Dion Chan SIM has added a photo to the pool:
From the Avenue of Moai, we continue our walk toward the main highlight of the cemetery: Hill of the Buddha, created by the famous architect Tadao Ando.
This multi-layered portrait is a fitting tribute to the man behind Ways of Seeing
The cultural critic John Berger was still alive and kicking when he donated his literary archive – heaped boxes of letters and notepads, sketches and scripts – to the British Library in 2009. From his home in the Alps, he proceeded to liaise with the collection’s curator, Tom Overton, sorting each item and recounting the wild stories behind them. When Overton sought permission to write Berger’s biography, though, the critic insisted that he wait a few years. Death changes the relationship between the writer and his subject. More often than not, it complicates and enriches it. Berger – who spent much of his career in passionate conversation with the past – probably knew that better than anyone.
Berger typically described himself as a storyteller, an elastic job title which allowed him to swing between fiction and poetry, essays and screenplays. Implicitly, too, the term helped frame his criticism as something propulsive and inclusive, an invitation to dance as opposed to a judgment from on high. Berger had no time for the “great man” theory of art as espoused by the popular historian Kenneth Clark and instead urged his audience to view each piece as a manifestation of society and politics: the tainted fruit of capitalism, inseparable from the marketplace. Oil paintings were status symbols. Nudes were the product of the lusty male gaze. Looking itself was a political act. “You cannot reply to me,” he would tell 1970s TV viewers, breaking the fourth wall to highlight the medium’s limitations. He liked pointing out the mechanics behind the manufacture of art, demystifying the process to better appreciate its results.
Continue reading...Novel squat Android opens to an iPad-like screen for video or multitasking, with plenty of power and battery life
Samsung’s latest folding phone breaks the mould with a squat, passport-like shape reminiscent of the Blackberry, which opens up to become a tablet similar to an iPad mini. It is certainly a better shape for a tablet than other designs, but is a short and wide phone when closed a compromise too far?
The Galaxy Z Fold 8 is an entirely new variant in Samsung’s foldable family for this year launched alongside the Z Fold 8 Ultra with a more familiar candy bar shape. Both folders are extremely expensive, with the Fold 8 starting at £1,699 (€1,999/$1,899.99/A$2,699) and the Fold 8 Ultra at £1,899 (€2,199/$2,099.99/A$2,999), with RAMageddon driving up prices even at the top of the market.
Continue reading...Spanning generations and multiple Indigenous societies and nations, In Light and Shadow traces the visual importance of Indigenous photographers. Representing work in different genres, the book presents more than 250 images with an accompanying exhibition at Obscura Gallery from 14 August
Continue reading...The spa town of Balatonfüred is a bucolic gem for sailors, hikers … and wine lovers. A new hop-on, hop-off bus tour offers a chance to get a taste of its little-known wineries
The 90-minute train journey south-west from Budapest to the spa town of Balatonfüred unveils a landscape that segues from gritty industrial compounds to long sweeps of golden sunflowers and fields of pale grain. The carriage is pleasingly retro, with thick velour upholstery; windows that open, awkwardly, with a stiff metal lever; and a bushy eyebrowed conductor replete with ticket machine slung over his shoulder.
But the real retromania is yet to come. Arriving at Balatonfüred station, I board a 1984 DAF bus, painted an almost audacious shade of green. From the open-air rear, I take in the view over Lake Balaton, central Europe’s largest freshwater lake, often referred to as the “Hungarian Sea”.
Continue reading...Darren Miles had skateboarded all his life. But in his 50s, he realised he was losing his skills and flexibility. So he took it in a new direction
Darren Miles never thought he would compete in any sport for Britain. But in October, he will represent Great Britain in slalom skateboarding – a form of downhill racing – at the World Skate Games in Paraguay. Last week, he completed his World Anti-Doping Agency awareness training. He had to tick a box confirming: “I’m an international athlete.”
“Justification” is the word that comes to mind, he says. “A feeling that I haven’t wasted my life skateboarding, that diverging into something new” – he took up slalom in his late 50s – “and working hard at it has yielded a result of which I am very proud.”
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Linux kernel boss Linus Torvalds thinks the project has reached a new normal of supersized updates, thanks to AI. Torvalds posts a weekly state of the kernel update, and last week’s message opened with his observation that “This rc is huge.” “Even by the ‘new normal’ standards this is a big rc, and I think it's the biggest rc6 we've had in years at least by commit count,” he wrote on August 2. Fast forward a week and the size of the release candidate remains a concern. “I can't say that I'm exactly thrilled about the size of this all,” Torvalds wrote in the message that announces the seventh release candidate for Linux 7.2. “But it is what it is: the new normal with a lot of fixes, many of them due to review by various AI tools.” Torvalds has a complex relationship with AI. He’s previously railed against the idea that good documentation can explain the work of developers who use AI to contribute poor code to the kernel, and also complained that the Linux kernel security mailing list has become almost unmanageable due to a flood of AI-generated bug reports, many of them duplicates. Torvalds has also declared “Linux is not one of those anti-AI projects,” and therefore all-but-welcomed machine-made contributions to the project. While Torvalds is concerned about the size of rc7, he said “nothing looks particularly scary per se - it's just that there's a lot here.” “Most of it is fairly small,” he wrote, before calling out three bigger changes: s390/zcrypt fixes, the return of the btrfs fixup worker infrastructure, and some netfilter ipset fixes. “But aside from a few places like that, most of this is just lots of tiny fixes. It's pretty much spread all over - drivers (gpu, sound, networking, you name it), filesystems, core networking, arch code.” All those little changes don’t add up to a reason to delay the release of Linux 7.2, and Torvalds wrote “I would expect that to happen next weekend unless something really bad pops up.” By next Sunday, the world should therefore have a new version of the Linux kernel. Version 7.2 won’t be a long-term support release, but will include significant features such as improved scheduling for GPUs and CPUs. ®
DEURNE (ANP) - De noodlijdende bussenfabrikant Ebusco is een belangrijke opdracht verloren voor de levering van 23 elektrische bussen. Het openbaarvervoerbedrijf van de Duitse stad Potsdam heeft het contract met de Brabantse maker van elektrische bussen beëindigd, omdat Ebusco de bussen niet op tijd zou hebben geleverd.
Ebusco heeft de leveringsdata herhaaldelijk uitgesteld en kon de naleving van de door hen genoemde data niet meer geloofwaardig garanderen, stelt de Duitse klant. Geannuleerde orders voor bussen en vertraagde leveringen brachten de bussenfabrikant uit Deurne eerder al in financiële problemen.
Ebusco is het niet eens met de annulering van de busorder, meldt het bedrijf. De bussenfabrikant "betreurt dit besluit", onderzoekt de zaak en zal later deze week inhoudelijk reageren. Ebusco maakt vrijdag zijn financiële resultaten over het eerste halfjaar bekend. Eerder dit jaar waarschuwde Ebusco dat het financieel nog niet uit de gevarenzone is.
Bij een steekincident in een woning in Hellevoetsluis is een man gewond geraakt. Een vrouw is opgepakt en naar het politiebureau gebracht, melden 112-fotografen.
