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Folk Tales in Paintings: Robin Hood and other merry men
Folk tales are often oral stories that have some foundation in history, but embellish their heroes to make them champions of the ordinary people, more legend than fact. This weekend I show paintings of...
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Last Week on My Mac: Should we be worried about data integrity?
All forms of data storage are subject to failure. Whether they’re clay tablets in an ancient civilisation, books in a library, or bits encoded in electronic media, sooner or later they’ll become...
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Folk Tales in Paintings: Lady Godiva and Wanda
After yesterday’s stories of Robin Hood and other men, today I look at paintings of two women from legend. The first is Lady Godiva, who stars in one of the most unusual of British folk tales. There’s...
View ArticleDealing with a kernel panic
A kernel panic occurs when macOS can’t continue running any more due to (software) damage, and your Mac has to restart itself in order to resume normal services. When this happens during startup before...
View ArticleSolutions to Saturday Mac riddles 205
I hope that you enjoyed Saturday’s Mac Riddles, episode 205. Here are my solutions to them. 1: Fifteen years and seven generations until it died a year ago, the last of the whole line. Click for a...
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Trojan Epics: 14 Odysseus and Polyphemus
Odysseus had played a major role in the Trojan War, having conceived the plan for the wooden horse that brought victory and the destruction of the city of Troy after ten years of bitter fighting. When...
View ArticleApple’s big test of data integrity
Well over two years ago, when Apple released Big Sur, it started the largest test of data integrity ever undertaken on Macs, and quite possibly the largest on any personal computer, in the Signed...
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Ukrainian Painters: Viktor Zarubin
Between 1892 and 1897, Arkhyp Kuindzhi was a professor at the Imperial Academy in Saint Petersburg, and taught this week’s Ukrainian painter, Viktor Zarubin (1866–1928). Zarubin was born in Kharkiv, in...
View ArticleGhosts in the machine: .DS_Store files
Inside every folder that you’ve ever opened in the Finder* is a hidden file, .DS_Store, poised there waiting to trip you up. It contains private data for the Finder, and has been quietly causing havoc...
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Reading visual art: 58 Sickles
The sickle is an example of a symbol whose meaning has been repurposed since the early twentieth century. Before 1917, when Lenin selected a design dominated by a hammer and sickle as the Soviet...
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