15 mm Indian Elephant (Donnington 'Originals')

I succumbed to the "wargames butterfly" syndrome once again and placed a modest order with Ancient & Modern for a selection of Hellenistic figures from their "Originals" range.

The plan was threefold:

• Various samples of cavalry suitable for generic medium cavalry.
• More Seleucid cataphracts (I already have some painted).
• An Indian elephant in case I ever wanted to create a Phyrric army.

As you can see it was a coherent and well thought out purchase. Well maybe not: I should be concentrating on finishing my Later Macedonians and I have more than enough medium cavalry already.

The elephant was the main reason I placed the order. I've built their elephant models before and they turned out well. So despite my reservations about the amount of preparation involved, I placed my order.

Read on for more photos and my notes on the build and painting.

15 mm Macedonian Heavy Cavalry (Xyston)

This is something of a first for me (well second really). Last Saturday I bought twelve painted and based cavalry from the bring and buy at the Phalanx show in St. Helens.

I've only ever done this once before (and also at Phalanx) but these figures were just what I needed for my Hellenistic project; were at a really good price of £2.00 each; and had a decent, if basic, painting style.

I have surprised myself by reworking them in less than a week! I have never done so many figures so quickly. Here's what most of them look like:

ADLG: BHGS Mid Year UK Rankings (*)

I have finally achieved a long held ambition: a BHGS ranking in the top 100 UK Art de la Guerre (ADLG) players.  Even better, I have just scraped into the top half of the rankings.

Podcasts, Podget, Audacious, And Linux

Introduction

For over ten years I've been using gPodder to manage my subscriptions to music and hobby podcasts.  Recently, I realised that gPodder was using almost 0.25 Gb of memory all the time just to monitor podcast feeds every hour.  This seemed an excessive overhead.

To make matters worse I'd developed all sorts of different podcast habits; copying music podcasts to an archive folder etc etc.  The habits weren't onerous but I began to wonder if there was a different way to do things with less intervention on my part.

From now on this gets "techie".  So, if this isn't your thing, look away now!