More on Google Lens and object identification

 I've written before about my experiences with Google Lens as a tool to identify nineteenth century artefacts.

Earlier this week I had quite a productive day at Lake View, working on a collection of nineteenth century surgical instruments.

Most of them I photographed using my cheap Temu lightbox which I powered from a powerbank to save trailing extension cables everywhere, which worked well as a solution

Working on the instruments had its problems. I didn’t know what some of the instruments were, or what they were called, so when I didn’t recognise them I used Google Lens to help identify them, with mixed results.

Specialised, unique looking instruments such as a fistula director or a nineteenth century tonsil cutting tool were easy to identify with the aid of Google Lens, often turning up examples in the collection of the UK Science museum, but more generic looking items, such as a tubular surgical probe, were sometimes  mistaken for car fuel system components, and this I think shows a problem with Google Lens - when you are trying to identify something fairly unique it’s quite good, as there are not a lot of possibilities, but where your object looks like a lot of similar looking more commonly searched for objects the results tend to be weighted towards the more common objects.

Nothing wrong with that, in fact in most cases it’s what you would expect the application to do - give you the most common result, but it does mean that when you review the results of the search you should do so critically ...

I bought a (refurbished) ipad...

 

Why, you might ask, given my antipathy to Apple's walled garden?

And the answer is purely pragmatism.

When I did my blog post about my use of technology in 2024, I mentioned that my Huawei pandemic era android tablet was stuck on an old version of Android and that among other problems some apps had stopped working.

Well I wiped it, and that stopped it complaining that it was out of storage, and am now running with a limited set of apps, basically wikipedia and some news apps.

And that's fine for catching up on the news and some basic fact checking, but doesn't get around the problem that one of the apps that has stopped working is Evernote.

If it wasn't for the fact that I have a lot of material stored in Evernote, I could simply have used the web version to check a document, but just because of the sheer volume of material that I have in Evernote, it's a pain.

I could have bought myself a new high quality Android tablet, but they are not exactly cheap, and even a reasonable mid range one was going to cost me in the region of four hundred bucks.

Given the problem of some apps not working on older versions of Android, second hand wasn't an option.

And then I found a refurbisher I've bought quite a few machines for use with Linux and/or fieldwork from had some 'as new' refurbished iPads for sale at under $200.

While it is an old model, it runs the latest version of Apple's operating system, and comes with Apple's 'niceness' baked in, and will hopefully be supported for another couple of years, and as I've found with the old iPad Mini I still use as a note taker, it's perfectly possible to keep using an iPad long after it's fallen off support, as always it is access to the applications that counts.

If the refurbished ipad lasts for over two years the cost of ownership will be about the same as my Huawei tablet, so in a sense, apart from yet more devices cluttering things up, I won't lose anything...

A win for Lubuntu

 As I've written elsewhere, we've been without the internet and all the conveniences of modern life it brings for a few days.

Very much a first world problem but extremely aggravating none the less.

And, because of our connectivity problems, I've been using the town library's free wifi to check my email etc.

The first time I did so, I used the HP windows laptop I bought second hand as a travel computer earlier this year.

This turned out to be a mistake, because it of course, after being powered off since our trip out west to Lake Tyrell, and being windows it of course wanted to download squillions of updates, sync onedrive, and the rest. Normally I power it up once a month to sync itself, and before we go on a trip turn off Windows update and the rest. As luck would have it that was something I was going to do the afternoon our router died.

So, let's just say the windows laptop wasn't a good choice of device, especially as the library's wifi isn't the fastest.

The other time I used the library's wifi, I used my Lubuntu machine. (I could have used the distraction free machine, or my old Ideapad 1, but I'd shafted myself as the distraction free machine is barebones and doesn't have an email client installed, and my Ideapad had software to connect to Google drive and sync installed. What I needed was a machine that had all the tools but no dependencies, and the Lubuntu machine fitted the bill.)

So, up to the library.

Our town library has two public wifi networks - one called 'Public' which is 2.4GHz and a 5GHz service called 'Public-5g', which is less used, in part because some people confuse it with a 5G phone service.

So, power up, connect to the 5g service, open Thunderbird, and it flew - which is pretty good for what after all is a nine year old laptop.

The lack of dependencies on external services, as well as a lightweight but efficient operating system meant that it simply did its job, and did it well.

And what it shows is that (a) Linux really does help you get the best out of old hardware, and (b) all the syncing and background download slows windows down, especially as Microsoft increasingly position it as both a cloud centric and cloud dependent environment ...

Parsimonious documentation

 Today, down at Lake View, I've been documenting the contents of a large nineteenth century display cupboard which has been dressed with a selection of plausible looking willow pattern dishes and some big heavy nineteenth century religious texts, plus the collected works of Sir Walter Scott.

Even though these books are props with no real connection to the house, one doesn't want to damage them by opening them and stressing the spine to photograph the title page.

The standard solution would be to use a book pillow. These usually are made of Tyvek or something similar with an inert filling and are quite pricy at around $75-80.

I don't happen to have one, don't particularly want to buy one, and anyway it would would take too long to come in the post, especially as we are getting close to Christmas.

I needed an alternative solution.

Given that the books are not intrinsically valuable, all I needed was something with a washable cover that I could stack to make a support.

And I hit on a solution - a box of kid's beanbags from K-Mart

for a little under $7.

Just the right size to stack to support a book cover

and because they are designed for little kids to play with, they have washable covers, very useful in case an old book sheds something, and if they get really mucky, cheap enough to throw away...

 

Of prayer books and penises

 As I mentioned elsewhere, one of our tasks at the Athenaeum is to decide what to do with a pile of tatty, mouldy, broken spined bibles and prayer books we have inherited from various local deconsecrated churches.

The books themselves are in a sorry state, some have lost one or other of their covers, some have pages missing and some have evidence of white mould.

They're not unique, and they are are not even very valuable as objects, however, in a family history context they can be valuable as they have the names of an owner and possibly even a date inside, which gives an anchor point to say that the owner was in the Stanley area at such and such a date.

Others have more indirect clues - one, undated, has a drawing of the Athenaeum wall clock, and we know that the Athenaeum was used for Sunday schools in the 1860s, and another, a drawing of a famous prize fight, and others, quite good caricatures of what I assume were members of the congregation of the time, and yes, I did open one book to be greeted by a drawing of a penis, showing that not much has changed in the intervening 150 years.

But what to do with the books?

Many are in such a poor state it would be difficult to justify the cost of conservation, and nineteenth century prayer books are hardly unique.

So our strategy is to photograph and record the names, the scribbles, and the caricatures and where they were found, and only to conserve the books which are particularly rich in graffiti and caricatures, as well as retaining some of the prayer books and bibles in better condition for use as props to illustrate aspects of nineteenth century life.

The rest will simply be disposed of, although we have had a left field suggestion that we ask a local arts society if they are interested is using them as the basis for artworks on life in the nineteenth century.

Otherwise the mouldy covers will probably be incinerated and the paper shredded as bedding for chickens, before eventually being composted ...

Using google lens to identify an object

 Down at Lake View today I came across this

basically it's a cane covered glass bottle with some weird apparatus on top and the inscription 'By Royal letters patent No. 2'.

I knew I'd seen one before somewhere and had an idea that it might be something to do with soda, as in aerated water, but I was absolutely buggered if I could remember where and what.

So, I pasted the image into Google Lens to do an image search, and it came back with two results, one from the PowerHouse Museum in Sydney, and one from the Sparklets Collector's site - apparently there are people out there who collect old soda syphons.

Crucially the Sparklets Collectors site mentioned that the P01/WK model, made from 1897 to 1913 could have either By Royal Letters Patent No.2 or No.5, as in the PowerHouse museum examples.

Incredibly useful and undoubtedly saved me a bit of head scratching.

I'd previously used Google lens once or twice to help identify the source of an image, and have been impressed by its image finding capabilities, but I'm doubly impressed by the effectiveness of this slightly left field technique to identify artefacts ...

jrnl - a command line journal tool

 Journalling seems to be having a moment.

It gained some traction during covid lockdowns as a way to help give meaning to what was happening - basically as a form of psychotherapy.

Essentially, it's like keeping a diary in which you write down thoughts, feelings, and the fact that the postie looked at you in a funny way this morning.

Well, I'm not going to talk about that sort of journalling, I'm going to talk about something else.

When I was working I always kept notes and records of meetings and so on.

I must admit I wasn't terribly organised about it, and should have written some structured notes about what happened at the end of each day. Eventually I discovered Planner diaries - the ones with a diary page for a week and a notes page - Leuchtturm and Moleskine both produce them, and I'm sure other people do as well.

And that worked pretty well for me.

Fast forward to 2024. I'm retired but I'm volunteering on two entirely separate archiving projects for two separate bodies.

Lets say the possibilities for confusion are infinite, so at the end of each day's volunteering I write my self some notes about what was discussed, what I did and if there needs to be any special preparation for the next weeks work.

And it works for me, and gives me something to check back on if I've forgotten something.

At the same time, sad anorak that I am, I keep a set of of one line gardening notes in a Notable notebook about when things have been planted out, fed, etc.

So I was interested to come across jrnl, a command line journalling tool for Linux and a few other operating systems

For the moment I'm only trying it out, and I've only installed it on my Lenovo IdeaPad, which runs ubuntu.

Ubuntu, provide a snap meaning installation is literally a couple of clicks - I did find that it helps to have decided where you want your journal file to live, before you start - for the moment mine is in the incredibly unimaginative ~/journal/journal.txt

In use it's incredibly simple - type jrnl to get started, type away and then Ctrl+D exit

and the resulting file looks like

which is pretty simple.

Personally, I think of the design of the program points one to creating a series of terse entries along the lines of 'toner cartridge changed in docuprint', whiich is undoubtedly valuable but would probably bear collating with other notes etc in an end of week write up rather than treated as a journal per se.

For example, when I was cataloguing the contents of Dow's I would write some fairly basic weekly notes about the building temperature, whether I had noticed any degradation in any of the artefacts, and which items had been catalogued.

Jrnl would have been an ideal tool for this.

However in creating a single monolithic text file I could see it becoming unwieldy.

You also of course need to think about backup, perhaps by copying it to a cloud based filestore on a periodic basis, or by using a utility such as deja-dup.

That said, I think it's potentially valuable as a tool for capturing what happened during a day's fieldwork etc, without resorting to anything more complicated than a terminal window ...

[update 13 November 2024]

Well, I went to install jrnl on my Lubuntu machine, and found that the Lubuntu software library tool didn't have it in its list of available packages, so I installed it from the application's website using pipx, and ended up with what is obviously a later version.

In usage it's not that different, but importantly it no longer creates a monolithic text file but creates a set of directories ../year/month and creates individual files named date.txt

so, as today's the 13th we have a file called 13.txt, which makes managing the entries much easier, especially when collating them into a weekly report or something similar ...

Owner bound sheet music in the nineteenth century

 

Today, down at Lake View I catalogued some bound sets of sheet music dating from the 1880s or thereabouts.

At first I was a little confused by the collections as some of the sheet music had different people’s names - one waltz in the bound set might have Phoebe Illegible on the cover and another Mary O’Scribble while the volume itself said it belonged to Mary Higgins.

And then I realised - people, particularly in country Australia, in the nineteenth century probably collected and exchanged sheet music just as we used to sell CDs to second hand music shops, and buy others from the same shops - after all a set of sheet music was typically priced at between 2s and 2s 6d - which, using the RBA's inflation calculator, would come out at around between $20 and $30 today allowing for inflation - and strangely enough roughly the cost of a CD.

Sheet music was popular - a quick search of Trove will show any number of stationers offering popular composers at discount.

The reason of course was quite simple - if you wanted music, on the whole you had to make it yourself, or else wait for a travelling music group to pitch up at the local music hall, which outside of the cities could be quite a long wait.

And people crave entertainment, especially in the cold dark nights of winter, where there was nowhere much to go - and remember in small country towns where everyone knew everyone, there was only so far a social soiree could go to alleviate boredom.

So just as people, especially middle class people read books to pass the time, they would also play the piano, the violin, the flute or simply sing to entertain each other, and for that reason, people would have the pieces they especially enjoyed playing bound together to make them more manageable, and more portable, perhaps much as we would gather favourite CDs together to take on a long car trip ...

Really popular authors in the nineteenth century

 Up at the Athenaeum I've been working on the heritage book collection, which basically consists of all the books bought by the Reading room from the early 1860s to the 1950s.

Uniquely, the collection was never broken up, so we can get a picture from its contents of what people actually wanted to read. 

Sometimes a book was so popular that they bought a second copy, and sometimes a book was so worn it was replaced with a newer edition, so following on from my previous post what were the good folk of Stanley reading in the 1870s and 1880s?

Totally unscientifically, I roughly scanned the collection listing for a number of well known nineteenth century authors - as some books from the period don't have a date of publication in the front matter (Not all nineteenth century publishers included a date of publication  on either the title page or its reverse) and just to add to the fun some books have multiple copies with different dates and different publishers - I resorted to manual scan of the collection listing.

And what did I find?

Sensation novels mostly, Wilkie Collins, Mary Braddon as well as Louisa M. Alcott, Bulwer-Lytton, plus more than a dash of Charles Dickens.

There are more serious books as well, Charles Darwin's Origin of the Species, books on poultry raising and so on, bust basically, just like us, they liked a dash of excitement in their bedtime reading ...

Really popular literature in the nineteenth century

 Recently, I've been cataloguing the books used to 'dress' Lakeview, ie nineteenth century books bought as job lots at auctions and from garage sales that are used as props to help give the impression of what the house would be like when people actually lived there in the late nineteenth century.

The books fall into roughly two categories - boring didactic books of overtly Christian stories, often given as prizes for 'general advancement and conduct' at Sunday school, and books by popular authors of the time such as Charles Dickens and Louisa M. Alcott.

Well, while it's hardly a scientific study, one thing that is noticeable is the the more popular books have damaged spines, are more likely to have been given as presents for birthdays, and quite worn, suggesting that they have been read and reread, possibly by several generations

while the goody two shoes overtly Christian books seem to have been little read with bindings that are still tight and have undamaged covers.

There's obviously a curatorial risk here - if you select the books in good condition to make a nicer display, do you risk suggesting that people were more overtly religious than they actually were?

A wifi enabled cat feeder

 We are a cat keeping household, which can be a problem when we both need to be away overnight,

Up to now we've relied on these cheap plastic gravity fed cat feeders, which work but have their own problems, including a tendency to sometimes jam.

One of our cats, Lucy, is a bit of a guzzler, and is not above stealing some of our other cat's food. At home we feed them together and make sure that Oscar gets to eat his dinner while Lucy eats hers.

So we decided we needed something a little more sophisticated and settled on a wifi enabled cat feeder

it's basically just a little machine that doles out about 10g of cat nibbles at set times throughout the day and. having two bowls means that if they are hungry and hear the cat feeder, they can both eat at the same time.

You can get more sophisticated versions with a camera, a speaker and so on so that you can have something kind of like Facetime for Felines, but we just went for the base version.

The device is powered from a USB socket, and has a battery backup so that the furries will still get fed if the power goes out - always something to consider if you live rurally, as we do.

Setup is fairly straightforward, or would have been if I'd remembered to put in the back up battery first.

You download an app and connect via bluetooth to the cat feeder, configure a wifi connection and then configure the device.

It's all fairly intuitive. 

At first I thought wifi was overkill, but actually it turned out to be useful, as the internet connection meant you could check that the cats had been fed, and that something had not gone awry with the device. 

You can also cancel feeding sessions remotely, which meant that once we knew roughly when we were going to be home we could stop it dispensing cat kibble, as we would feed them wet food when we got home.

While we wouldn't want to leave the cats alone for too long with only Radio National for company (perhaps because we have RN on at home in the mornings they've grown to like it as background noise), it does mean that we can leave them alone overnight or possibly even a couple of days if necessary ...

An experiment with Lubuntu

 When I had my little to-do with Jammy Jellyfish and Noble Numbat, I had the lurking suspicion that it might be my eMMC based Ideapad that was the source of the problem, rather than the latest version of Ubuntu.

 To test this, I took the old laptop I'd bought J second hand at the start of the pandemic  as an emergency replacement after her old machine died, and converted it to the current release of Lubuntu running over a Noble Numbat core, and it's absolutely fine.

My current guess is that some of the instability I had with Noble Numbat on my Ideapad came from some of the low level stuff not being quite optimal.

On the other hand having taken the IdeaPad back to the previous version it seems stable enough, certainly stable enough for a little genealogical work this morning.

Turning the Dell into yet another Linux machine gives me a silly number of Linux machines but having played with the Dell and typed on it for a bit, it is quite a nice machine, and certainly light enough to shove in a backpack to take somewhere, so it might well live on as a replacement for my old heavy Kubuntu based Thinkpad...

Reverting to Jammy Jellyfish

 Ever since I upgraded my Lenovo Ideapad from the previous version of Ubuntu, Jammy Jellyfish, to the newest version, Noble Numbat, I've been having a few stability issues with previously well behaved applications such a FocusWriter crapping out on me, which was a bit embarrassing when you're in the middle of taking notes of a meeting.

Now what one wants out of a computer is stablity and reproducability, basically everything works all of the time and everything is predictable, ie always works the same.

And, for whatever reason, I wasn't getting that. 

So I decided to revert. Actually not quite true, I did wonder about migrating the box to Lubuntu, but as the current version with a non beta window manager is built on Noble Numbat, that didn't seem such a good idea.

On balance reverting to Jammy Jellyfish seemed the better idea as all the instability issues came after I upgraded to Noble Numbat.

I had a look at the data on the machine, and there wasn't actually that much that hadn't already been copied elsewhere, so I transferred the last few items to Google Drive and then went for the nuclear option of completely wiping the machine and doing a complete reinstall from a freshly written USB.

After the install, after having gone through the Intel security chip shenanigans, I simply reinstalled my apps and copied my data back, including my Notable notes, and away we went.

Took me about an hour - actually a little longer as I had lunch in the middle of the exercise. 

The only way I'm going to find out if the stability issues have gone away is to use the machine, and twenty minutes writing a blogpost doesn't really count, but hopefully a few days use will convince me that I've a stable system again...

Chamber pots, provenance, and globalisation

 

F Winkle potters mark on chamberpot base

As I’ve written elsewhere, chamber pots were very much a feature of Victorian life, and even more so in rural Australia, where often luxuries such as town water and town sewerage often did not arrive until the end of the nineteenth century, and on farm stations, the dunny out the back possibly lasted as late as the the 1950s.

So where were these chamber pots made?

Staffordshire. Or more accurately the pottery manufacturing area centred around Stoke on Trent.

• Wedgewood

• Swinnerton’s 

• J and G Meakin

• Johnson Brothers

• W H Grindley

• Thomas Poole and Gladstone Staffordshire

• F Winkle

•  W Adderley

And from Australia:

• Hoffman Brunswick Australia

• Robert Fowler (Australia)

While now owned by a multi-national, Fowler’s survives as a brand of sanitary ware, but Hoffman’s is long gone.

How do I know this?

Out of curiosity I spent an hour or so going through Victorian Collections to look at examples of chamber pots as an aid to recognising the sometimes cryptic potters' marks, and basically, most were made in Staffordshire, and none appear to have been imported from either of the other two major manufacturing countries of the late Victorian period, Germany and the USA.

Which suggests that if items as mundane as chamber pots were imported most domestic pottery must have been imported, despite the obvious expense of bringing cases of pottery half way around the world.

But then perhaps that's not so surprising.

Despite Felton and Grimwade establishing a glass bottle works in Melbourne in 1872 to make primarily medicine bottles, Australia was still importing glass medicine bottles in the early 1890s as evidenced by the wreck of the Fiji in 1891, so it is quite possible that while 'brand name' pottery was being imported, there was a local industry producing the more utilitarian unbranded, undecorated domestic pottery.

Equally, a substantial proportion of the unbranded items could also have been imported. It's important to understand that the wash set, the ewer, the basin, the chamberpot would possibly all have been on display on the nightstand, and that for middle class people having a good matching imported set was a sign of affluence, while poorer households would have made do with cheaper, unbranded items, and perhaps simply used an enamel metal pot that went under the bed - the 'gazunder'.

It's possible this unbranded pottery, whether being made locally or imported being less cherished, was more likely to be broken and discarded - judging by the number of pottery fragments in the soil in our back yard, quite a lot of broken pottery was simply dumped - and hence does not show up in the historical record.

Provenancing oil lamps

 Oil lamps were a feature of the Victorian age.

Before electricity they were used almost universally as a source of light, especially once cheap kersosene became available as a lamp fuel, which  displaced whale oil, which was comparatively expensive. (Gas lighting was initially confined to offices and factories as early gas lights were not actually that bright, and being fixed in position could not be easily moved round the house or repositioned to provide better light for reading, sewing, or other domestic tasks.)

At their simplest oil lamps consist of three components, a reservoir, a burner, and a glass funnel to protect the flame.

When you examine them, quite often the only manufacturer's name you see is on the brass burner unit, as in this example from Plume and Attwood in America

And I made the not unreasonable assumption that they had manufactured the lamp. And then I came across this example stamped 'Kosmos Brenner'

It turns out that 'Kosmos Brenner' is not a manufacturer but a type of burner made by Wild and Wessel in Berlin in the 1860s that allowed the use of a flat woven wick.

This design was copied by a number of other manufacturers, some of whom also named their burners 'Kosmos Brenner'.

So, long story short, I'd been assuming that the name on the burner was that of the lamp manufacturer, and in some cases, that's true, such as is the case of the brass oil lamps made by Sherwood's in Birmingham.

But there were always fewer burner manufacturers than oil lamp makers - even Sherwood's supplied burners to other manufacturers - so unless there is a maker's trademark elsewhere on the lamp we cannot safely use the trademark on the burner as an indicator of who manufactured the lamp and where, at best it's an indicator of where the burner came from.

By analogy, it's a bit like my looking at my no name chain store desk lamp and deciding it was made by Osram, as that's who made the lamp globe ...

Some fun with Ubuntu sandboxes

 Yesterday, since it was a depressing wet and cold day, I spent part of the afternoon upgrading my Lenovo IdeaPad from the previous version of Ubuntu, Jammy Jellyfish, to Noble Numbat, the new version with long term support.

The upgrade went well, the machine rebooted cleanly at the end of the upgrade process and everything worked well, apart from one app - Notable.

This is a little bit unfortunate, for me at least, as Notable is one of the components of my research toolkit.

I use it to create living documents when researching a topic. Notable allows me to organise these notes in a way that makes sense to me, and being markdown based its straightforward to take a note's content and convert it to an .odt or .docx document to insert into something else.

As always after an upgrade, I clicked round the various key applications and they all appeared to work with the exception of Notable.

It simply didn't start.

Now, I'm no longer any sort of Linux expert but I do remember the basics of problem solving.

First of all I tried running it from a terminal, which produced this slightly scary message

which did not look good. I didn't understand the implications but I got the key message - the new version of Ubuntu is using application containers to stop wayward applications writing somewhere where they shouldn't, and this time around the container helper application was not correctly configured.

After a bit of googling I found there was a --no-sandbox argument one could add to the command line but that seemed a bit clunky as an option.

So I tried option B - reinstalling the application using the .deb from the developer website. Didn't work - in retrospect that was probably a silly idea as the installer hadn't been updated for some time, and would have no 'awareness' of the sandbox requirement.

So. option C - try installing from the Snap Store - this worked, but left me with two Notable icons, one to the 'bad' un-sandboxed install, and one to the 'good' install.

I couldn't work out how to get rid of the 'bad' icon, so I simply pinned the 'good' icon to the taskbar, and I'll try and find a fix later - for the moment I've a working tool and I'm happy.

I guess that the better way of doing this (and I have not tried this - I don't feel like experimenting at the moment) is before upgrading to Noble Numbat 

• copy your data somewhere safe 
• uninstall notable 
• upgrade 
• install notable from the snap store 
• re-import your data...

The Lake View House documentation project has restarted

 The Lake View house documentation project has restarted after a bit of a hiatus over winter with the discovery of a suspected black mould problem.

When the project was paused I was in the middle of documenting a nightstand in the main bedroom, and I finished off the documentation yesterday with a rather fine chamber pot made by W.A. Adderley in England.

As Adderley’s changed their potters marks reasonably often we can date this to somewhere between 1886 and 1905, which helps make the point that even in quite middle class and well to do houses in rural Australia at the turn of the twentieth century, indoor plumbing was unusual, and a night time trip to the loo would have involved a trip in the dark to the outhouse at the bottom of the yard - hardly an inviting prospect on a cold and wet winter’s night - explaining the continued use of chamber pots.

It also explains the presence of a hip bath in the kitchen. (I havn't yet documented the kitchen, which is in a separate brick building to reduce the risk of fire spreading to the main house.)

Having a bath was a major undertaking requiring water to be heated on the range, and having a bath in the kitchen - which would be warmer in winter - makes perfect sense.

Besides the chamber pot I documented some Guerlain pasteware from Limoges and a rather nice early twentieth century oil lamp made by Sherwood’s in Birmingham.

And this reinforces something I observed while documenting Dow’s pharmacy - prior to world war one, most manufactured products in Australia were imported, usually from the UK. 

Between the wars and in the immediate post world war two period you see a lot of import substitution with locally made items replacing imported goods and then, from the 1960s onwards one sees local brands being taken over by overseas conglomerates with production being moved offshore to countries with lower production costs.

On a technical note I also used the revived Lumix to photograph the artefacts, rather than the point and shoot Nikon I used document the contents of Dow’s. Using a small lightweight DSLR camera definitely works better documenting larger artefacts and pieces of furniture, although for small objects such as bottles and jars, the Nikon is more than adequate.

Haval Jolion

 I don't normally do car reviews, but when we were in FNQ we ended up with a surprisingly impressive Chinese made SUV, I thought I'd review it:

Renting a car is always a lottery - you might think you’ve reserved a particular size or model of car, and you of course end up with something completely different.

This time, in FNQ we had booked a Kia compact. Being realists we knew that we would probably get something else, but hoped for a compact at least, if only because of the ease of parking it in underground hotel and apartment car parks which always seem to be a bit smaller than ideal.

Well we didn’t.

We ended up with a Haval Jolion, a mid sized SUV made in China by Great Wall Motors.

I’ve never driven a Chinese made car before, but when I’ve ridden in a cheap MG they seemed a little tinny and flimsy, with a noisy transmission - a bit like the little Hyundai Getz’s you used to see as base rental cars.

The Jolion was none of these. It felt substantial and well made.

The inside was bit plasticky but the seats were good, the transmission was smooth, and it had a manual emulation mode like our old Subaru Impreza, so that you could control the gear changes on a steep or rough road.

Basically, I came away impressed by the vehicle’s capability.

And there’s a story here:

When Japanese cars first came on the market they were basic (I know, I learned to drive in a Datsun1200) and had problems such as being prone to corrosion, but they improved.

Dramatically.

Korean cars followed much of the same trajectory, with the original ones being derived from old Japanese models, one the first original designs like old Hyundai Excel I owned years ago while nice to drive was fairly basic. Both Japanese and Korean made cars now dominate and are regarded as quality vehicles.

At the same time I’ve driven a range of rental vehicles both here and in Europe, and apart from a couple of Renault Clios in Spain and Portugal I’ve never come across anything that I would ever think of buying, and in the case of one vehicle, the VW Taigo we had in Italy last year, most definitely not - which was a bit of a surprise, as I though that on the whole VW made decent cars.

Having driven a Haval Jolion, all I can say is that if I was in the car trade I’d be worried.

Another one bites the dust

 

I decided that it really was time that my Alcatel Pixi 7 (Android 4 no less) went to the great network in the sky, otherwise known as the local e-waste centre.

I always liked the (paper) notebook sized format, and I still use the old iPad mini I bought to replace it as a  lightweight note taker.

I'd originally bought the Pixi as cheap portable device, to replace my original no name Chinese  7" tablet and keyboard combo.

I added a minature  keyboard to the Pixi, and hey presto, I had a note taker.

All this happened while I was still working and to be honest, I had last seriously used it as a note taker in 2015 before I retired, although it did have a few outings to Albury Library for a bit of research.

Anyway, time to let go. It was simply gathering dust. It took a long time to boot up - so long that I thought it might have hung, and once booted, I did a factory reset on the device to wipe it.

Bizarrely, after I wiped it, it booted up in Spanish ...

e-Hive, a Trip Report

 Yesterday, I went to a presentation at Albury Library Museum about e-Hive, a cloud based digital asset management solution targeted at small and medium sized museums.,

In my experience most museum solutions are overly complex products requiring in house expertise to manage and administer. In the case of paid for systems, there is of course support available, but again they tend to assume the existence of a dedicated in house team. Open source systems can be worse, because, like taking on a cat, taking on an open source system means that you are committing to dedicating sufficient resources to maintain the system over its lifetime.

In the case of most small and medium sized museums, the budgets are (usually) simply not there for the procurement and installation costs, and in this time of uncertain funding the recurrent funding for either support contracts or to sustain a team of system geeks can be problematical.

e-Hive claims to provide a lower cost access model with a web based solution where you are effectively sharing your support costs with other insititutions, leaving you free to concentrate on the asset management component of the job.

There are different tiers, with the cost of the subscription based on the number of objects, including a free tier limited to a few hundred objects to allow you to exepriment with the system to see if it will do the job for you.

e-Hive is produced and supported by Vernon systems, who also produce a full featured museum management system, and much of the e-hive product is derived from their museum management system.

e-Hive is gaining considerable traction among smaller museums in both Australia and New Zealand, and locally by institutions on both sides of Murray in Victoria and New South Wales. The National Trust has also recently implemented a Vernon systems solution and the data I am creating cataloguing LakeView is being recorded in a format compatible with Vernon systems, so I was curious to learn a bout e-hive, given it close relation to the Trust's CMS and the possible adoption of e-hive by the Stanley Athenaeum.

The system basically presents to the enduser as a series of web based forms, with the object data neatly separated from the acquisition and provenance data. There does not seem to be any user accessible means to load data programmatically, although Vernon systems will import your data for a fee.

This is different from the full featured solution where the Trust has been importing my data from Dow's, and the LakeView survey spreadsheets.

Data is stored in the cloud, exactly where was not clear, and this would need to be specified in the case of culturally sensative information.

It is possible to record the conservation data of the object, and any associated conservation plan.

It is possible to generate reports either as PDF, XML and CSV - the CSV report, while not including images of the objects is perhaps one that would be run every week or so to provide a local backup of the content lodged in the system.

While there needs to be some due diligence about the location and ultimate ownership of the data the product looks to be a more than viable solution to the problem of digital asset management in small and medium museums.

My notes of the presentation are available online as a pdf.

Technical note

I used my eMMC based Ubuntu machine to take notes. With a theoretical battery life of more than five hours it was more than adequate for a two and a bit hours presentation.

Notes were created using Focuswriter in ODT format, and I cleaned and prettied them up afterwards using Libre Office

Making a contact sheet

Up at the Athenaeum, Donna, one of my colleagues asked me if I knew how to make a contact sheet on Windows.

I didn't, and googling didn't help as everyone assumed that you had PhotoShop.

Well, we're a voluntary organisation and we fund everything out of our own money - yes there's some grant funding, that's paid for some things, and a photocopier cum printer cum scanner as funding in kind by the local council, but computers, software and the like we pay for ourselves.

computer generated contact sheet produced by yours truly

But when I got home, I thought, maybe I can do this on Linux.

So what's a contact sheet?

Well, in the old days of 35mm photography, often you would cut up your negatives into strips of four or five images, lay them out on a sheet of photographic paper and make a print showing the images in minature - a contact sheet as in this one from wikipedia

You would then look at the images through a magnifying glass and choose which one to print - in movies about journalists in the twentieth century there's often a scene where they squint at a contact sheet to find the image showing the bad person handing a bribe to the corrupt person after they've been on a stake out.

When everything went digital contact sheets disappeared - much easier to flick through the pictures using an image viewer.

So why a contact sheet?

Well, we have a large number of digitised images, and the idea was to group the images together, and put the contact sheets in a binder to let visitors - often family history researchers - look through to see which images we have and request copies.

As everything is done for 23c and stick of chewing gum and we don't have everything online or a front end to let people search, this struck us as a simple lowest common denominator solution.

So when I got home, I did a little digging and found that the montage command in Image Magick would do the trick. 

Put the images in a directory and run something like

montage *.JPG -label '%f' -background 'gray' -fill 'white' -geometry 450x450+2+2 -tile 4x6 ~/Documents/contact.png

to generate a suitable image like the one at the top of this blog post.

Now, obviously Donna is not going to go out and install Linux on a pc just to do this.

However, Image Magick also has a set of Windows binaries, so the next stage was to install them on my work machine.

The tools are all command line based so running the command from a scratch directory

C:\somehwere\scratch> magick montage *.JPG -label '%f' -geometry 450x450+2+2 -tile 4x6 contact.png

produces a very similar image to my original Linux experiment

There's only one thing I havn't got quite right the -label argument isn't adding the filename as I thought it would. As I don't get an error message I'm guessing I've misunderstood something, and I need to populate the filename list somehow ...

[Update 04/08/2024]

Facepalm moment! I was being too clever, montage not only wanted the filenames (not the filenames including the full paths to the locations) and the filenames need to follow the -label directive,  so the command that works is actually

C:\somehwere\scratch> magick montage -label '%f' *.JPG -geometry 450x450+2+2 -frame 10 -tile 4x6 contact.png

which provides an image like this

simple once you know how!

Powerbanks and the lightbox

 

Bit of a 'Duh!' moment this one.

Up to now I've used the $25 Temu lightbox plugged into a USB adapter which was then plugged into a wall socket or an extension board.

And this is fine, in fact in my work bag I always take a power board with USB sockets with me.

But sometimes there's no convenient wall sockets, especially in older buildings such as Lakeview, and you don't really want to be trailing 5 or 10m extension leads all over the place.

And then I had my goldfish moment. The light box is basically only a couple of LED strips in a plastic enclosure, meaning it'll run fine off a powerbank, which is basically just a big battery. (We have one for emergencies when the power is out to ensure we can keep a phone or portable internet modem charged).

But as well as emergency backup, you can use the powerbank as a portable power source - simple really.

Using the revived Lumix

 Having successfully revived the Lumix, I thought I'd put it to work to see how it went, using my super cheap Temu lightbox

For this exercise I thought I'd try photographing some coins as in this 1850s English halfpenny

or in this pair of Italian 50 centesimi coins - one from the 1920s with the classic design harking back to the glories of Imperial Rome, and the other from Mussolini's Italy in 1941, with a far more aggressive Fascist design

Photographing coins can be tricky - they are small, fiddly, and getting the contrast right to show detail can be difficult. 

Sometimes, playing with the contrast and exposure settings can help bring out detail as in the tweaked photograph of the Italian coins or this equally tweaked George III half penny

On the whole, the grubby tarnished British coins came out alright after a little fiddling as in this comparison shot of a pre and post 1860 recoinage Queen Victoria penny

(and yes, I will need to reshoot it as I've accidentally cropped the edge of the post 1860 coin) works quite well, but not so much with the more reflective Italian coins (stainless steel and cupronickel respectively)

What I did find is that the Lumix is lighter and easier to use than the Finepix I used to photograph postal covers, it doesn't produce such a high resolution image - good enough for photographing bottles and similar small artefacts but really at its limit with an item like a coin.

and of course there's a question as whether a camera is really required, as in this quick and dirty phone picture of a post and pre 1860 recoinage penny.

However, on balance I feel the revived Lumix is going to be a useful extra tool, being lighter, hand held shots in less than optimal light should be easier, such as in Lakeview, and indeed when photographing things like manufacturers labels on the base of items.