the neat "So it won't matter if I shoot you then?" resolution of the original); and the pretend wife. In fact, this remake is all about the pretend wife, who is given a more prominent role than Sharon Stone's version. Which I guess makes sense, given that Kate Beckinsale is director Len Wiseman's missus. (We also get a couple of nice references to keep fans of the original happy: there's the three-breasted hooker — which, given the lack of radiation mutants doesn't make much sense here — and a woman bearing the likeness of the exploding-head Arnie decoy in the customs scene.)

In all the film was pretty good. It was played straight, but not in the po-faced way The Dark Knight Rises was. (They bungle the single almost funny line: In response to "That's your wife?" I would have gone with "We're having problems".) Sure, there were some major logical flaws (not least, how about they start by building some robots to build all those other robots?) but on the other hand I could happily watch Kate Beckinsale kick/shoot/jump over things for hours. And once again we see Bill Nighy demonstrating that he's happy to spout any old tosh for cash.

Also, it's fun to imagine that in the original script the only two parts of the world left inhabitable were the UK and France, and that The Fall was originally the Chunnel.