Month: July 2024

  • Love in Constant Spectacle, Jane Weaver

    Have been listening to Jane Weaver’s Love in Constant Spectacle for a couple of weeks now. Such a carefully constructed, intimate and gentle album which builds a fragile melancholic voice over dreamy motorik beats.

    Weaver’s gentle psychedelic pastoralism (which is the best way I think I can describe it) is something I find incredibly appealing in the same way as I enjoy late 60s poppy-psychedelia (The United States of America), the tail-end of 1970s acid-folk or, more recently, a seminal band like Broadcast. Somehow I’d not heard of Weaver before so listening to her previous albums over a 20-year career is also proving to be an absolute joy.

    Tracks I particularly like: Perfect Storm, Emotional Components, Love in Constant Spectacle, Motif, Romantic Worlds – though need to say that there’s not a song on this album that I don’t think is great.

  • OCLP and Ubuntu

    OCLP and Ubuntu

    Shock! Horror! Yesterday, I realised that – and I’ll blame this squarely on work – I’d slipped back into using OSX in that unconscious, it’s-what-I’m-used-to way. So I tried booting into Ubuntu on my macbook to find that it just refused to boot up. The boot choice led to a black screen. Then I realised that I’d updated OpenCore Legacy Patcher recently (it’s an old macbook running Sonoma) and somehow it had screwed up the EFI bootloader during the update. I spent the evening scratching my head and trying to find explanations for what should be a straightforward fix. Turns out that what was missing was the ext4_64.efi driver and an entry in the config.plist pointing to the driver. (To make things more irritating, I’m convinced I did this when I first installed Ubuntu.) What it’s made me realise is that I really do need to get hold of a dedicated linux laptop.

  • Shakespeare and His World

    Found this copy in an Oxfam bookshop today. I used to have a copy years ago but lost it in a move between schools. Originally publishing in the mid-1950s, it’s essentially a standard version of Shakespeare’s life though I imagine that some of the historical detail might be dated (ha!) in terms of current scholarship. The draw for me are the illustrations: lots of places, portraits and documents that provide a visual reinforcement of the biography. It’s useful to have in a classroom to let children flick through. This edition has an attractive cover which means it’ll look displayed good on a shelf.