Recent content on my name is mwd
Laura and I are always interested in stories of how things were made, and we were listening to Tim Minshell's book on that topic on a recent drive up north, Your Life Is Manufactured . The section we listened to that day was about how manufacturing scales, which he illustrated by talking about the trade-offs between things like flexibility and throughput as you go from home baking, to a small…
As motorbikes go, 1994's Ducati 916 is something of an icon . A design that revitalised Ducati, and set the lineage for the bikes its still making today. So revered by the world is the 916, that even now, thirty years on, as Ducati revealed its new designs for 2025, they were quick to point out how they drew on the design cues from the 916. I've never driven a 916, but in 2006 I was lucky enough…
Modern cameras really are quite remarkable. When I got back into photography in the late naughts, although even the budget cameras let you take some amazing images, they definitely had their limits, and each time I've upgraded my camera I've generally [1] been impressed with what the new leap in tech brought with it, but at the same time I think we take such progress for granted, so it was nice to…
Whilst I've not posted much new here beyond photos, I have been doing behind the scenes maintenance as I try to bring home my various bits of digital life. I've had several websites over the years, and each stage tended to be quite leaky, losing some content along the way. Then in the web 2.0 boom this was solved by devolving maintenance responsibility to third parties - content went to iWeb,…
I saw this article by Ursula K Le Guin being linked to on my socials, and specifically this quote, which I felt resonated with later-life Michael: Technology is the active human interface with the material world. But the word is consistently misused to mean only the enormously complex and specialised technologies of the past few decades, supported by massive exploitation both of natural and human…
I've been making more of an effort to get some new music into my rotation. After years of avoiding them I've reluctantly taken up a subscription to Apple Music: whilst I still stand by my "buy albums over streaming" policy, I do need some way of discovering that new music to buy. As much as like bandcamp , their explore system has never worked for me, and so I was getting stagnated in my listening…
Despite my increasingly advanced years, I still have the soul of a skateboarder. I was never very good at doing tricks, but there is just something about cruising around on a skateboard that sits well with my inner self. When I lived in the centre of Glasgow as a student I'd regularly use my skateboard for commuting between my home and the University, but when I moved to Cambridge that mostly…
Both myself and my friend Jason have been independently investing effort into our personal web presence, as we both try to get around what it means to have a such a thing these days. I've been running my own website for a couple of decades, but what it should be today when so few people engage with content outside of a social media curated stream I'm not sure. I've enjoyed trying to make the…
A little over a year ago I started suffering from Raynaud's Syndrome , which is where I'll lose blood-flow to my fingers and/or toes when I get cold, rendering them white and numb due to lack of blood, and after which it takes 20 minutes or more to recover. I have to confess that the first couple of times, before my GP explained to me what was happening, it was quite distressing to go through, as…
Being unable to go to the workshop during much of the pandemic, I still wanted to make things, so I turned my attention to something easier to work on at home: baking. Like with woodwork, there's lots to learn if you choose to dig into any particular aspect, you can refine your craft, and you get something nice at the end of it all. This post is just documenting some of the bits I've learned with…