Castle Howard lit up in green as part of their Christmas ‘Wonderful Wizard of Oz’ installation.
Castle Howard in Green
It’s a Festive Postbox Topper for Malton!
As we are merely days away from Christmas it seems entirely appropriate to drop some images of a fantastic Santa-themed topper in Malton.
Unlike most of the other toppers from Malton I have posted, this one can be found at the south end of The Shambles, just outside of Cosy Cottage Soap.
‘Three norths’ set to leave England and not return for hundreds of years…
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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Nunnington Hall’s Christmas Tree Festival
Slingsby Community Primary School’s rather lovely submission to Nunnington Hall’s Christmas Tree Festival. It managed to look even better in person.
Last night on YouTube: BBC Archive
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.
The Middlecave Yard Demolition and Rebuild – Late November 2025
See more of the Middlecave work here!
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”Saltburn Cliff Tramway – A Black and White Timelapse
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
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!
MacOS Tahoe’s Terrible Icons
One Foot Tsunami has an entirely reasonable rant about MacOS Tahoe’s terrible Squircle icons. They’re just corporate blanding to the max.
Retrieving the Time Machine Estimated Full Backup Size for MacOS Tahoe
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