The British Geological Survey has an interesting article on the moving alignment of true, magnetic, and grid north and how it’s about to leave England for the next several hundred years.

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A Little More Web Kipple
The British Geological Survey has an interesting article on the moving alignment of true, magnetic, and grid north and how it’s about to leave England for the next several hundred years.

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Slingsby Community Primary School’s rather lovely submission to Nunnington Hall’s Christmas Tree Festival. It managed to look even better in person.
The Lion & Unicorn has an interesting dive into the BBC’s YouTube archive channel.

I’ve featured a few things from that archive, but none of the videos featured in the article. It’s a nice read and covered a similar ground to some thoughts I’ve been having around archive footage and what it means today.
It’s time for another exciting update from the demolition and rebuilding of the former farm at Middlecave Yard.
The most notable changes made since my last update is the ducting for water, power, and comms has been installed – as has sewage piping – and, most importantly, the concrete slab that will make up the ground floor has been poured.

Slab! More of this later.
Continue reading “The Middlecave Yard Demolition and Rebuild – Late November 2025”And here’s a black and white version of October’s timelapse of Saltburn. In some ways, the black and white effect adds to the experience.
Gallery: 2025 Misc

Five Hundred and Seven Mechanical Movements is a lovely online compendium of Henry T. Brown’s classic technical reference Five Hundred and Seven Mechanical Movements. The classic illustrations (taken from a 1906 edition of the text) are just wonderful – as are the modern animated sequences that show the motions in question. My current favourite is No. 92 – better known to most as the mechanism used to drive a steam locomotive!

One Foot Tsunami has an entirely reasonable rant about MacOS Tahoe’s terrible Squircle icons. They’re just corporate blanding to the max.
Well, it’s been a little while since I last looked at sizing Time Machine backups on MacOS and, with MacOS 26 (‘Tahoe’), the magic incantation needed to pull that information out has changed.
Open up a terminal and enter the following…
log show --predicate 'subsystem == "com.apple.TimeMachine"' --info | grep "will be in backup of all sources"
…and this will print out a number of records from previous Time Machine sessions thus…
2025-11-17 08:59:01.989807+0000 0xdd79ec Info 0x0 27411 0 backupd: (TimeMachine) [com.apple.TimeMachine:SizingProgress] Estimated a total of 3112764 files (13.52 TB) will be in backup of all sources
2025-11-17 09:54:37.554473+0000 0xde7d23 Info 0x0 27411 0 backupd: (TimeMachine) [com.apple.TimeMachine:SizingProgress] Estimated a total of 3113582 files (13.51 TB) will be in backup of all sources
2025-11-17 10:54:38.754477+0000 0xdfb366 Info 0x0 27411 0 backupd: (TimeMachine) [com.apple.TimeMachine:SizingProgress] Estimated a total of 3119251 files (13.51 TB) will be in backup of all sources
2025-11-17 11:54:25.417194+0000 0xe0dd3f Info 0x0 27411 0 backupd: (TimeMachine) [com.apple.TimeMachine:SizingProgress] Estimated a total of 3123208 files (13.51 TB) will be in backup of all sources
Adam Savage has a couple of nice videos from the Paramount Film Archives. I especially enjoyed the second of these on the various media formats used over the years.

Abort Retry Fail has a really nice post on opening and installing a new old stock Red Spine release of OS/2 Warp 3.0.
Now, while I’ve played around with OS/2 Warp 4.0 and 4.52 as part of Period Sites in Period Browsers, Warp 3.0 is not one I’ve yet reached.
And how uncanny it looks! Familiar but alien. Windows 3.1 but not. I should really get an instance of this up and running just so I can really feel – rather than just see – the differences between how I expect it to work and how it does work…
Anyway, I strongly suggest going and having a read of the article and a look at the pretty pictures.