As of today (12th march 2025) it will be the anniversary of Terry Pratchett’s death. For those that don’t know, he is/was a titan of wonderfully British fantasy fiction. Eric was the first grown up book I read. My sister got thrown by the opening paragraph, and handed it to me in disgust. Other, better […]
I have a soft spot for modernism (art deco, brutalist and modernist architecture) and if you want an intro you can’t do much better than going modernism in metroland. Anyway, my eldest wants to have rabbits, and it’s been about 8 years since we last had Leporidae in the house, we need to make some […]
In May, there was some space weather. If you had any friends in the northern hemisphere your feed would have been awash with purple and green. Well, its my turn to talk about, and show you what I did that night.
At work, they have been pissing about with Large Language Models (word generators). Mostly to do fancy research by making ML models pretend to understand the world around them. Now, a lot of LLM and Generative ML models are there to put artists out of work. However, I have taken a different approach. I am […]
A while back, I made a rocket dovecot. In fact, I think I started it just under 10 years ago. Whilst it was fun, it was never really practical. The roof was unreliable, and the rocket carriage failed pretty quickly. I did make a nice software stack to control it all through a web interface […]
I really like the look of large “school” escapement models. Typically they are plate sized models of working escapements, allowing key features to be demonstrated. You can see a very nice collection here. (Along with some history, pricing and other bits of information.) So I decided to make a simple “electric” escapement, because I don’t […]
As you might be aware, I have already made a hal9000 replica. Looking up the dates, it’s just about ten years since I made it. Anyway, a while back I wanted to make an improved one, after seeing a bunch of kickstarters. So I decided to make a parametric CAD model, because I couldn’t source […]
Everyone loves a good bumble bee This week, I found a bumblebee nest in an old compost bin. I had my suspicions that there might be a solitary bee living in there, as I had seen some activity recently. But, I was more than surprised to find a no-fooling nest. This is possibly the coolest […]
This year the newts have returned to my ponds. This is despite having to do a “flying” pond liner change. Something ate hundreds of holes in the liner around the water level. Anyway, that’s fixed in 2/3rd of the ponds, so we are mostly happy now.
In this time of strife and suffering, I think its important to produce art that nourishes and uplifts the soul. So I present my motivational tablet: