The latest splendid offering from SoundDust is called Plato. It comes with some Plato sounding quotes, all unsourced, and, as is the way of such things, many probably not found in Plato’s works. But there is no harm in repeating a good thing…
I woz ere!
The map by Sophie Stone records places you have lived or visited in the UK. This is mine:
Despite my names Scotland and Ireland remain mostly untouched. Curiously Apple’s Safari browser offered to translate the text into English. This merely changed pts to points and broke the layout.
Flaky Sabbath
Will the flaky Sabbath mural at the tattoo place in Hulme be retired once Black Sabbath finally retire?
I was never a fan although it was claimed that their roadies lived locally in the house with the deep purple (see what I did there?) curtains that were always drawn. Our teenage vocabulary was insufficient to describe the imagined debauchery within; but they were probably just sleeping having worked all night.
Happy birthday Microsoft
The fifty years since the founding of Microsoft have flown by. Much that is written today about their history seems to have been passed through a reality distortion field but they are American so we have to make allowances.
P.S. Can I have my Minecraft back?
Returning birds
This morning saw the return of a Heron to the local pond. A couple of years ago there was a heron nesting in a tree overlooking the pond. Time will tell if this one decides to stay.
This afternoon saw the return of an Osprey to the nest at Loch Arkaig in Scotland. The nests are monitored by The Woodland Trusts‘s Osprey Cams so the hatching of chicks can be followed through the summer.
It looks like the blue tits have returned to the hole in the wall at the rear of my home to build a nest.
Presumably for the benefit of motorists who do not understand what double yellow lines mean or that you must not park within 10m (32 feet) of a road junction. How did they get a driving licence?
Personal outsider web sites
In her defense of unpolished personal websites Ana Rodrigues opined:
all I want for my personal website is to give back to the web. I want anyone, regardless of skill level, to inspect elements, understand the structure, and learn from readable code.
Splendid. Let’s take a look:
Hmmm!
We should not forget that browsers will happily render a text file (someText.txt) and combined with a simple drag and drop access point like Transmit‘s Docksend it should be easy to be on the web. This was how things worked in the days of yore. Your account with an ISP came with some ‘web space’. The ISP account would put an icon on your desktop onto which you dragged your files and they automagically appeared on the web.
The punk rock scene in the UK of the late 1970s was a move against the self-indulgent, bloated excesses of established musicians and the music industry. Of course it did not last and the status quo was soon reestablished but there was a re-setting of attitudes. Perhaps one day the web will experience something similar and people will reclaim it as their own.
Passing clouds
video test:
A view of Ludgate Hill
A game of TimeGuesser turned up a picture of crowds gathering, at the end of the First World War in 1918, at Ludgate Circus looking up Ludgate Hill towards St.Pauls Cathedral caused me to wonder what had changed since then.
The street view today shows much has changed – click image to embiggen.
The spire of St. Martin’s church is recognisable; and just above the chap’s hat on the far left it looks like the top of one of the fancy finials that still adorn the building on the left.
The railway bridge was never much admired:
Of all the eyesores of modern London, surely the most hideous is the Ludgate Hill Viaduct— that enormous flat iron that lies across the chest of Ludgate Hill like a bar of metal on the breast of a wretch in a torture-chamber. – Walter Thornbury, ‘Ludgate Hill’, in Old and New London: Volume 1(London, 1878), British History Online [accessed 9 March 2025].
and it was removed in 1990 with the arrival of the City Thameslink rail service (the canopy protruding on the right) which passes under the road.
But perhaps the single greatest change since then… nobody is wearing a hat.
EMI Videogram Catalogue – Autumn 1979
In response to the growing use of home video recorders in the late 1970s EMI produced a catalogue of a dozen films available for purchase. The choice was limited but included some British ‘classics’. Although most would have been shown on television it was a novelty to own a film to watch whenever you felt the need.
The operation was managed by Cliff Michelmore after his career as a television presenter. Although the reply envelope was addressed to him he probably did not pack all the videograms himself; indeed the newsletter tells us he had up to twenty men and women trying to sell these newfangled things. The films would cost around £200 today. The first blank 180 minute tape I purchased cost the best part of £20. The EMI ones would have been just over £15 (including VAT) – around £70 today. Within a few years you could pick up a pack of three tapes at the supermarket for £5.
Mr. Michelmore assures us that the catalogue will become a collectors’ item. Perhaps he could foresee that the project was doomed. By the end of 1979 the company had merged to become Thorn EMI who published subsequent catalogues but by the mid 1980s the operation was sold to the fraudster Alan Bond by which time the videograms were simply known as videos.
The catalogue and associated bumf can be viewed in the gallery.