Glass Works, Barnsley

A couple of shots from the Glass Works redevelopment in the centre of Barnsley. They’re not that great – I snatched them quickly whilst on the way to the station – but they do reflect the current state of redevelopment in the town centre.

The New Library. It doesn’t look that bad from the outside – however I’ve yet to go in and have a poke around and see what it’s like from the inside. It’s got a silly name though – the ‘Library @ the Lightbox’ sounds very named-by-committee.

Steelwork for the south-west entrance to phase two. Taken on Cheapside outside of the grotty looking Alhambra Centre.

A west facing shot taken from the temporary foot bridge over the railway. New steelwork has been added to the large hole that will eventually form the bulk of phase two. This area will contain the covered shopping area and Cineworld Cinema.

Hot Dog. Jumping Frog…

Another day, another ear-worm. This time it’s Prefab Sprout’s irritating catchy ditty The King of Rock ‘n’ Roll.

I suspect I picked this particular ear-worm up during a repeat viewing of Top of the Pops ‘88 on BBC 4. The body of the song isn’t much to write home about (late 80’s synthy with a slight edge to the lyrics) but oh! the chorus, that bloody chorus… It’s not left me alone for days…

‘Hot dog, jumping frog, Albuquerque…’

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?

Time Machine

Apple’s Time Machine is a neat little utility to automate onsite backups. However its machinations are, like so many of Apple’s products, completely opaque to the end user using the standard user interface and so troubleshooting can be rather difficult. Fortunately for us, this is one of those circumstances where Terminal commands can come to the rescue.

Our first magic spell is…

log show --predicate 'subsystem == "com.apple.TimeMachine"' --info

This will show logged message from the past and can be useful if you’re trying to troubleshoot an issue that’s already in progress. Run this command and macOS will display the last few weeks of Time Machine logs before exiting

The second magic spell is…

log stream --style syslog --predicate 'senderImagePath contains[cd] "TimeMachine"' --info

This command will run – and will remain running until you explicitly exit it – and will display any log messages that Time Machine writes out to the system log.

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.

Raspberry Pi with PCIe

The Raspberry Pi 4 is out! And I’m not going to buy one because A) revision zero is buggered, B) the load this site produces on it’s current 3B+ host is functionally zero (so there’s very little point in upgrading it) and C) I’m currently far too busy to do any pottering around with one outside of that.

However other people have and they’ve started playing around with the new PCIe bus – even going as far as desoldering the USB controller and adding a PCIe riser.

Which is very neat indeed.

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?

Recent Films

Notes on films I’ve recently watched.

28 Days Later

See here

Contagion

A medical drama with clear roots in The War Game, Threads and The Day After. Well filmed and well cast, it seems to loose confidence in the story it’s trying to tell when it diverges into a Chinese kidnap plot that neither explores the desperation that a village in China might feel or ratchets up the overall tension.

Godzilla: King of the Monsters

Rubbish! A mish-mash of ideas and themes and – quite possibly – scripts makes this a terrible sequel. The first – though a little wooden in places – understood the concept of the slow reveal and that, while human drama was a traditional element of a Godzilla movie, the drama was always wrapped around the actions of the monsters rather than the other way around.

Oddly enough, I think there was actually the hint of a good idea hidden under the layers of mess. The eco-terrorism angle had potential legs and could have led to a very nice Night Moves-with-giant-monsters concept. Perhaps that’s an idea who’s time has yet to come?

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