Category Archives: Uncategorized

Experiments in Cabinetry

Two drawers, each 45x95x25mm internal diameter, in a sturdy case. All made from the same layered-painted-and-varnished paper I use for jewellery.

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Blocking contactless payment – or, make your bank card a tinfoil hat

Contactless payment cards, touch-for-access ID cards, and prepay travelcards all use the same technology – RFID. This is great in principle, but it means that you can’t keep more than one of them together without either confusing the readers, or accidentally using the wrong one. I wanted to be able to touch my wallet on [...]

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Valentine’s Day

I’m not a fan of the consumption-and-expectation culture, nor of the idea that love is best expressed by garish red heart-shaped dustcatchers from a High Street shop. But there are a lot of other ways to express love, and even when I don’t mark a celebration myself it’s a very rewarding thing to help others [...]

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Lighting next week

Next week, I’m lighting “Dinner”, by Moira Buffini, at the Network Theatre underneath Waterloo Station in London. That’s Tuesday 16th October to Friday 19th October – doors open at 19:00 for 19:30, and tickets are £11 from Ticketsource. Click here to download the flyer in PDF. The lighting won’t be anything particularly fancy, but then [...]

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Design & Branding

A couple of extremely talented musician friends asked me to do some graphic design & branding for them recently – here’s the results. “Her Name Means Wolf is a music project by singer Claudia “Clouds” Guastella which draws many of its influence from British Isles folk. New videos around once a week, or whenever Clouds [...]

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Faux-rosewood finish

I’m rather pleased with this paint job, so I wanted to post a tutorial on how to do it. It’s done on artist’s mountboard (I’m making a display case for jewellery, for me to use when selling my work) but any smooth surface will work. The first thing to do is to paint it black, [...]

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Transforming Spaces

I went to this conference on Saturday, at Firstsite in Colchester – it was a really good, inspiring day. Since a lot of you won’t be familiar with the empty shops movement, here’s a short executive summary. There are a lot of disused commercial & retail spaces in the UK, and that’s only set to [...]

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The myth of farming

I’ve seen a quotation go around Twitter lately: “Liberals think the poor need jobs, when really the poor need to not need jobs: but land, skills & tools to provide their own necessities.” (via) It’s attractive on the face of it (who doesn’t want a cottage, a garden, a pig, and a workshop?), but when [...]

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A (short & incomplete) pragmatics of feminism

Problem: the world is largely run by muppets. Observation: the world is largely run by privileged straight cis men (SCM). [Disclaimer: this also includes race, class, disability, &c. issues. Intersectionality applies, so ticking one box doesn't give you a free pass on the rest.] Observation: there are many fewer SCM than there are of Everyone [...]

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Truth and Beauty – The Future We Deserve, Part 3

Or, Heuristics for History. You know the drill; italics are my own editorial comments or summaries. Everything else is Vinay Gupta’s, and he wishes me to say that he likes being contradicted and argued with. From the last couple of talks in this series: we understand the system and its limitations. Now, what can we [...]

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