Neil
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vulcangiant.bsky.social
Neil
@vulcangiant.bsky.social
130 followers 370 following 42 posts
Irish Engineer & Project Manager working in the Food Industry and fan of all things analogue and arty! 🏳️‍🌈

📃Typewriters, pens, film photography, stationary geekery, books, baking, food reviews, textiles and various forms of art
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Reposted by Neil
twlldun.bsky.social
April 3, 2025 at 8:17 AM
vulcangiant.bsky.social
#NowReading : Butter, by Asako Yuzuki

I've been really enjoying this - it's brilliant. And I've been asked about it by three strangers in coffee shops and on the train! Haven't had strangers ask me about what I'm reading in years - seems to be on lots of people's TBR lists

#Books #WhatImReading
A copy of Butter by Asako Yuzuki, with a bright yellow cover with a bloodstained cow on it, resting on a table. A hand painted mug showing alien abduction is beside it - my painting skills do not quite match my ambitions!
March 24, 2025 at 11:47 AM
Reposted by Neil
janrosenow.bsky.social
JUST DROPPED: @nathanielbullard.com's epic annual slide deck on the energy transition is now live.

As always a treasure trove of information.

www.nathanielbullard.com/presentation...
January 30, 2025 at 12:28 PM
vulcangiant.bsky.social
Adobe Reader now requires a Pro subscription to rotate a PDF. I have to use it per work policies, so having to take screenshots, rotate them and crop to the bit I want.

Fire the entire company into the sun.
January 27, 2025 at 4:22 PM
Reposted by Neil
garethdennis.uk
🚨 NEW JOB ANNOUNCEMENT 🚨
Back in 2008, an eager civil engineering undergraduate created the Wikipedia entry for the Old Dalby test track - now Network Rail's high speed test facility - as its history and its value in developing the modern railway was fascinating and exciting.
the experimental and very Thunderbirds looking gas turbine powered Advanced Passenger Train running round a corner at high speed in black and white a two track stretch of railway with a very long very yellow train stretching off into the distance on one track with many figures clad in orange working on the adjacent track
January 23, 2025 at 10:57 AM
Reposted by Neil
dgar.bsky.social
Me: The earth isn't flat.

Fiat earther: Correct.

Me: Huh?

Fiat earther: It's the shape of an italian car.

Me: What?

Fiat earther: You read my name wrong didn't you?
December 30, 2024 at 1:31 AM
Reposted by Neil
janrosenow.bsky.social
Too many argue that the energy transition is impossible instead of looking at how far we have already come.

Huge challenges remain & we are not on track to meet targets.

Defeatism won’t help us solve the puzzle.

That’s why I’m an energy transition optimist.

www.cisl.cam.ac.uk/news/blog/wh...
Why I'm an energy transition optimist | Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership (CISL)
4 December 2024 - In this blog, Dr Jan Rosenow, CISL Senior Associate and course lead of the new self-paced online course, Renewable Energy Foundations for Business, explains why he’s an energy transi...
www.cisl.cam.ac.uk
December 13, 2024 at 8:03 PM
Reposted by Neil
edconway.bsky.social
🖌️WATCHING PAINT DRY🖌️
A thread about the rise of mass production.
💵The ascent of mass consumption.
📈The rise & fall of economic growth.
📉 And why our productivity growth seems to have stalled.
🚗But, above all else, it's about why watching paint dry is actually a perfectly good use of your time
🧵
November 16, 2024 at 3:24 PM
Reposted by Neil
janrosenow.bsky.social
Why I’m optimistic about the energy transition:

Humans tend to underestimate the pace of innovation and overestimate the inertia of incumbent technologies.

Clean energy technologies have scaled much more rapidly than predicted by modellers
November 16, 2024 at 10:00 AM
vulcangiant.bsky.social
Time to start @garethdennis.bsky.social's new book now it's finally arrived!

Very excited to get read this - trains are great and we should have more 🚂
An image of Gareth Dennis' new book, entitled "How The Railways Will Fix The Future", with a Scottish Parliament bookmark
November 15, 2024 at 10:36 PM
vulcangiant.bsky.social
Finally got around to framing my last linocut print - this was printed with Cranfield Caligo inks, with 2 blocks and a couple of masks. My first time printing with masks and registration to think about!

I made this over the course of about 8 hours - a fun project ☺️

#Art #Linocut #Linoprint
A linoprint showing a sunrise, with a bird about to eat a worm from an apple in the foreground, framed in a black frame.
November 10, 2024 at 5:33 PM
Reposted by Neil
jayispainting.earthskyart.ca
OK...since we've got the new threadinator feature, here's some of my recent tips to get the most out of Bluesky..in no particular order
November 8, 2024 at 11:39 PM
Reposted by Neil
gregpak.net
As I noted before, I sincerely appreciate the ANGER here. And I particularly appreciate the subtle fury demonstrated by screenshotting the entire column so you don't have to reward the WaPo with clicks to read it. High five, @petridishes.bsky.social.
petridishes.bsky.social Alexandra Petri @petridishes.bsky.social · Oct 26
I guess it has fallen to me, the humor columnist, to endorse Harris for president wapo.st/3UqHWRM
The Washington Post is not bothering to endorse a candidate in the 2024 presidential election. (Jeff Bezos, the founder of Blue Origin and the founder and executive chairman of Amazon and Amazon Web Services, also owns The Post.) We as a newspaper suddenly remembered, less than two weeks before the election, that we had a robust tradition 50 years ago of not telling anyone what to do with their vote for president. It is time we got back to those “roots,” I’m told! Roots are important, of course. As recently as the 1970s, The Post did not endorse a candidate for president. As recently as centuries ago, there was no Post and the country had a king! Go even further back, and the entire continent of North America was totally uninhabitable, and we were all spineless creatures who lived in the ocean, and certainly there were no Post subscribers. But if I were the paper, I would be a little embarrassed that it has fallen to me, the humor columnist, to make our presidential endorsement. I will spare you the suspense: I am endorsing Kamala Harris for president, because I like elections and want to keep having them. Let me tell you something. I am having a baby (It’s a boy!), and he is expected on Jan. 6, 2025 (It’s a … Proud Boy?). This is either slightly funny or not at all funny. This whole election, I have been lurching around, increasingly heavily pregnant, nauseated, unwieldy, full of the commingled hopes and terrors that come every time you are on the verge of introducing a new person to the world. Well, that world will look very different, depending on the outcome of November’s election, and I care which world my kid gets born into. I also live here myself. And I happen to care about the people who are already here, in this world. Come to think of it, I have a lot of reasons for caring how the election goes. I think it should be obvious that this is not an election for sitting out. The case for Donald Trump is “I erroneously think the economy used to be better? I know that he has made many ominous-sounding threats about mass deportations, going after his political enemies, shutting down the speech of those who disagree with him (especially media outlets), and that he wants to make things worse for almost every category of person — people with wombs, immigrants, transgender people, journalists, protesters, people of color — but … maybe he’ll forget.” “But maybe he’ll forget” is not enough to hang a country on! Embarrassingly enough, I like this country. But everything good about it has been the product of centuries of people who had no reason to hope for better but chose to believe that better things were possible, clawing their way uphill — protesting, marching, voting, and, yes, doing the work of journalism — to build this fragile thing called democracy. But to be fragile is not the same as to be perishable, as G.K. Chesterton wrote. Simply do not break a glass, and it will last a thousand years. Smash it, and it will not last an instant. Democracy is like that: fragile, but only if you shatter it. Trust is like that, too, as newspapers know. I’m just a humor columnist. I only know what’s happening because our actual journalists are out there reporting, knowing that their editors have their backs, that there’s no one too powerful to report on, that we would never pull a punch out of fear. That’s what our readers deserve and expect: that we are saying what we really think, reporting what we really see; that if we think Trump should not return to the White House and Harris would make a fine president, we’re going to be able to say so. That’s why I, the humor columnist, am endorsing Kamala Harris by myself!
October 26, 2024 at 11:20 PM
Reposted by Neil
sylessae.bsky.social
Unpopular motivation hack for drawing:

Start drawing immediately, even if it feels impossible.

After 15 minutes, your brain will recognize the difficult task and create dopamine to help you keep going.

Agonizing endlessly before the drawing doesn't help your creative process.
October 26, 2024 at 12:56 PM
vulcangiant.bsky.social
Been doing some minor maintenance of my (second favourite) typewriter - a Smith Corona Corsair, from the 1960's. Don't think this machine has ever been cleaned internally! All cleaned down and degunked with mineral spirit, and working much more smoothly now 😊
#typewriter #analogue
A view of the mechanisms at the back of the carriage of my Smith Corona Corsair, with the carriage cover removed The main body of the typewriter removed from the casing, with tools laid around it, and a little egg cup with cotton swabs and mineral spirit for cleaning the mechanisms and type slugs - don't use any container you've had mineral spirit in for food again! The bottom case of the typewriter, with the body removed. I've seen worse but there's definitely a few decades of grime under there! The Corsair has these odd little metal brackets to hold the body in place in the case - they make getting the case on and off quite challenging The typewriter before cleaning - I've always loved the blue colour!
October 26, 2024 at 11:12 AM
vulcangiant.bsky.social
If you see this, quite post a bridge.
My photograph of the famous bridge in Ironbridge, Shropshire - the world's first iron bridge, built in 1779.
October 25, 2024 at 9:58 PM
Reposted by Neil
garius.bsky.social
As i say a lot at work:

No. We don't need to consult the users, if it's a thing we know more about than them.
lawtontri.bsky.social Tom Lawton @lawtontri.bsky.social · Oct 21
By far the most sensible suggestion I've seen on the NHS Ideas For Change site from the 1250 contributions to date...

change.nhs.uk/en-GB/ideas/...
1221/1250 From "Your ideas for change" Go to the projecta Stop wasting time on getting ideas from the general public rather than experts Look, most people haven't got a clue about how to run an incredibly complex organization like the NHS. Even less of them have any expertise in healthcare provision. Why are you wasting time, money and effort on an exercise like this? Speak to experts. Speak to people on the front line. Speak to academics who have actually put years of work into researching this. Heck, speak to other health services around the world who have good approaches. But what you don't need to do is sort through a million responses from people who think that "wokery" is ruining the NHS, or believe that if only everyone ate dandelions you could do away with ambulance sirens. Stop it. Just stop it.
October 22, 2024 at 7:40 AM
Reposted by Neil
sjoy.lol
Think this might finally have happened with twitter:

every.to/p/breaching-...

"At its simplest, the trust thermocline represents the point at which a consumer decides that the mental cost of staying with a product is outweighed by their desire to abandon it."

By @garius.bsky.social
Breaching the Trust Thermocline Is the Biggest Hidden Risk in Business
Companies have no way back from a sudden loss of trust
every.to
October 20, 2024 at 5:37 PM
Reposted by Neil
bencollins.bsky.social
Some exciting news:

We have made The Onion's historical front page archive, dating back to 1900, available and free for all.

Explore history with us, starting with this day in 1932:

theonion.com/front-page-a...
August 19, 2024 at 4:50 PM