I saw Hawkwind live in concert last weekend. I haven't seen them live in years: decades in fact. Dave Brock is the cornerstone of the band of course and the last remaining original. He might be creaking a bit, but at 82 you have to give him huge respect for keeping things going and doing his bit for psychedelic space-rock. He looked good and played well: I hope I'm as fit as he is when I reach that age.

"Spirit of the Age" from the album Quark, Strangeness and Charm, stood out for me. I don't think I've ever heard it live before. That was a great album and definitely hugely enhanced by Robert Calvert's song writing. Great to hear it live.

I missed out on their last concert up here (their 50th anniversary tour) and was kicking myself for not going. Not even Hawkwind can go on forever but, luckily for me, they don't know when to stop touring. And good luck to them.

I have factory reset my tablet again yesterday (April 8th). The Economist app has started crashing too much again. How much? It crashed 4-5 times while I was trying to read an article at lunchtime: I'd restart the app (with all the delays that involves), go back into the article (more delay) and then maybe get 10 secs and then a crash again. Repeat. I gave up that article. As I detailed before, I'm back in the same hole.

My last factory reset was back in February 2024 :

2024-02-07 --- factory reset
..
2024-03-09 --- crash
2024-03-13 --- crash - then crashes on 16,25,27
2024-03-29 --- x2 crash - then once each day ..
2024-04-06 --- x3
2024-04-07 --- x4
2024-04-08 --- x5+

So it looks like I get about 4 weeks of decent behaviour but then a slowly degrading experience for the next few weeks. I'll see how this reset goes. Would I carry on paying for this? Maybe, assuming the discount I got. But it is wearing thin. I'll have to decide in September.

Like many people, I was shocked earlier in the week to read about the accusations against Ed Piskor, comic book creator and half of the Cartoonist Kayfabe YouTube channel. But it was just terrible to see that he then killed himself two days later. Just absolutely appalling. I am still trying to process it. Ed and his channel co-host Jim Rugg have been constant companions to me over the last few years: I've watched and listened to the channel very regularly, particularly when I paint. They started as pandemic lockdown companions. Ed loved comics: their creation, the artistic process, techniques involved, the business, the history, everything. An infectious enthusiasm.

I have to say that my heart goes out to his family first and foremost. Also to Jim Rugg, the other half of the channel, who must be devastated over the turn of events this week. What a tragedy this has been. I'll miss Ed a lot.

The Lambiek folks have an overview of his life, work and death. Also, the Comics Journal.

What a terrible week.

Now for some more Japanese culture, this time animation, also known as anime.

The most famous Japanese anime studio is Studio Ghibli, a company I've come across many times but never seen any of their films. A lot of people really love the stuff they make. As I've said, I've never had much interest in manga, or anime, but I've been been intrigued enough now that I decided I should should watch one. I recently saw Spirited Away, one of their most popular productions (and also a 2003 Oscar winner).

It's a simple story about a young girl separated from her parents and trapped in a ghostly world of spirits, complete with magical people, weird entities and strange creatures. The world appears centered on a large bath-house run by a witch and the little girl has to find a job and work out how to escape and save her family.

Well, I really loved the film, enjoying it immensely. Charming and beautifully made "cell" animation, I can see why the the Ghibli "style" is such a worldwide success. There's a bit of a "signature" style, a traditional animation look alongside atmospheric painted backgrounds. I can understand a film like this being a big hit for both children and adults. Funny moments but also themes that tug at the core human emotions of love, loneliness and loyalty. It's also a refreshing change to see a film informed by Japanese cultural traditions even though it speaks to universal traits.

A film easy for me to recommend wholeheartedly. I will try and watch another Studio Ghibli production.

I recently wrote about my poor experience with The Economist android app. Well, since a factory reset, I'm happy that things have improved immensely. It is still somewhat slow and unresponsive, but the main problem I had was the crashing, and this has (mostly) stopped.

I did the reset on February 7th. I got my first app crash on March 9th, so got about four weeks of relatively pain free reading. Since then, I've had two crashes in the past week, so possibly a sign things are degrading a bit again. The app is still a bit slow and annoying sometimes but at least I now get a chance to read the articles. And this makes a huge difference. I'll see how it goes over the next week or so. This level of performance is just about "good enough" for me.

I recently wrote about ransomware and paid some attention to the British Library's current problem with this scourge. Well, a BBC article (Why some cyber-attacks hit harder than others) returns to the scene and covers the continuing issues and costs being borne. It's a sorry state of affairs. Looks like people are having to order books with paper forms and the digital media is still offline.

The Russian hacker group Rhysida claimed responsibility, and demanded a ransom of 20 bitcoin (equivalent to £600,000 at the time). After the British Library refused to pay up, and following an online auction of stolen data, the hackers leaked the nearly 600 GB of private information on the dark web.

Of course, Russia. The country has long been a center of criminal "hacking", state sponsored and private enterprise. Russian authorities look the other way as long as these groups don't attack Russia itself; maybe the state will co-opt or sponsor the activity. China is another major offender. The New York Times via the archive site:

Leaked Files Show the Secret World of China’s Hackers for Hire

The Chinese government’s use of private contractors to hack on its behalf borrows from the tactics of Iran and Russia, which for years have turned to nongovernmental entities to go after commercial and official targets. Although the scattershot approach to state espionage can be more effective, it has also proved harder to control. Some Chinese contractors have used malware to extort ransoms from private companies, even while working for China’s spy agency.

The problem we have is that computer and network security is hard. As well as the actual "technical" mitigations we can use (e.g. spam filters, firewalls), people themselves are usually a weak link. Anyone can be misdirected or scammed, even "experts". And almost everything is connected to the internet today, including everything that keeps civilisation actually "civilised" and people alive. Let's hope things don't get worse. And to be clear, I don't think ransoms should be paid because it just encourages these attacks.

My tablet has taken to telling me something I am painfully aware of. The Economist android app crashes. A lot. In fact, it crashed over ten times for me at lunchtime yesterday. Given that it is also very slow, it takes a long time to start it up and get to a point I can attempt to read something again (it also loses the current article). It might crash again before I even get to the article again, if I can find it (it sometimes rearranges the home page and hides stuff). This is the way it is every day now.

I like The Economist magazine in general and have been a subscriber for many years now. I still find the writing good and explanations of current affairs and business excellent, even if I am a bit less aligned with it on some issues than I used to be. However, given the problems reading it, I will not extend my subscription again later this year.

I am also far from the only one having a problem. If you head over to the Google Play Store and look up the Economist App, you will see many people saying very similar things. This needs to be addressed or people will stop buying it. Fundamentally, what do we have here? A collection of text and images on pages wrapped in a "magazine". How hard is this? It is a solved problem.

I read on a Samsung Galaxy Tab A, from 2018. It has 3 GB RAM and 32GB storage. I use it only for the Economist app now. I see no reason why the Economist app should not work on this. If they really need to stretch the limits of what this tablet supports (but why?), give us a "lite" version. I refuse to buy another tablet just to read a "magazine".

I have tried a factory reset of the tablet. Things improved for a few days but started getting bad again soon after.

Here are some of the things wrong :

• The app is very slow and often unresponsive.
  
  It is hard to tell if you've "clicked" the link and have to retry a lot. Finally, after a 10 second wait, maybe it will work.
• The app crashes a lot (see above).
• The app "resets" itself to the home screen.
  
  It rarely remembers your place in an article so you have to find it yourself, which is slow.
• The downloaded issue has the same problems.
  
  I've stopped trying to go through the "weekly" edition because it is even slower to get into. Even having supposedly "downloaded" it, you would not know. Everything behaves the same and a constant appearance of needing to download or refresh content. It's not just the ads.
  
  
• The "weekly" page usually shows me the wrong (previous) week. Selecting "Browse Editions" might refresh (slowly) and show all the available editions but does not let me select the new edition: it shows me the previous one again.

So, I have just about had enough. My subscription is good until the autumn but I will not pay money again for this horrible, frustrating experience. I will call their help center and let them know. I'd like my money back.

An Update

I've just done another factory reset, reinstalled the app from thePlay Store and logged in. I used it at lunchtime and, although the app was a bit slow and unresponsive to "clicks", it behaved better. It didn't crash once, which is the most important thing to me. I actually managed to read a few articles and not feel angry or frustrated at the end of my lunchtime. I'll see how it goes for the next few days.

The British Library has had a big problem recently, as they were saying throughout their web site :

We're continuing to experience a major technology outage as a result of a cyber-attack. Our buildings are open as usual, however, the outage is still affecting our website, online systems and services, as well as some onsite services. This is a temporary website, with limited content outlining the services that are currently available, as well as what's on at the Library.

This has been the case for weeks although it appears they are restoring some services now.

I've been reading about "ransom ware" cyber-attacks for a few years now: this is when an attacker gets access to a computer system, server or network and encrypts (scrambles) the files and data so the systems are unusable. They then demand money to unlock the data. Perhaps money not to leak the data online in public. This sort of attack has affected hospitals, businesses and government. It's getting worse. So bad in fact, that people are waking up to the National Security implications.

The Economist had a recent article about the problem (How ransomware could cripple countries, not just companies) and one of the things it mentioned was the fact that Bitcoin, a hard to track anonymous digital currency, is one of the things that made the problem much worse. In fact, Bitcoin is a major enabler of the crime :

The hardest part of a ransomware attack was once cashing out and laundering the ransom. Attackers would have to buy high-end goods using stolen banking credentials and sell them on the black market in Russia, losing perhaps 60-70% of the profit along the way. Cryptocurrency has enabled them to cash out immediately with little risk.

With everything increasingly connected (think "5G"), and network and computer security so poor (for many reasons), it might get very bumpy. Let's not talk about war.

Above: A wrench interrupted. Image from ArsTechnica.

Last week I came across yet another media report of ransonware : infecting a Bosch Torque wrench ("Handheld Nutrunner NXA015S-B 3-15NM"). This was detailed in a post on ArsTechnica.

My initial reaction was a bit of amusement: an internet connected wrench? But maybe a modern manufacturing business has a good case for logging or setting all sorts of things over a network: this was even part of the case for "5G" networks. But if so much of modern life is now network connected, how screwed will we be if it is attacked, compromised and rendered unusable?

Over the years, you see and recognise the same painters and can watch them get better over time. Some artists paint in a very realistic style, which is impressive from a technical point of view and sometimes also produces a beautiful work of art. Occasionally, a "hyper real" style can seem too much like a photograph and this is probably a common criticism. My take is that the ends justify the means and if the ends look like this work by Lucy McKie then I'm very glad to see it. Colour, composition and technique come together to create something beautiful.

You can see this work at the Mall Galleries site. Make sure you look through the rest of the Royal Institute of Oil Painters 2023 exhibition to see much more by some great artists.

I'm reading the book Chip War by Chris Miller, about the history of the semiconductor industry. It looks at technology, logistics and at the increasingly fraught politics of the manufacture of advanced computer chips.

I know some of the history here, especially from a Silicon Valley and USA perspective, but there's plenty I'm learning (and I am only a quarter of the way through the book). A trivial example: I'd never thought of the origin or meaning of the term computer "chip". It turns out that it's from the way the integrated circuits were all created on a single piece of silicon and then each individual circuit was "chipped" off the whole to make the part.

A huge amount of very innovative work was done in the semiconductor and transistor field in the fifties and sixties and it continues to this day. The technology is, in some ways, almost indistinguishable from magic.

I went to see the new National Gallery of Scotland exhibition The Printmaker's Art | Rembrandt to Rego. Printing is both art and craft, and here you often need to make the tool to then make your art. For instance, etching a copper plate or sanding a stone block for lithographic printing. The exhibition has some good videos showing a few of the printing techniques available to an artist (the videos are also on their YouTube channel).

There are some very good prints on display here, some phenomenally good. An example of the latter is Claude Mellan's Head of Christ, an engraving printed on paper.

As the information in the gallery box says :

"Incredibly, this entire image has been formed using a single engraved line swirling outwards from the tip of the nose."

Right: Face of Christ on St. Veronica's Cloth, Claude Mellan, 1649. Engraving; second state of two.

NOTE: The image is taken from The Metropolitan Museum in New York. To properly see the amazing print, you need to see it in person or, at least, go to the Met link.

There is a whole other side to Rembrandt's artistic output: printmaking. He was a master of the art and the exhibition has an example of this in his print Christ Presented to the People ('Ecce Homo'). The gallery shows two versions, a later one he reworked, showing his mastery of the Drypoint printing technique. The print is made by using a needle or sharp object to directly incise the lines in a metal plate. The Met Museum has an essay about this.

The image below is from the National Gallery of Scotland web site.

Above: Christ Presented to the People ('Ecce Homo'), Rembrandt, 1655, Drypoint.

An unfamiliar name to me, Joan Hassall produced a print called The Stricken Oak that is absolutely amazing.

Shown on the right, it should be seen in all its glory, either in real life or the National Gallery of Scotland web site. A beautiful and very finely detailed wood cut.

Right: The Stricken Oak, Joan Hassall. Wood engraving on paper, 1937 [link].

There are a lot of pieces worth seeing and this only scratches the surface. We also have William Blake: tiny wood engravings illustrating Thornton's Pastorals of Virgil (see the Tate site).

Hokusai, Otto Dix, Toulouse-Lautrec, Degas, Picasso, Goya, Constable and more.

I'm a member of the National Gallery of Scotland so it is an easy decision to go back for another look. However, even if I wasn't a member, I think another visit would be hard to resist.

Printing has been something I have wanted to try my hand at for a long time and this is another little push to have a go sometime.

There are lots of different things going on in December: markets, fairs, shows, exhibitions, concerts. Too much to see everything so you have to be a bit picky. Unfortunately, a lot does tend to clash at weekends.

A case in point last weekend were so many artist studio spaces having an "open studios" at the same time: Coburg House, Patriothall and Out of the Blue Abbeymount. I wanted to see Abbeymount Studios (I've never been) but prioritised Patriothall because it is near me and I was a bit time constrained. All this was on top of Out of the Blue Arts Market, Summerhall Christmas Market and quite a few other markets. All go!

I went to Summerhall Christmas Market on Saturday afternoon and thoroughly enjoyed wandering around the stalls in all the various rooms of the rambling old building. Until 2011 it was "The Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies" but now it's a big arts venue with a lot of very diverse programming.

The best thing about well curated markets like Summerhall is the quality of the stallholders: creators and makers. Much to see and many are worth drawing attention to but I'm always particularly interested in any visual artists around.

Marie-Alice Harel

One of the creators present was Marie-Alice Harel, an artist and illustrator.

I recognised her work from a book I'd seen at Transreal Fiction, a self-published art book called Bird People.

As she says on the web page, it certainly is "curious": "a reflexion on nature and culture, on the blurry line between human and animal". Her art is fine, detailed and beautiful to look at, in the classic tradition of Edmund Dulac. She's won some awards and exhibited quite widely. There's lots on her web site, including some process. More to come I expect!

Left: A detail from Into the Deep, Watercolor and ink, 2020. © MÄ HAREL [link]

Joanna Robson

Another artist and illustrator with a table exhibiting her work was Joanna Robson.

Robson's also an accomplished artist with an attractive body of work. I was particularly struck by the prints she had on display.

The etching Haven has a blog post describing the background and technique. Having recently visited the Scottish National Gallery's The Printmaker's Art, it's great to see the actual copper plate the etching is inscribed on. It looks beautiful.

Right: Haven, etching. © Joanna Robson [link]

Overall, an excellent Christmas market at Summerhall, made so good by the people taking part. I will definitely want to go next year as well. I also bought some Kimchi from Edinburgh Fermentarium. I've now finished the pot of "Mac Kimchi" : "A kimchi for those of us who crave the deep spicy umami of traditional Korean kimchi". Recommended.

Well, tis the season to go shopping it seems.

Edinburgh is jam packed with people in the town center. I read that the official Christmas Market on Princes Street is unbearably busy, with some people turning around and walking away because of the queues. Even outside the main areas things are busy, especially at weekends. Luckily, I'm an early bird so, if I need to go near the epicentre, I can mostly avoid the crush. I assume it will be getting worse.

It's definitely something to take in at night though. I like this time of year because of the number of things to do but I prefer the smaller and less commercial attractions. Some reports to come hopefully.

Above: Biggish Self Portrait, John Byrne. Oil on Board. 61x71cm

John Byrne, one of the best artists Scotland's produced, died today. He was a natural : he had to draw (write,paint) to live.

I was mostly familiar with his painting, drawing and print making and he was very prolific. In addition to this, he was a successful writer and playwright.

Definitely a big Byrne-shaped hole in the Scottish arts scene.

I saw a lot of his work over the years in Edinburgh, and would even occasionally see the man himself around town (or in the Art Shop). A very dapper dresser. He was fond of doing self-portraits, often with a cigarette in his mouth: not very good for his health although he lived to a good age (like another famous artist smoker, David Hockney).

Although I'll miss seeing new art works from him, I look forward to a proper retrospective exhibition.

There is a bit of winter sun around just now in Edinburgh: an occasional bright sun, weakly warming, with clouds and the threat of rain, sleet or snow. Perhaps all three on the same afternoon. It's very cold but this is something you need to get used to during a winter in Scotland. There's often no sun at all and it can be quite dark and dismal all day.

The Scottish Gallery's December exhibition is called Low Winter Sun and celebrates the sort of weather we might get up here at this time of year. Victoria Crowe is the artist and always a welcome sight in the gallery; an artist I like and have admired on this blog.

Some of Crowe's work in the exhibition are monotype prints, and they're good. From Jackson's Art blog :

The blog linked above also describes how to make a monotype print. Even better, Victoria Crowe shows how it is done on the Scottish Gallery's YouTube channel : The Making of Burnished by a Late Sun (YouTube video).

The exhibition is on for a few weeks and I'll visit again.

Almost a followup to the recent post about removing complexity and keeping things simple: a recent post by Julia Evans (a software developer in Canada). She has a video and a transcript of a talk she gave entitled Making Hard Things Easy and makes a case that far too much knowledge is poorly documented and hard to understand. She's primarily talking about technical things, like the Bash Shell or DNS, but the main point is applicable to many other things in normal day to day life and work. This is why we write an "executive summary" on a report. We want to extract the important parts of a (possibly long and involved) document and present them in an easily digested list up front. Fundamentally, it is all about good communication.

"Keep It Simple, Stupid" is often an apt plan in life, not just in your technical endeavours. If something is complicated, it's easier to build badly, or break.. So I will place this "What I Learned Lately" post in the "general" section.

I was looking at the state of the technical back-end of my web site and blog (such as it is), trying to recall how it all fit together: what this or that file (or style) did and where it came from. Most of it is quite simple: the blogging "platform" itself is straightforward (a small CGI script called blosxom), the rest generally static. But I had included some bigger components, a so-called "framework" (Foundation), of which I was only using a tiny portion (barely noticeable really). Also extra fonts, mostly unused but cluttering up the HTML. When you add complexity like this, things can get slower and harder to extend. The final problem was: I barely understood what this extra stuff was or how it worked.

So, I stripped it all out and put back just enough of my own work to keep the site and blog looking decent (mostly the "same" hopefully). This is now small and easily managed, and also something I fully understand. If I want to work on building my knowledge of HTML, CSS and Javascript (something I want to do), then it's best to start simple.

A final thing to note: testing the site to make sure it still worked and looked okay, I came across a lot of my old blog posts. Book reviews, some social comment, galleries and art. It all builds up and is fascinating to read now (to me at least). It's amazing to look back and recall I actually owned a Firefox Smartphone! Unfortunately it didn't work out for the long term. Things are a lot better now of course /s

Above: Into the sunlight through Rodney Street tunnel, Canonmills, Edinburgh 2023.

It's finally open. It's been a long and frustrating wait in many ways, but Scotland's new National Gallery of Art opened its doors to the public for the first time last Saturday. Many delays, some due to the pandemic, and a lot of money spent. But we have something to visit at last and the bottom of the Mound is beginning to look somewhat presentable again (although I have a bit of a complaint: see below).

The new gallery is laid out along the length of the main gallery building, but underneath it. In the photo above, the new extension is all the way at the back, stretching away under the National Gallery building at the far end. Unlike the old spaces for the Scottish collection, the new area doesn't feel so much like a basement now. It's lighter and better laid out.

I like the new gallery and I am very happy that it is finally open. Like many, it was dragging on a bit but you can't argue with the great art work we can finally see again. It makes a big difference to see the paintings in a well lit and more open space. And even though it is hard to integrate with the rest of the gallery space, it's a huge improvement.

Above: St Bride (detail/full), John Duncan, Tempera, oil and gold leaf on canvas, 122.30x144.50cm

The gallery site has a fuller section on Celebrating Scotland's Art.

You can also have a look at a YouTube video which walks you through the space.

I wish they actually cleaned up the mess and litter outside the gallery in real life, rather than just virtually. Council or gallery problem ownership? Also, hooray that the Playfair Steps are also open again.

Every year, the Mall Galleries in London hosts an exhibition of the Royal Society of Marine Artists and the 2023 show finishes on September 30th. Unfortunately, I don't get down to see them anymore, but the gallery always puts them online and it's the next best thing. As always, amazing works of art.

Some awards are given out each year (online). Frankly, they're all excellent but here are two I particularly like. Jenny Aitken's Sundown from Harwich Quay (link) because of the beautiful evening light, and Raymond Leech's Evening Crabbing Session Blakeney (link) because of it's lovely "painterly" execution. Great light as well!

Above: Sundown from Harwich Quay, Jenny Aitken, Oil on canvas, 40x50 cm

Above: Evening Crabbing Session Blakeney, Raymond Leech, Oil on canvas, 18x23 cm

The world is a lot better with good art.

Now that decent summer weather has arrived, perhaps it's time for the bikini?

Right: Community Garden Melbourne: The Morning after the Night Before, 2019-21, Oil on canvas. Leon Morrocco. Detail (link).

I hadn't heard of the Scottish artistic dynasty named "Morrocco" until I moved to Scotland: a little surprising. First Alberto Morrocco (who died in 1998), then his son Leon Morrocco. A sort while later I saw an exhibition by Jack Morrocco, who turned out to be Alberto's nephew. A lot of artistic skill here: all fine artists. One wonders whether it is a genetic foundation for the artistic talent or perhaps genes cause the disposition to put in the practice. Maybe a bit of both.

Leon Morrocco has an exhibition on at the Royal Scottish Acadcemy.

He is eighty years old this year and his work is as large and colourful as always. His palette seems to include colours not often used by other artists: pinks and turquoises perhaps. He is in a post-impressionistic vein, with some admixture of the Fauves perhaps. A wonderfully bright artist and a perfect match for sunnier climes. A type of weather that Edinburgh has right now luckily (for a few days at least). Reading a book about the great Scottish Colourist George Leslie Hunter just now, I also see traces of similarity, as well as that of Matisse, whom Hunter loved.

Below: View Through to the Marina, 2015, Oil on canvas. 85x91cm.

Below: Mountain near Cipières, Alpes-Maritimes, 2021, Oil on canvas. 152x157cm.

You can see all the oil paintings, and many gouache, pencil and watercolours, at the RSA site. The exhibition is free, so no excuse.