Observations from a Hill

OK, been mulling over a possible loudspeaker build that I've mooted before [blog posts passim] involving the drivers and crossovers from my Dad's old Wharfedale Lintons [the ones shown are from the net, not the originals], which I've still yet to re-purpose and are languishing in a box in the workshop. I've designed, improvised and built quite a few speakers over the decades, with varying degrees of success. In fact, the very best of the boxes I've built have been of the 'gut feeling' variety, eschewing the 'standard practice' of the day, in favour of going for what 'feels' right. More often than not - caveat: breaking the rules needs some knowledge of the rules; physics is physics, after all - the improvised [jazz, again!] boxes proved to be great performers. Back in the mists of time - the mid-1970s anyway - I bought a Goodmans 12" PA driver out of my ill-gotten gains working as a car-park attendant in my summer vacation when I was an ...

  Pictured, the current chaos of my workshop. I managed an hour down there this afternoon, until I gave up due to a total lack of peripheral nerve sensation in all twenty of my collective digits. I was trying to manufacture a tool to crack open the body of the 3" chuck I've mentioned before [blog posts passim], which can be seen on the piece of white melamine board in the centre of the picture. In doing so, I needed to fire up the old lathe in order to turn down and thread a couple of bronze spigots to put into a custom wrench to free the backplate of the chuck. The old lathe hasn't seen the light of day since last summer, and the room it sits in would seem to have the greatest ingress of storm-driven moisture of all of the building; so a new plan has been hatched. I'm going to abandon the little lathe shop and move the kit to the centre of the 12 foot bench pictured, approximately where the current project is sitting. Ironically, this will bring my workshop practice b...

It's extraordinary how the proponents of a free, entrepreneurial system, untrammelled by regulation and in their eyes, entirely meritocratic in nature, are often the first to cry 'foul' when faced with competitors who have second-guessed them and upset their 'own' playground. This week saw the disruptors themselves disrupted: OpenAI [et al] suddenly found that an Asian upstart had become he new kid on the block and had upset the cosy little applecart they had hitherto assumed to be entirely their own. DeepSeek, the Chinese AI that I mentioned last night, has really gotten under the skin of the erstwhile King of AI, which now is accusing it of intellectual property theft; to quote a Tech Radar piece today: ' OpenAI  claims to have evidence that  DeepSeek , the Chinese startup that has thrown the US tech market into financial turmoil, used the company's proprietary models to train its own open-source LLM, called R1. This would represent a potential breach of i...

The impact of the introduction of the Chinese AI Deepseek R1 on the markets could be the start of the beginning of this particular tech-bubble's bursting. Too early to call yet, but the fact that hardware manufacturing stocks [Nvidia in this case as the world's leading GPU purveyors] took such a big initial hit [they've crawled back up a tad since] would logically suggest two scenarios. Either those behind Deepseek have discovered a new paradigm for AI modelling which relies far less on massive hardware power and energy input to operate; or it's a cynical ploy to destabilise US stocks and manufacturing in the light of the second Trump administration. I don't believe either to be the case, but I'm still sceptical of the world's Gadarene [politically & commercially driven] rush to wholesale proselytisation and adoption of the technology as the next best thing since sliced bread. It ain't, and it's obvious to anyone actually watching the tech itself...

  Today, being ushered left or ushered right usually indicates either flying First Class or flying Economy. Not so in Auschwitz-Birkenau, where being told to go left meant staying alive, and being told go right meant extinction. Trude Levi was nineteen years old in 1944, when swept up by the Nazis in Hungary, and eventually fetched up in Auschwitz. '"We arrived in Auschwitz on 7 July and were put through a large 'selection' on 2 August when we were either sent to the right or the left by the camp commandant Hoess and the principal camp doctor Mengele. I was sent with others to the left. We were allowed to go on living; those sent to the right were exterminated."'

Tomorrow is Holocaust Memorial Day, so it seems appropriate to mention it on its eve here tonight. 2025 is a significant milestone year in that it marks the eightieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau. One-Point-One Million people were murdered there by the Nazi regime in the space of five years. In "The Kingdom of Auschwitz" by Otto Friedrich, he describes in awful detail the 'processing' of the victims of the Final Solution from beginning to end. I urge any Holocaust sceptic or worse, denier, to read this slim, intense volume at least once. In common with John Hersey's "Hiroshima", it proves that some historical events are too important, too appalling; for the grand sweep of the historical 'masterpiece': the beloved grandiose gestures of academe. Sometimes, simply, the truth; the appalling truth of the baseness of human nature and its consequences is best encapsulated by the focussed concision of reportage. More tomorrow...

The Universe has existed for 13.5 Billion years. The Earth for 4.5 billion years. Homo Sapiens is the last surviving human species, occupying the top slot of the evolutionary charts for just 13,000 years, and where has that gotten us? The Apex of the Apex Species: Donald J. Trump, 45th & 47th President of The United States: the most powerful man in the world and wielder of enormous economic power and influence over the rest of the planet's eight billion or so inhabitants. Think about it. This is the best the human race could come up with in 13,000 years of progress, from hunter-gatherer, through the agricultural, industrial and technological revolutions: Trump. The best we could come up with. Dear God, really? In the words of the great Peggy Lee song: 'Is That All There Is?'

  Pictured, the three-jaw chuck I mentioned in last night's post, disassembled as far as I can at this juncture: I haven't figured out access to the inside of the body of the thing, even though I've removed the obvious fixings in the form of the three, smaller machine screws seen here. I suspect that it will crack open at the back within the slight annular depression at the rear of the body. The tapped holes that would normally attach the chuck to the lathe's backplate lie in the outer, raised rim, so I think that I'm quite safe in this assumption. Everything needs a good clean, but considering it's probably sixty-plus years since the internals of this thing were exposed, it's in pretty damned good shape. A good soak in some solvent followed by an application of light oil should see it OK. The mating surfaces of the jaws look in pretty good condition too, so despite one of them [number 1 jaw] having lost a small chunk of its outer edge, it should work fine w...

I was watching a workshop video on YouTube earlier, which prompted me that it won't be too long before I can get into my workshop without freezing to death, at which point there will be an enormous amount of tidying, spring-cleaning and routine maintenance & overhauling of kit to do, to reverse the effects of a long winter of damp and neglect. In the interim, I've decided to get a bit of practice in, and chose this old, spare, three-jaw chuck as a guinea pig for a clean and general overhaul. It will come in useful at some future point, possibly in some static use - it's a pretty battered old thing and probably of little use for most turning duties - but it will be instructive in later dealing with the chuck I regularly use on the lathe, which in itself is no spring chicken. I would guess that neither has been disassembled for a very long time and so would benefit from a full service, methinks. I can start the process here in the warm of the house, as Storm Éowyn is due...

  This is what you get when über-rich men of little intellect, base instincts and good fortune coalesce into a political entity of enormous power. However you read Musk's offensive Nazi salute on Trump's inauguration day, it doesn't look well. If he was serious, he confirms that the intended collective philosophy of MAGA essentially equals that of the Nazi regime of the 1930s in the prelude to the Second World War. If meant in a 'humorous [??*!]' vein [and I doubt that very much], then I think perhaps that stands as proof that Musk is far too wealthy, takes far too many drugs, and has no sense of his place in the world or history except that he wants to 'own' all of it, including space. On the same day, 'President' Trump exonerated and expedited the release of all manner of criminals, including insurrectionists who in former years would probably been summarily executed by firing squad: now they get the keys to the Capitol as reward for their efforts...

There: gotcha! Except there is no monetisation here in these pages, although a bit of extra spending money wouldn't go amiss, I have to admit; but I don't intend - especially at my relaxed time of life - to start another business, with all the work that would entail. The discipline of writing this blog and my daily journal is enough in itself to help me focus on at least one or two thing s for some of the day, leaving the rest of the time for my butterfly mind to do whatever it wants. Clickbait is rapidly and worryingly becoming the modus operandi of more and more news gatherers, mainstream as well the more outré providers of 'truth'. The proclivity of so many to go along with the first 'fact' that is thrust before them unchecked is no new thing: the tabloids have traded in click-baited [before we actually 'clicked' on anything] 'news' offerings for as long as newspapers and periodicals have been printed. But the issue now is that the constan...

Well here are: Trump 2.0 is official and four years of Christ knows what has commenced in The Capitol. A long and predictable inauguration speech - tele-prompted, naturally - offered a vision of an isolationist American Republic with all the usual tropes of conservatism: border security, law & order, social conservatism and an expansionist economic and geopolitical view of the world. He made much of the MAGA creed and of the defence of America from its enemies, whomever they are and wherever they might be. Pretty safe ground for someone preaching to the converted. His stated aim to nix all climate-change legislation and 'drill, Baby, drill...' should be of major concern to all of us: here's a guy who believes that the California wildfires disaster was the fault of Democrats in general and Joe Biden in particular. A guy who manifestly has little grasp on the realities of the world in the twenty-first century. However, many of his sympathisers who attended the ceremony an...

Well, here we are again on a Sunday night with a food post. Pictured, tonight's supper of roast chicken, my signature roasties and steamed carrots, with a much-reduced sauce of chicken stock and the deglazed pan juices: tasty. Otherwise, I've been plotting a couple of workshop projects: a new feather board for my table saw and a wooden charging stand for my iPhone; but the crushingly frigid ambient temperature in the workshop coupled with the lack of any real heating mitigates against any realistic progress on that front. I've got stuff I'm planning to write about regarding language and photography in the works, and I've finally just started work on a poem about Al Moores that I've been gestating in the back of my mind since the day he died, and the four of us became three, but that's for another day: I'll post the resulting work when I'm halfway satisfied with it. Talk later...

I've spent a good couple of hours this afternoon installing the latest release of Linux Mint on my MacBook Air [pictured left], to replace the rather broken previous system which I couldn't update. Between that and my old MacBook Pro 13" is a plate upon which is my supper for tonight: a four fish finger sandwich, something I've not made for a while now, and which I'd been hankering all day for. What began as a humble working-class snack dreamt up by time-constrained 1960s mothers-on-a-budget, has become part of the boomer culinary mythology, alongside the cheese and crisp [potato chip] sandwich and instant mash. All of which gradually replaced the cucina povera of our earlier childhoods, such as dripping on toast, eggy bread, and even, in my family's case, of lamb's brains on toast. These days, the humble fish finger buttie is just as likely to appear on gastro-pub menus in the more chef-ie form of white fish goujons in tempura, served in a sandwich of arti...

Yesterday evening at twilight, expecting a delivery of a small leather pen case to safely house my Parker Duofold Maxima fountain pen [blog posts passim], I twice wandered into the conservatory/wintergarten/lean-to that fronts our place, to see if anyone was on their way down the lane. On both occasions I imagined that I could see someone approaching our gate, only to discover that the figure had vanished into immateriality before I could open the door. This happened twice, and I simply put it down to my next door neighbour returning from unloading his car. The delivery duly turned up after dark, and so I forgot about the false starts, but when I woke this morning, the incident was still lodged in my mind; and after the lucid dream I had just awoken from - twice - I wondered what exactly was it that I had I seen the previous evening: a ghost? A glimpse into an adjacent dimension? Dementia? Anyhow, the memory of the manifestation faded during the day's machinations and I little cons...

Well, here we are: another one down in the pantheon of our creative heroes. David Lynch is no more of this earth. Requiescat in pace. My first exposure to his canon was The Elephant Man of 1980, which I watched with my late friend John Kyte on an early visit back to Birmingham some forty-odd years ago. He had one of the early VCRs - a Sony Betamax - and had managed to get a copy of the film, somehow. In those days, legal release copies of feature films cost a small fortune, hence the proliferation of video hire shops that began in that era. Anyhow, we watched the film in silence and we both ended up in tears over the plot - go look it up if you don't know the story - but the main takeaway for me was the cinematography/direction/foley axis: particularly the sound direction; never mind the wonderful performances of the principal actors of the piece: the surreality of the mix - a glorious spectacle in itself - lent the narrative poignancy and fixed its historical placement for me. A y...

  Jane and I went over to Church Island for our customary constitutional there. A lap around the island, out along The Belgian Promenade, and passing under Menai Bridge [pictured from near Eglwys Sant Tysilio - Saint Tysilio's Church] into Porthaethwy itself. It's a gentle forty-five minute stroll, and the weather today has been glorious and nowhere near as cold as of late: a full fifteen degrees warmer than last Wednesday, and no black ice around on which to injure myself, as I did then. Fortunately I heal well and there's only a faint scar left on my cheekbone to give away that I'd kissed the tarmac at a rate of knots. Here's looking forward to Spring...

  Pictured, my recently-acquired darkroom changing bag and System Four developing tank. I'd decided that getting a lab to process my speculative test films from unknown-quantity old film cameras was getting a bit expensive, so I focussed on getting back into my old haunt of developing my own stuff, which I have done professionally in past lives; and as the prospect of building a pukka darkroom is fast joining the morass of projects unlikely to get done, I relented and bought the above. I've got some conventional chemistry down in the studio, which I might as well use up for the initial few test rolls, as they will at least give a standard output by which to judge the cameras rather than the film/dev combo. But as these days I'm more into the serendipities of the photographic process, I'm going to investigate the alternative world of Caffenol: film development based around coffee. The ingredients involved are all household and non-toxic, unlike most, if not all, traditi...

I read in today's FT - with a measure of disquiet, I have to say - about the Prime Minister's stated aim '...to make Britain "the best state partner" for artificial intelligence companies in the world...'. Firstly, I'm not even sure I can see exactly how we can make that work, given that all the major players in the game have pretty-much limitlessly deep pockets from which to draw in development: something that currently the UK just doesn't have. Secondly, his USP of the UK's "values of democracy, open commerce and the rule of law" really won't cut it with the current batch of technoligarchs and their venture capitalist buddies-in-arms, who are now moving into the disturbingly uncharted waters of complete, global, financial anarchy: they just don't give a shit for law and order or democracy, and as for open commerce, they would rather that all anti-trust laws and corporate taxation were expunged from the world economy once and for...

  I wasn't going to foist another dinner post on you after last night, but roast pork with proper crackling has fortunately occupied my time this afternoon/evening as Sunday supper is my sole responsibility. I had taken some pics of the work in progress and my plated-up results, but Apple's algorithms and systems seem to have got their collective underclothes in a twist and refuse point-blank to let me edit anything: so here is the aftermath of the carving, the pic of which needed no edit. Note - and please forgive me, anyone forbidden to eat pork, or those of a vegetarian disposition; I apologise, but I can't help myself, as I was raised on the stuff - the crisp, salted crackling and just beneath, the layer of silky, lardy fat. The meat was tender, but as is always with this particular cut of pork, a tad under-flavoured: I guess a locally-reared pig would provide something tastier. However, as I always say, the star of the show is the skin and its layer of soft fat just b...

OK - I'm doing a Sunday food post on a Saturday for no other reason than I haven't got my act together for the post I kind of intended to make, as I've just got swamped in stuff that seems relevant but is so wide-ranging I need to think a bit longer about it before I scribble a post on it. So, pictured are some air-fried chicken drumsticks which I marinated in the following [US measures as they seem to be pretty universal these days]: 2 tbs Greek yoghurt (the real stuff - at least 5% fat and whipped), 1 tbs rapeseed oil, 1 tsp Kashmiri chilli powder, 1 tsp generic curry powder, 1 tsp Garam Masala, 1 tsp garlic paste, 1 tsp ginger paste, salt and black pepper: a good grind each. Get the chicken schmooshed up in the marinade until well coated and chill for at least an hour, covered. Pre-heat your air-fryer, then whack in the chicken for 25mins at 190C, turning halfway through and basting with the remaining marinade. Rest the meat for ten minutes and eat. I've no idea wher...

It's been a strangely philosophical day today, with AI featuring front and centre above [and between] several coincidental threads that have been thrust my way, so to speak. In chronological order, I picked up a thread first thing this morning over my first cup of tea, that pointed to an academic paper emanating obliquely from Apple Inc., indicating that some reticence to the wholesale adoption of AI across the broad spectrum of knowledge applications is probably in order. The paper outlines research carried out regarding the performance of various AI LLMs with regard to simple arithmetical logic problems of the order of those used to gauge the performance of year eight pupils in standard testing. We've all done these at school at one time or another: 'John has forty apples in a barrel, three tangerines in his pocket and fifty kumquats in his knapsack. How many orange-coloured fruit does John have? ' etc., etc. When the AI is presented with straightforward arithmetical ...

Further to last night's reflections on Trump's pre-enthronement pronouncements; all the news-feeds this morning report on his latest fantastical outbursts regarding the wildfires currently raging through the Los Angeles Hills, fanned by hurricane force winds and fuelled by tinder-dry land. Apparently, according to Trump - and he should know, being possessed of, in his estimation, one of the world's greatest intellects - the blame for the conflagration lies squarely on California Governor Newsom and President Biden's shoulders. I quote from his post on 'Truth [sic] Social':  "Governor Gavin New scum refused to sign the water restoration declaration put before him that would have allowed millions of gallons of water, from excess rain and snow melt from the North, to flow daily into many parts of California, including the areas that are currently burning in a virtually apocalyptic way...". Charming reference to the Governor, I must say,  and entirely bef...

  I know Trump's full of crap and given to rancid hyperbole in servicing his own sketchy career, but the latest ramblings from Donald the Duck really do sound like the thought-processes of a man entering the early stages of dementia. OK, renaming The Gulf of Mexico "The Gulf of America" will upset an awful lot of good people, but will in itself have little geopolitical effect should it ever actually happen; but the suggested taking of Greenland as a US territory and suggesting that he might annexe Canada in the process is tantamount to a suggestion of an intended future declaration of war: what on earth are we to make of that? Even if he's only half-serious, it's a tad disturbing that a person in his position would think it fit to voice such thoughts. The only saving grace at the moment is that the Republican Party appears to be fragmenting in much the same way as the British Conservatives, with everyone on the Right taking lumps out of each other in the theatre o...

It's ironic that the advances the human race has made on the road to 'modernity', or the world in which whatever date is current, have almost always been environmentally destructive in one way or another. In advancing the prospects of our species in whatever way, we have always - and until very recently often unwittingly - jeopardised the very environment that supports and enables our continued existence. Most of us imagine that the tipping point of mankind's influence on the quality of the environment was the advent of The Industrial Revolution. But no: I was reading a piece in today's Guardian newspaper about the pernicious influence of the metal smelting of the the Roman era in the Europe of the Pax Romana, that two-century period of relative political stability that came to an end in AD180, leading, ultimately to the fall of the Roman Empire. It seems that the Romans contributed some half a million tonnes of lead pollution to the atmosphere in that period; the f...

Well, it looks like the nascent bromance between Musk and Farage has already gone south on the whim of the capricious former South African egotist. What a pair of oxygen wasters: the planet's in enough strife without their using valuable and diminishing resources as it is. As to Musk's [why is it that I'm so tempted to call the guy 'Muskie'? Anyone that remembers the cartoon series Deputy Dawg will know to which character I refer] claim to be a major proponent and enabler of free speech via his bastardised X platform; why is it that he routinely cancels anyone that disagrees with his frankly deranged Weltanschauung. But then again, I suppose, he's the boss, and woe betide the naysayers, what ho? He's just a child in billionaire's raiment; much like infant emperors of past history, elevated to authority before their time: but in his case, there have been no regents acting in loco parentis: his - likewise for that matter, his passkey to the executive bath...

I was having a pint of John Willie Lee's excellent bitter at the Anglesey Arms in Menai Bridge this afternoon, on my way to pick Jane up from work in Bangor - a circuitous route, admittedly, but a good pint's a good pint, all said and done - and set to perusing Julian Hollands railway miscellany "More Amazing and Extraordinary Railway Facts". I do love a good miscellany: they make great dipping material and go particularly well with a pint or two! What I hadn't realised, and I guess many others might not also, was that the Beeching report that led to the axing of the bulk of Britain's branch lines in the middle of the last century, eviscerating a network that had been built to service communities across the UK, no matter how small or far-flung, was not the only report he produced. There was slated to be a Beeching 2.0; not so much an axe this time, but rather a guillotine. The power of the road lobby was just getting into full stride in the 50s and 60s and the...

In pondering what the bejesus to write about this afternoon [as usual], I've been casting around the various news sources that infest Fairview Heights from time to time for ideas. One of the key issues at the moment, of course, is Donald Trump and his impending re-admission to the highest office in the world: one of the scariest thoughts imaginable for millions of Americans, let alone those of us in the rest of the world who will inevitably suffer at the hands of the Orange One, politically and economically. There's a couple of his intended policies/directions that will be pivotal on a global level. The first, of course is sanctions. The second is his absurd alleged intention to make cryptocurrency a federal reserve asset. The former, particularly with regard to China, is weird enough, as he seeks to alienate the world's global manufacturing and trading giant from the US economy: it will be interesting [and disturbing in equal measure, no doubt] to see how he intends to re...

There's so many things that deserve comment today, from rollbacks to social care and poorly thought-out net-zero policies, to Trump and crypto, to Musk, etc. etc., but I'm going to leave that for another day as I'm ranted out. And so, in true OFaH tradition, I leave you for today with a lazy cooking post. Pictured, my first foray into cooking steak in an air-fryer. I also cooked the potatoes in the thing, as well. The sauce was an improvised construct of whatever stuff was left over from Christmas: half an onion languishing in the veg basket, a small [tiny] bottle of prosecco, the remnants of a chicken stock cube, boiling water and - inspiration! - a teaspoon of beef extract. Whilst the steak was cooked to perfection; medium-rare, of course, it lacked the char that comes from pan or griddle frying, which to my book is one of the delights of cooked meat: the very stuff that the health paranoids throw their arms in the air about. If you don't eat red meat that often - and...

I guess one of the most important questions we ask as adolescents, when meeting a potential friend and/or boyfriend/girlfriend; or, perhaps in seeking out what tribe we might belong to, is: "What music d'ya like?". It certainly was the case in my youth, and has probably always been [and maybe always will be] the case, as the discovery of music has been central to the process of growing up and finding one's way through the hormonal maelstrom of one's teenage years and on into adulthood. Let's face it, we all - or most of us, at any rate - need a soundtrack to our lives. Which brings me to open-mindedness with regard to music(s). It's something that has been in the background of my own personal musical journey from a pretty early age: nine or ten years of age, I'd guess, when I discovered my love of [particularly] guitar music. I loved pretty much every form of it from a very early stage in my youth, to be honest, but at the point that I moved schools in...

New Year once again: true to my prediction in yesterday's post, I was sound asleep by midnight, and even missed the sounds of the brave souls out in the teeth of the storm outside letting off fireworks, because I was listening to music on headphones. I'll post a piece about the album [and its genre] I was listening to, presently. However, suffice it to say, I eventually woke from the rigour mortis of dream-sleep at around half-past-eight this morning, with my sole thoughts turned to getting a brew on [that's a pot of tea to the uninitiated: nothing to do with beer], which I duly did, unwinding the cramp of sleep and jolting my brain into semi-action with the tannin and caffeine hit of 2:1 Assam to Earl Grey tea [loose tea, naturally], as is my normal custom. I used to favour a lovely Rwandan tea, blended with safflower, which Marks & Spencer used to sell, but unfortunately no longer do, but there you go: Rwanda is better known these days as an intrinsic part of the dodg...