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The Audi museum mobile special exhibition entitled "More Than Red – Passione Ducati" will see around 50 Ducati models from past and present exhibited.

Instant Lettering, A Letraset Database. From Hoosier Type Co.

Why write a blog post somewhere nobody has published in five years, in a new WordPress interface where you recognize… yeah, nothing? Where somehow you can’t even upload a JPG or PNG file you downloaded from another site “for security reasons” without converting it first? Or get paragraph tags or linebreaks working inside blockquotes? (Really? On Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s own World Wide Web???) Because sometimes there is no other place …

Good news! The Dacia Sandero is now, despite used car prices going a bit… daft, available for under two grand. Bust out the balloons, fire off the party poppers and bust out the cake, for this is joyous news. Or at least, it is if you want a Dacia Sandero. If you don’t want a Dacia Sandero (weird if you don’t) then put all the party paraphernalia away until something …

The year is 2016. It was a Monday, starting my second week of my first trip to New York in August, and I was sitting on the subway. I think I was just looking at my phone, not paying much attention to anything when suddenly, approaching a station, someone hands me a drawing. Of me. I was flabbergasted; this guy just gave me a sketch of me, and an amazing …

Creatives for Change is a Manchester-based art collective responding to the biggest challenges of our time by raising money for charity. Using creative skills as a force for good. Each year they set a different poster brief, and support a different charity. I was invited to design a poster to respond to this year’s brief of ‘Restoring Nature’, raising money for the Wildlife Trust for Lancashire, Manchester and North Merseyside. …

Ahhh! Year end holiday break. This is deeply needed. Ten days of long walks, reading, writing, and perhaps some planning ahead this stretch. The past week turned out rather well after hitting a wall, but no resolution, but others also seeing the pain and how backwards things are and working to resolve them and bring them closer too modern without repeating known problems and pains of past years so to …

Wow, long time, no posts! Anyway, about them text-to-art generative models going about, eh? Surprising nobody: I am extremely into them. I’ve been using DALL-E and MidJourney since they came out, and even though tons has been written about them, I wanted to give a slightly different overview: the perspective of someone who isn’t interested that much in their realism skills. I think that the most compelling place for ML …

In 1972, the government drew up plans to construct a deportation facility off the coast of Ireland that could house as many as 70 million people - the entire population of the UK, if need be. The intention was to make it an exact replica of the United Kingdom and call it Bad Kingdom. Nobody, it seemed, fulfilled the increasingly stringent criteria of what it meant to be truly British. …

Post to the north CricklewoodThe North London LineThe north London line from West Hampstead Station turns south westwardsArial Road,Hebrew word for water spirit, built by British Land Company 1879Barlow RoadBuilt on the site of the Midland Railway’s West End Sidings – a marshalling yard and goods distribution centre. William Barlow was the Midland Railway’s engineer who built much of St.Pancras Station.Lauriston Lodge, sheltered housingBrassey RoadBuilt on the site of the …

A Grisly End to a Lancashire Policeman.A grisly end. Sergeant William James Bedwell of the Lancashire Mounted Police had tied his legs together, cut his throat and jumped in the River RIbble -buried at Preston Cemetery, Lancashire. [Some years before he had been severely injured when he had been thrown from his horse and landed on his head]

In August 2020, the New York Times asked me to write an op-ed for a special feature on authoritarianism and democracy. They declined to publish my submission, which I am sharing here instead. When the George Floyd protests began to spread nationally in the summer of 2020, I noticed many people on social media asking Hong Kongers for advice on protest tactics–which apps to use, what equipment to wear, the …

Once you’ve deployed your web app to prod there is a moment of satisfaction: a brief respite where you can reflect on your hard work. You sit, adoringly refreshing the homepage of www.mysite.com to watch it load over and over. It’s beautiful, perfect, timeless. A glittering crystal palace of logic and reason. Then people start to actually use it in earnest and you begin to receive messages like this in …

As Britain’s population grew throughout the 19th Century and the demand for water in its towns and cities increased, local authorities and water boards looked to rural areas, building dams in remote valleys and creating large reservoirs. The Stocks Reservoir, completed in the 1930s, is one such reservoir, located in Dalehead in the Forest of… Continue reading The cemetery serving a submerged parish: St James, Stocks-in-Bowland