In 2024 I created a sequence of unique Christmas cards that formed an animation: 2024’s Christmas Card I ended the story of their creation with: I strongly suspect next year’s cards will be a little simpler… … but, seen as you’re back here, it should be fairly clear I failed. 2025’s Christmas Card Last year’s cards were individually static and unique, but moved together. My goal this year was to…
This is an archived version of the page describing my 2024 Christmas Card . Hello! You’ve perhaps reached this page because you received a Christmas card that looked something like this: Merry Christmas! Your card was handmade and totally unique! It’s part of a series of cards I made this year: As far as I know this is the first series of Christmas cards that form a stop motion animation, the…
Thames Mouth near Southend-on-Sea Thames Head near Kemble Over the last year and a half I ran the entirety of the River Thames! In total it took 20 runs for a total of over 440km. Thames Head (west) to Southend-on-Sea (east) (OpenStreetMap). Click on all maps and images in this post to enlarge them! Let’s get the obvious question out the way first: “why?” And I, errr, don’t have a good reason.…
On a rainy January morning nine years ago I sat in my Year 10 form room. We’d just come back from the Christmas holidays and smartphones were slowly becoming commonplace. Before then most teenagers I knew had some combination of an iPod, a Blackberry, or a “camera phone”. With smartphones came apps. One of my friends had an iPhone. This was unusual at the time; iPhones had only been available in…
A good simple idea well executed. In 1989 Krzysztof Kieślowski directed Dekalog , a series of ten films for each of the Ten Commandments. The characters are residents of the same Warsaw apartment block. Each story only features 2 or 3 characters confronting moral issues themed loosely around each commandment. In the hands of a weaker director and writer — Krzysztof Piesiewicz co-wrote the series —…
Although I graduated two years ago, I’d previously never made my bachelor’s or master’s theses public, although the code has always been available. I’ve not touched either project since, but the theses both provide missing context. MicroJIT: A JIT compiler for the BBC micro:bit (2018; thesis ; code ). The micro:bit features a low-powered Cortex M0 processor. At the time the primary programming…
For the last year international travel has been all but impossible. Travel anywhere, for that matter: I last left London 9 months ago. I’ve missed exploring. Adventure. I haven’t been to the EU since the UK left last year, but the pandemic couldn’t stop me visiting the EU … I start the day early. The streets in St John’s Wood are empty — it’s a bank holiday in the UK — and Regent’s Park is too.…
It is a truth universally acknowledged that New Year’s resolutions do not work. Each year as January rolls around we set ourselves noble goals to exercise more, lose weight, eat more healthily, smoke less, or sleep more. Yet 88% of these resolutions are doomed to fail . As much as our intentions may be good, New Year’s resolutions mostly fail through poor goal setting: all of the above are much to…
Regent Street Regent’s Park The Mall Piccadilly Circus For a long time I’ve had walking around and photographing a desserted central London on Christmas Day on my bucket list. Ordinarily the city would be bustling with tourists, workers, and shoppers every day of the year, but inevitably this year was an exception. Instead whenever I’ve gone for walks or runs around Westminster I’ve been…
A view of the City of London from the north-east at Primrose Hill. With clear skies, temperatures reached the mid-thirties for much of the last few days. Made with Nikon D3400, ISO 100, ƒ/5.6, 1/2500s.