The Eclectic Light Company

By 1810 James Ward had established himself as a painter of repute, an Associate of the Royal Academy, and had patrons on whom he could rely. His paintings covered a wide range of genres. His original specialities of farm animals and rustic scenes were reliable and steady sellers, and he was showing considerable talent at landscapes, but had yet to produce any major, pure land...

While macOS updates have become increasingly reliable, the more updates you install, the greater the chances of one of them going wrong. Because they can change components from the firmware to bundled apps and Safari, those post-update problems can include anything from kernel panics to Finder glitches.

The single most impor...

As Impressionism with its loose style and painterly brushstrokes was becoming more accepted, Georges Seurat devised its antithesis based on contemporary scientific theory, and advocated as scientific painting. Instead of blending pigments to produce different paint colours, Seurat’s novel method aimed to use optical mixing of colours. By applying many small dots of often cont...

Writing data to an SSD is really little faster than a good hard disk, but SSDs cheat better to improve their performance. This is because, before the SSD can write to a memory block that has been in use, it must erase it, and its erase-write cycle time is abysmally slow.

The cheat is simple: instead of waiting to erase blocks when they’re required for writing, they’re ...

Given the technical difficulties posed by shade and shadow, it’s sometimes comforting to know that some highly accomplished painters haven’t depicted them quite right, despite trying to do so. Unlike reflections, which can always be revisited in similar conditions, cast shadows can be fleeting and lost without a photograph.