ChrisC

Cornered Star / Melanie Manchot (2018)

A horse strolls around a silent Brutalist estate. It sounds like it should be rather tedious, but Melanie Manchot’s Cornered Star is rather compelling.

The Doctor Shops for a Minicomputer…

And here’s a rather nice pair of Doctor Who-themed adverts for the Prime Computer range of minicomputers. There are so fairly obvious hints that Tom Baker and Lalla Ward are phoning it in but the shoutout to their current – but brief – marriage is rather nice.

A VJ Day Topper in Malton

In spite of what I said previously, this blog’s descent into postbox topper groupie-ism appears to continue.

This time Malton sees a simple – yet effective – topper to mark the 80th anniversary of VJ Day on the 15th of August.

Converting PDFs to JPEG sequences using imagemagick

Imagemagick (available from all good package managers) has the ability to split a .pdf file into a set of numbered images via the following incantation…

convert -quality 100 -density 200 -colorspace sRGB <PathToPDF> -flatten <PathToOutputDirectory/>Page-%02d.jpeg

…where, of course, ‘%02d’ represents the auto-numbering element of the incantation.

A Post Box Topper in Beverley

I promise this blog isn’t about to become a postbox topper blog. I really do.

Having said that, here’s a rather nice teddy-bears’ picnic topper that I happened to pass in Beverley the other day.

Lightning verses Trees – FIGHT!

‘Simulating Lightning‐Induced Tree Mortality in the Dynamic Global Vegetation Model LPJ‐GUESS‘ (pdf) is a nice little read about simulating global tree death rates due to lighting strikes. The methods they use to validate their model are interesting and, while the number they come up with (301–340 million trees of a diameter of greater than 10cm) seems rather large, it pales when compared to their cited number of 50 billion trees killed by all combined natural causes.