2. 2009-10-05

    We have recently had a wood-burning stove installed. With a baby on the way, I understand it's traditional to frantically embark on home improvement. Our house is old and draughty, as homes built around open fireplaces, one in every room, must be. The current central heating isn't very optimised for heat delivery, especially since we removed a good portion of the internal doors, and have yet to get around to replacing them.

    The chimney breast, in what has become the main living room needed some attention, having suffered some water damage long ago, due to leaking. The leaks are gone, but the brickwork and surface plaster were left saturated and continued to deteriorate. Rounding it all off, it was mounted with a bulky, mantelpiece of slate, with ugly pseudo-wood veneer, and filled with garish orange ceramic tiles.

    Installing the stove was a way of addressing these issues simultaneously. When fired up, it should produce a generous heat in the centre of the house, well suited to the original building design and airflow. As part of the installation, we've had the chimney lined, the fireplace and hearth reconstructed, and the chimney breast re-surfaced. We ordered the stove from Kindle in Bristol , and they also managed all the installation work, which only took a couple of days.

    New stove

    The stove is a ClearView Pioneer 400 . A clean-burn design, and the installation is certified for use in smokeless zones, such as Bristol. It's a multi-fuel configuration, which can be used to burn (smokeless) coal as well as firewood. We've built a small log store in the back yard, and filled it with a metre-cubed of sawn firewood.

    Due to the unseasonably hot weather, I've not had too much of a chance to get it up and running, aside from a few test sessions. I'm not yet sure what our practical fuel consumption will resolve to. In my tests, I've so far determined that it is capable of generating a startling amount of heat after just a few hours of operation.

    On a less practical note, it is simply enormous fun having a large burning fire you can fiddle about with, sitting within easy reach. It's very easy to get hypnotised by the thing, when it's burning. I find it considerably more interesting to watch than most things that are on the television.

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  3. 2009-10-05

    Life behind glass : Photographer Michael Wolf captures human exhibits in their natural environment of downtown Chicago.

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  4. 2009-08-05

    Beehaus : Urban dwellers are being encouraged to keep bees by Natural England , with the launch of the Beehaus, an new user-friendly urban beehouse design from the firm Omlet .

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  6. 2009-08-01

    Electric suicide ants : Colonies of lasius neglectus , the poison-resistant "Asian super ant", whose magnetic compulsion for electricity sources is so strong they can represent a fire hazard, have been identified in the UK for the first time.

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  7. 2009-08-01

    1. Obtain S60 smartphone. I'm quite fond of my Nokia E51

      2. Install Python for series 60 on your phone.

      3. On a nearby OS X Leopard notebook, setup a new bluetooth serial port, type RS232. ( System preferences -> Bluetooth -> Advanced ). Call it something like 'Bluetooth-console'. Ensure the Mac is paired with the phone.

      4. In a terminal, run ' screen /dev/tty.Bluetooth-console '

      5. Set your Mac's bluetooth to 'discoverable'

      6. Launch the Python application you've just installed on your phone. Select Options -> Bluetooth Console -> Other. Choose your Mac, and then select the Bluetooth-console serial port as the device.

      7. Meanwhile, back on the Mac: a python shell will start in your screen session after a small delay.

      8. In the python session, " import audio "

      9. In the python session, " audio.say('I never realised my phone had a built-in speech synthesizer') "

      10. Fall over in astonishment.
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  10. 2009-07-18

    Smiley Squid : This piglet squid has been making waves, because of the arrangement of its pigmentation.

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  11. 2009-07-14

    I've not posted a gig write up in a long time. One day I might get around to post-documenting some of the backlog. However, here's something very fresh.

    Last night I went to see Fever Ray . Fever Ray is the assumed band name of Karin Dreijer Andersson, one half of the strange and compelling Swedish brother-sister art-electronica duo, The Knife .

    The ticket price for this one was fairly steep. Seventeen pounds is a lot to ask for an debut act, on a Bristol weekday evening. Knowing the Knife to have something of a penchant for staginess and performance statements , I figured that the cost of admission might indicate a more elaborate performance spectacle than the routine Academy show. It wasn't a terribly full crowd, which may have also had something to do with the ticket price. Luckily my expectations of an interesting presentation were met, more than satisfactorily.

    A stage swathed in as much machine-made fog as I've seen since I last watched the Sisters Of Mercy, decades ago. For readers unfamiliar with the Sisters' stage ouevre, let me clarify; this means a lot of fog . The five-piece band only identifiable as bizarre silhouettes suggestive of a dark circus. Improbably tall hats, shadowy pierrot faces, frock coats, hunched shoulders. Karin, stage center shrouded in an enormous cowled cloak , the headress simultaneously suggesting fur and antlers and briar-hedge basketwork, her peculiar outline only really humanised by oversized white gloved hands. During the second song, she cleverly unfurled her cloak a little, a sudden backlight creating a surprising stained-glass panel effect that seemed to shine from inside her.

    The whole performance was a meticulously staged progression, slowly opening up the initial murk. At the start the overhead fog was scissored dramatically by a pair of slow moving laser beams. By the second song, they'd each expanded to a pair of fan shapes. Later on these picked up oscillating movement, and eventually traced out colour shifts in the waves of fog. Within the on-stage gloom, the odd sight of a dozen or so standard-lamps, pulsing away in time to the beats through thick lampshades. I didn't have my camera with me, although I expect it would have struggled to capture any of this well. Quite a few people have submitted photos of previous shows to flickr .

    As the show progressed, the stage was slowly up-lit from the back with soft blue and yellow glows. The cloak was shed, placed on a stand just behind front of stage, it still loomed, like some kind of shadowy spirit-familiar. Gradually we could see a little more of the performers, jigging around, wildly shaking shamanistic totem-sticks, pounding away on congas and toms, yet still the lighting and smoke effects kept them essentially obscured and anonymous.

    The short set stuck solidly to the album, without encores, which was fine by me. My attention didn't wander, nor did I tire of standing in place. My only complaints would be with the slightly murky sound, which isn't that unusual for the Academy, and that the music didn't really connect as terribly live, aside from the vocals; pitch-shifted, yet weirdly still human and very real. I think this was probably down to a combination of the very programmed sounds, and the distancing effect of the theatrics. It was something more like watching a stage-show display set to a musical playback, than a rock music show. I took it as an opportunity to watch something a little out of the ordinary, and enjoyed myself.

    The album is ace, and I recommend it to anyone. You can find it on spotify .

    The video for "Triangle Walks" gives an impression quite close to the live show. There are some other videos available on the band site which give a good sense of the Fever Ray aesthetic.


    <embed>

    Triangle Walks from Fever Ray on Vimeo .



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  12. 2009-07-04

    Bee Balls : Honeybee hordes use two weapons - heat and carbon dioxide - to kill their natural enemies, giant hornets.

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  13. 2009-07-02

    Stingray migration : Looking like giant leaves floating in the sea, thousands of Golden Rays are seen here gathering off the coast of Mexico.

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  19. 2009-06-09

    Because I've been in the mood for photo housekeeping, here's the remainder of the photographs from our trip to Manhattan last Christmas. They're mostly concerned with a walk over the Brooklyn Bridge which occurred on the very morning of Christmas day.

    NYC Christmas, part Two

    We took the train down to Brooklyn and just leisurely walked across. The weather and views were rather stunning, and the city much quieter than usual. We did run into a bit of footpath congestion at the Manhattan terminus; the comic image of a frustrated, lycra-enveloped cyclist failing to exert his right-of-way, in opposition to the crowds, camply yelling "Hello! Bicycle lane!" will stay impressed on my memory.

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  20. 2009-06-07

    Thanks to some free air miles obtained when I signed up for my last credit card, we managed to get an entirely free weekend's accommodation (self-catering apartment, right in the city centre), and flights (BA, return from Gatwick) to anywhere in the closest European zone. The only catch was that they needed to be cashed-in before the end of February '09. We elected to re-visit Dublin, as Mrs S. spent several months living and working there, back when she was studying towards her degree. That was several years ago, neither of us have been back since.

    It hasn't changed much. Right before we left, we discovered the exciting news that we were in the family way . This rather curtailed the traditional Dublin entertainment of drinking stout (the Guinness does taste better, you know) and bar-crawling. Perhaps the most striking change was the effect of the recent economic turmoil upon the sterling exchange rate. Dublin was never the cheapest city, but now things were positively eye-watering; a pint of Guiness was pushing five pounds, a decidedly average meal for two (with no alcohol) in a vegetarian restaurant easily overshot the forty pound mark. Luckily with free travel and accommodation leaving enough elasticity in our spending budget, we managed a relaxed weekend break without risking bankruptcy.

    The February weather was cold, windy and occasionally damp. Wind-swept and grey rather suits this city by the sea. On on the evening we flew in, the night of the 14th, we somehow managed to blunder straight in and secure a last-minute table for two in a little Italian bistro, minutes after we'd unpacked; saving us from having to hurriedly improvise a meal with limited shopping options.

    Most of the rest of the time we just cruised around the city streets, feeding the ducks in the park, dipping into second-hand-book shops, cafe's and what proved to be an astonishingly well-stocked Gibson guitar dealer, where I ogled an array of the fancy new auto-mechanical-tuning robot guitars. I was particularly taken by the effect of the grimy, yet bright, winter sky reflecting off the mosaic-tile pools in the Garden of Remembrance.

    Dublin: Feb '09

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