Observations from a Hill

  Pictured, sunflowers at Llanedwen, Ynys Môn today, part of Hooton's Farm Shop's sunflower trail; a touch of Provence in North Wales, and a welcome, momentary diversion... RIP Lady - a fine and lovely dog

I was reading a post on Medium earlier about what being a graphic artist meant before the days of desktop publishing software and Photoshop, let alone AI. The writer pointed out the broad variety of physical training, skills, experience and equipment required simply to do the most basic of design tasks. First and foremost was the necessity of possessing the actual ability to draw and paint: the fundamentals. All other techniques flowed from that underpinning. Since the advent of widespread computing power and the software to exploit it, new skill sets have grown up around it, transforming both the industry itself and its practitioners' praxis within the industry. I was minded about the type of school I attended at secondary level, and the subjects that were central to its curriculum, particularly in the pre-streamed first two years there. Ours was a technical school when I first started, and didn't start transforming itself into a more mainstream grammar school until I'd go...

OK - I wrote last year about issues with the water safety at the Nantlle quarries, caused by industrial waste dumping over the many years since the quarry's closure as a going concern. I was very guarded in my approach to the issue for a number of reasons, but in the light of the recent BBC TV toxic dumping exposé "Buried", hosted by Michael Sheen recently, I have to add to that previous post the rider that I accidentally had sight of a report commissioned in the late-1980s about the Twll Balast site above the Dorothea Quarry, where technical scuba and mixed-gas diving is popular, and where a significant number of fatal accidents have occurred over the last few decades. In that report - the copy I made sadly is no longer with me - it was stated categorically that the waters that have filled the Twll Balast workings since the quarry's demise are polluted with an extremely noxious cocktail of substances related principally but not solely to local plastics manufacturing...

I noted with somewhat grim amusement in today's bumper summer fun edition of The New Statesman, a piece by Nicholas Harris about the first Wetherspoon's pub to be opened outside of this archipelago, in Alicante, España. What makes this particularly of note is not the part of Spain chosen - pretty predictable given that it is a traditional holiday destination for package-holidaying Brits, but rather that it has been opened in an EU country. Consider the fact that the founder of the cheap booze at breakfast, lunch and dinner chain of pubs, Sir Tim Martin is virulently anti-EU and campaigned vigorously and vociferously for Brexit. What manner of business brain comes up with that combo, one might ask? First you and your political ilk manage to convince half of the population to vote for a restriction of their rights to free movement within Europe, and then later decide to open bloody pubs within the economic union you apparently loathe, to serve those very people. It adds to the co...

Thinking on about last night's scribble about Apple, I was minded about Steve Job's early adoption of a totally enclosed proprietary approach to Apple product. Everything about the Mac - hardware, software, etc. - was in-house, and third-party involvement in any way not to be countenanced. It's not unlike the ethos that he created after his return to the company in the late nineties, at least as far as the iPod, iPad and iPhone were concerned: totally ring-fenced products and software, with any third-party software input - at least for the iPad and iPhone: the iPod being a special case during its lifetime - totally controlled by Apple itself through the Byzantine channels of the Apple Developer Program. To an extent, Job's early views on the issue were pretty understandable: the company was relatively small and upcoming compared to the industry standards and the giants of the day, such as IBM; they were treading very new ground back then, and were cognisant that what th...

I picked up a post on Medium today, from last month, about the apparent doldrums in which Apple seems to be becalmed of late, and I have to say I can't disagree with any of it. Since the death of Steve Jobs and the departure of Jonny Ive, there has been little advancement of note in either hardware, OS or software design language , only 'evolutionary tinkering', sometimes good, sometimes bad: nothing outstanding or remarkable. It's as if Apple product has reached its 'white goods' phase, like fridges and cookers: utilitarian, albeit with much flair and great build quality; a bit like Bosch anything or Neff cookers, Smeg fridges or Agas or Roll Royces. Pretty much as if 'we have refined our wares to a point where there is nowhere left to go to improve on our wares'. Except that we all know that as progress is made on the technical side of product development, this should be de facto followed by changes in the design language of the products themselves: e...