Recently updated blogs

International Peening Day on the first weekend in April each year is a great opportunity to get out scythe blades from hibernation and get them cleaned and peened ready for the new season. There are inevitably occasions where rust forms and it needs removing to restore the blade. This ranges from light surface rust blooms when blades are left and not cleaned and oiled in a timely manner, to heavily …

Kelly Link's stories are often inspired, in some small or large way, by fairy tales, but they are modern stories and in no way emulations of the classic fairy tales. White Cat, Black Dog is her fifth collection, and it contains seven stories, the first concerns a white cat, and the last a black dog, thus giving rise to the book's title. And it follows the flow of a typical …

The Killers (1964), directed by Don Siegel

The Midnight Pub - A tiny forum in the form of a virtual pub. It even has a speakeasy. This website is personal - Frills - I really identify with this post, and the feeling that my posts aren’t worth anything if they’re not useful in some way. In reality there are no rules at all about what you should post on a personal site! Don’t Disable Form Controls - …

Due to other factors progress on Westhill Road is somewhat slower than I have anticipated , this is a quick post to show one of Westhill Road’s intended key buildings, the provender / perishables store. The Hawkhurst Provender Store The intention from the outset with Westhill Road is to add an element of perspective modelling to give the impression of greater depth than the physical 18″ deep baseboard. Positioned centre …

A funny thing happened on the way to Austin this past weekend. My younger son and I were driving to the University of Texas for a campus visit. We have a rule when driving - whoever is behind the wheel gets to pick the music. So, since my son was driving, he put on a country music playlist from Apple Music because that's the genre of music he's currently heavily …

Well, winter still hasn't arrived and the rivers are in a constant state of flood, now for Barbel that isn't the end of the world but now valentines day has passed my attentions typically turn to plump Dace, solid Roach and Gigantic Grayling, all of which will be close to their pomp. Issue is these conditions are not conductive to targeting any of the above. Therefore I still feel persuaded …

While I was relaxing in the Crows Nest yesterday afternoon and writing about the forthcoming Merseyside Pub Guide 2024 book, the proof copy was already sitting on my doormat. So I can now put it on sale.This year's edition lists 1,982 pubs of which I have visited 1,472.You can order a copy direct from the printers by clicking here. Or in due course it will be available from Amazon and …

In my post last month about life-drawing I mentioned that the amount of oil used in the Faber-Castell Pitt sanguine pencil meant that I couldn’t get the tonal variation from it that I could from graphite pencils. I ordered myself an oil-free sanguine pencil, but then — as often happens — discovered I already had an alternative buried in one of my many art supplies boxes! So this past weekend’s …

A few interesting things I learnt about this week are1. Coffee Stains in LaTeX - This package provides an essential feature that LaTeX has been missing for too long: It adds coffee stains to your documents. A lot of time can be saved by printing stains directly on the page rather than adding them manually.My Take: There is too much fun to be had with LaTeX. I guess the rest …

Published 8 years after it's predecessor, 'The Dark is Rising', returned Susan Cooper to her Arthurian world but relocated the action from Cornwall to the Thames Valley. The story of Will Stanton, last of 'The Old Ones', is another episodic quest as the newly minted magician comes into his power by locating lost artifacts. What elevates this beyond that first book however is Cooper's commitment to developing a coherent, mythic …

I tried Surreal Brewing Company's 7 Mile Porter. It's not bad. It has strong notes of chocolate and burnt coffee. The chocolate notes are more dark chocolate than milk chocolate. It didn't taste bad, it just didn't taste like beer. It needed something, more hops maybe, to offset the sweetness of the malts.

This week, the new Prime blasts his message to the people, and Megatron is surprised their war wasn't really over in ten minutes.All this and cryptic Metroplex in my look at Autocracy Chapter 11!

I first played the jumping and parrying to avoid death video game Prince of Persia on an IBM 386 at a friend’s house. I never saved the princess, though I did wall-run to the end of a later version called The Sands of Time. Needing games that I can play from any computer while traveling, I’m going to play both the original using SDL (source code) or JS versions, and …

In the world of British innovation, there’s a fascinating collection of ideas that, while incredibly creative, never quite made it into everyday life. These inventions, captured in pictures from the last century, reveal a time when people dared to dream big. Chris Hodge, an amateur historian from Chislehurst in southeast London, has dedicated more than […]