StuartK
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A new, and rather impractical clock. A little while in I figured out this was basically a bad idea, but at that point I'd committed so much time to it I decided to finish. Oh well. A DROD clock based on Big Ben. A 60 minute clock grafted onto a 30 step timer is rather confusing in practice - it's very easy to mistake 6 minutes for 6 remaining moves, when it really means 3.

Source material was difficult. I guess there's a shortage of hover boots in London, because every single photo of Big Ben seems to have been taken at an angle. Or else silly people are climbing all over the hands and generally getting in the way (in at least two films - name them for bonus points)

In the end, I googled for the largest, straightest image I could find, edited out the hands, shuggled it about, adjusting the perspective, grafted the minute hand back on in increments, resized the images and finally put everything together. Even aesthetically I'm still not absolutely happy with the results - I ended up moving the image to one side so I had room to add a counter, and Rabscuttles snake timer, to make the whole thing marginally useful. The bright side was I learnt a bunch of new stuff in Paint Shop Pro (always fun) and I've got the source material in a useable format if I'm ever motivated enough to revisit it, and if I can think of a good way to address the problems.

krammer
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Except that Big Ben is not the name of the clock tower, it's the name of the bell. Everyone gets that wrong...

It's a nice clock, although I wouldn't want to use it for DRODding.

Oh... one of the films you want is The 39 Steps. Not sure about the others... although a spaceship smashed up the tower in a recent Dr Who episode.

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Saqqara
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Thirty-Nine Steps is one, as already mentioned, and I believe Shanghai Knights is the other, with Jackie Chan hanging from the hands.

On a side note, nice clock Schik, has a very rustic appeal, although it could get a bit confusing, perhaps you chould PSP out the extra ticks for the minutes to make it more reliable?

StuartK
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Saqqara wrote:
Thirty-Nine Steps is one, as already mentioned, and I believe Shanghai Knights is the other, with Jackie Chan hanging from the hands.

Yup that's the other one

On a side note, nice clock Schik, has a very rustic appeal, although it could get a bit confusing, perhaps you chould PSP out the extra ticks for the minutes to make it more reliable?

You've fallen for an ummm... old jedi mind trick. Many words are recognised and processed by the brain by only their first and last letters. The DROD community breathes a collective sigh of relief, that Schik /= StuartK


As to PSPing out just the ticks, that's perhaps a workable solution, so I gave it a go. I've attached a blank clockface. Adding the hands and finishing everything off, if it takes about as long as last time, would be another 4+ hours of dull and repetitious work, so I don't really want to go ahead unless feedback tells me it'd be worth it.

One next option/stage would be to change the roman numerals around, but that would be both a large amount of extra effort (at my skill level) and I'm also concerned it really won't look much like Big Ben any more, thus losing the point of the original idea.

Saqqara
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You've fallen for an ummm... old jedi mind trick. Many words are recognised and processed by the brain by only their first and last letters. The DROD community breathes a collective sigh of relief, that Schik /= StuartK

Whoops StuartK, I am truly sorry for that one. I had just got done reading one of Schik's posts and the name must've stuck.


[Edited by Saqqara at Local Time:05-15-2005 at 06:45 AM]

StuartK
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My molestations of Big Ben continue, now with a 6 hour clock. It does indeed look quite peculiar now, and I'm undecided whether to go with pure functionality or the compromise between functionality and image quality above.

jamie
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And as Krammer said, it's *still* not called Big Ben

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