Gardening update

With Winter approaching maybe it's time for a little review of how the gardening has gone in 2018. Well apart from cutting things down not a great deal has happened. The herb garden is still doing really well. The raised bed is starting to show some wear and tear though (it is over five years old now) so i'll have to do some reinforcements next year or over the Winter.

The lawn was doing well until the drought, it hasn't yet recovered and is rather patchy. The second raised bed is now settling down ready for some plants next year. Maybe in 2019 there can be more new plants instead of just cutting bits off the existing ones.

Castles (6) : Aberystwyth

Aberystwyth castle is ruins nowadays, though recognisable as having once being a substantial castle. The castle and it's predecessor have had a troubled history.

The first Aberystwyth castle was a motte and bailey castle built in 1100 to the South of the current castle. The castle was besieged and later burnt down in 1136. The castle was rebuilt but burnt down again at a later date. The current Aberystwyth castle was built by Edward I in 1277. However it was captured and burned down just a few years later!

The castle was finally considered finished in 1289 though by the 1340s it was already said to be in a state of disrepair. However it continued to be an important political centre being well situated on the coast and next to a thriving town. The castle was captured by Owain Glyndŵr in 1404 during the Welsh uprising.  The castle was finally destroyed by Oliver Cromwell in 1649, the castle having been a royalist centre and mint during the Civil War.

Remodelled Derby

I went to Derby yesterday for the first time since the early Summer. The station has undergone a lot of change with new signalling, a changed layout and a whole new platform so I thought I'd go up and see how it looks now! Unfortunately the old staging siding at either end of the station are now gone, there always used to be at least one old locomotive resting there. However the ends of the platform are better. You still get some good sights at Derby, including a rail tour yesterday. You can see my photos here.

Blit

The usual history of graphic user interfaces goes like this: Xerox PARC invented them in the 1970s and Apple got inspired to build their own closely followed by X Windows and Microsoft... Well it didn't quite happen that way. Xerox were not the first to develop GUI technology and in the late 1970s and early 1980s there were a number of other GUIs in development.

Blit was a multi-tasking windowing environment developed by AT&T in the early 1980s. It ran on the AT&T 5620 which might be termed more a smart terminal than a computer but it had a M68K processor - like the first Macs - and so was quite powerful for it's day. The 5620 could be connected to a Unix computer via an RS-232 connection. The GUI is familiar but also had some interesting ideas, somewhat similar to Smalltalk systems in some ways and early X Windows. The video is well worth a watch.

Castles (5) : Stamford

Stamford Castle was a Norman structure built around 1075. It was built on a small hill overlooking the river Welland and the west of the town of Stamford. Little details of the castle's early existence are known though it thought to have been a standard motte and bailey design. The castle may have been built on the site of earlier fortifications.

The castle was besieged in the civil wars of the twelfth century but fell into decay in the following century when it was described as old and decayed.

The castle was largely demolished in 1484, the site remaining vacant for hundreds of years before being built on in the twentieth century. All that remains of the castle now are a small part of the curtain wall.