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Does anyone else get this? I seem to have broken the BBC website. I don’t seem to get it anywhere else and it doesn’t happen all the time but, when it does, I don’t seem to be able to get that chrome session to ever load that page.

It’s worth noting that I’ve never seen this with FireFox, so it might be either a browser issue or an issue with the two plugins I use (HTTPS Everywhere and uBlock Origin).

Lions and tigers and (polar) bears… oh my!

Another gallery added — this time two dozen or so shots from a trip to Yorkshire Wildlife Park in June 2019. I actually have two more sets from YWP that I need to process but time really does seem to have go away from me recently.

I also have another blog post to write, one similar to my Barnsley Glass Works post from last week, that covers some of the work done for YWP’s expansion.

Addendum: Though it’s well hidden, YWP’s news page actually has a populated, subscribable RSS feed. The whole site looks to be a fairly standard WordPress implementation and, though they’ve hidden the feed with the site’s theme, these feeds can be picked out of the HTML quite easily.

You’ll Float Too

Some video I found of Céleste Boursier-Mougenot’s floating bowls installation. I suspect that the gentle chimes of the colliding bowls would be wonderfully relaxing to listen to in person.

And while it is, I think, certainly art, I just don’t really understand the thought process that would lead you to create it in the first place. Perhaps that’s why I potter with computers and just look at the creations of others?

Photography

Yet another set of photographs moved away from Flickr. This time it’s two sets of shots from Donna Nook Nature Reserve – the first taken in 2016, the second from 2018.

And with that I am now fully migrated from Flickr and I can start looking at the rest of my photography backlog – I have loads of nice images from many enjoyable trips and it seems a shame to leave them hidden away in my Lightroom Library.

A Terrible Mistake

Look what I found in a West Midlands charity shop window…

I think I may have made a terrible mistake when I sold my old games. Who knew that a bunch of fairly mainstream titles would end up being worth so much?

The Old Ways

“In early versions of the Mouse program, you could enter the call sign of the AP bureau to which you wanted to connect.”

This is a funky little tale of a cub reporter and his TRS-80 back in the early days of computerised journalism.

DOOM

A trailer for the new DOOM dropped at E3 yesterday and I have to say that I’m rather looking forward to it. I’ve played DOOM – in it’s various incarnations – since the mid-late 90s and, in a world where stories seem to be ever more complex, the simplicity of DOOM is a refreshing change.

  • A portal to hell is opened.
  • Bad things come through.
  • Kill them all (and, preferably, do it to a rocking soundtrack).

It’s mindless escapism with black and white antagonists which, given my ever more limited gaming time, manages to strike a deeply appealing note to me.

Linkspam

Mac Open Web is an interesting little link for Apple users out there; it’s a curated web directory (remember those!) of open source and small developer software targeting the open/indie web with nothing from the big players and the major corporations.

I do hope that, as we push into the early 2020s, the slash-and-burn axis of facebook-twitter-reddit-google starts to weaken.

ISDN

I have now managed to screw my Amazon Advertising Profile up so much I now receive adverts for ISDN Splitters!

ISDN? ISDN was old when I took my first job (a worryingly long time ago). It was, along with some older vampire tapped BNC, one of the first things I tore out and replaced with a more civilised solution.

I mean, I could understand someone with some new old stock and a huge warehouse quietly listing it in the hope that someone might buy it and that they wouldn’t end up paying for recycling, but to actively advertise ISDN kit? That takes both commitment and an up front cash payment.

Madness!

A Burning Sensation

It’s been so long that since I’ve had to burn real, physical media that I’ve completely forgotten how to do it – especially on MacOS.

Anyway, it turns out all you have to do is right click on the iso and select burn.

And, just like that, I’m now an owner of a Kubuntu 19.04 install CD.

In other good news, it appears that my external blu ray reader/writer still works!