Castle Howard lit up in green as part of their Christmas 'Wonderful Wizard of Oz' installation.

As we are merely days away from Christmas it seems entirely appropriate to drop some images of a fantastic Santa-themed topper in Malton. Unlike most of the other toppers from Malton I have posted, this one can be found at the south end of The Shambles, just outside of Cosy Cottage Soap.

The British Geological Survey has an interesting article on the moving alignment of true, magnetic, and grid north and how it's about to leave England for the next several hundred years. ]

Slingsby Community Primary School’s rather lovely submission to Nunnington Hall’s Christmas Tree Festival. It managed to look even better in person.

The Lion & Unicorn has an interesting dive into the BBC’s YouTube archive channel. I’ve featured a few things from that archive, but none of the videos featured in the article. It’s a nice read and covered a similar ground to some thoughts I’ve been having around archive footage and what it means today.

See more of the Middlecave work here! It's time for another exciting update from the demolition and rebuilding of the former farm at Middlecave Yard. The most notable changes made since my last update is the ducting for water, power, and comms has been installed - as has sewage piping - and, most importantly, the concrete slab that will make up the ground floor has been poured.

And here's a black and white version of October's timelapse of Saltburn. In some ways, the black and white effect adds to the experience. Gallery: 2025 Misc

Five Hundred and Seven Mechanical Movements is a lovely online compendium of Henry T. Brown's classic technical reference Five Hundred and Seven Mechanical Movements. The classic illustrations (taken from a 1906 edition of the text) are just wonderful - as are the modern animated sequences that show the motions in question. My current favourite is No. 92 - better known to most as the mechanism used to drive a steam locomotive!

One Foot Tsunami has an entirely reasonable rant about MacOS Tahoe's terrible Squircle icons. They're just corporate blanding to the max.

Well, it's been a little while since I last looked at sizing Time Machine backups on MacOS and, with MacOS 26 ('Tahoe'), the magic incantation needed to pull that information out has changed. Open up a terminal and enter the following... log show --predicate 'subsystem == "com.apple.TimeMachine"' --info | grep "will be in backup of all sources" ...and this will print out a number of records from previous Time Machine sessions thus...

Adam Savage has a couple of nice videos from the Paramount Film Archives. I especially enjoyed the second of these on the various media formats used over the years.

Abort Retry Fail has a really nice post on opening and installing a new old stock Red Spine release of OS/2 Warp 3.0. Now, while I’ve played around with OS/2 Warp 4.0 and 4.52 as part of Period Sites in Period Browsers, Warp 3.0 is not one I’ve yet reached. And how uncanny it looks! Familiar but alien. Windows 3.1 but not.

TopperBlog returns with a set of Remembrance Toppers and other knitwear. I’m not posting any images from the memorial itself as I’m sure there are far better pictures from the service on Sunday already online. There's been a lot of work put into these commemorations and, sadly, I'm not entirely sure I've managed to find them all. The Marketplace Post Box…

The Flaming Lips have done a pretty nice cover of Black Sabbath's War Pigs.

"A Scene in York" - York Minster from Lop Lane by the Reverend Calvert Jones (Getty Object 85.XM.150.1) Whilst poking around on Getty.edu's art search site I managed to stumble on this fascinating but sadly poor photograph of what is now the junction between Museum Street, St Leonard's Place, Duncombe Place, and Blake Street. The photos current location can be seen on the StreetView below.

Arxiv has an interesting paper on LLM reversibility and, while the maths is way over my head, the implications of it are definitely interesting.

It's the start of the month and over at Retro Computer Adverts there's a rather lovely brochure for the Cray Y-MP C90 in all of it's early 1990s glory.

The ISS in Real Time is a fully interactive timeline of the ISS's operation and is more than a little cool. They've managed to dig out all sorts of old footage and photos, crew manifests and daily schedules, and have put it all together in a pretty but usable interface. The flightpath widget is also a nice way of showing where the station was at any particular time.

So The Masterplan is 30 years old today. Do you feel old yet?

And here's another interesting chunk of Archivery via Period Sites in Period Browsers that doesn't appear to be online anywhere else - A mid 1990s chronology of the BSE outbreak in the UK as published by the MAFF.

See more of the Middlecave work here! And here's mid-October's update on the Middlecave Yard Demolition and rebuilt. The site as seen from across Middlecave Road.

Quanta Magazine has a nice article on a question I'd not even thought about - can all shapes pass through themselves? And, apparently, the answer is 'no', but only for a very limited number of shapes. The article is pretty good and breaks down the problem and its history quite nicely. Go read!

Another short timelapse, this time from Saltburn and their lovely funicular tramway. Gallery: 2025 Misc

This blog's slow descent into postbox topper fandom continues - this time with a nice 'Harvest' themed topper in Malton.

It looks like ChatGPT's new browser is identifying itself as a bog standard Chrome instance. That should make it both hard to block and hard to track. "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/141.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"