Howard Oakley

Keep talking the tablets

by Howard Oakley on 7 January 2011 in Help
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Books such as Archie Miles’ gorgeous Silva: The Tree In Britain, a sumptuously illustrated account of trees and woodland in the UK, bear witness to the fact that the right balance can be struck between presentation and content, form and function, or process and purpose. Even its content finds a sweet spot between accessibility and sophistication, making it as valuable on the proverbial coffee table as it is in the academic’s library.

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The nightmare before Xmas

by Howard Oakley on 15 December 2010 in Help
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Deck the desk with USB fairy lights and flash up the wifi Santa Claus: Christmas is here. Looking beyond party antics and next month’s painful bills, this season of retail excess should set a new record for sales of wireless-dependent products. This is despite modern wireless communications bearing only a passing resemblance to Marconi’s miracles at the end of the 19th century. Morse and ‘wireless telegraphy’ have long since gone, and only the small stalwart band of radio hams still talk to one another over long distances.

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Magical mystery tour

by Howard Oakley on 26 November 2010 in Help
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Sometime in the dim and distant past, perhaps when I upgraded to Adobe CS3 or CS4, something went awry with my Photoshop installation. Ever since then, the program has started up with an alert informing me that one or more files is missing from its Application Support folder, exhorting me to re-install it all to fix the problem. Nevertheless, once I’ve dismissed that alert, it appears to run fine and I have neither fixed the problem by re-installation nor worked out just what it’s whingeing about.

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Finger-painting frolics

by Howard Oakley on 15 November 2010 in Help
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Since its development during the later Renaissance, oil painting has been the de facto standard for ‘serious’ works of art. Notwithstanding the brilliance of JMW Turner’s watercolours, he knew the importance of producing his most significant works in oils, and even the Impressionists remained generally conservative in their choice of medium. Oils are conventionally applied with [...]

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A spot of chaos theory

by Howard Oakley on 27 October 2010 in Help
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We were returning from an idyllic Pyrenean holiday, and had just boarded the Eurostar in Paris, sweaty heaps after a sprint to the far end of the train, when my wife announced that she had lost her passport. Technically, as we had cleared UK passport control, this would not impede our return, but it needed [...]

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The new open university

by Howard Oakley on 13 October 2010 in Help
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iTunes U is a great resource for anyone interested in broadening their minds, and if you have not yet used it, then I recommend you do so. Professor Simon Schama may not be my favourite art historian, but he’s without doubt one of the most exciting and inspiring. If you find yourself growing numb in [...]

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