ReText, again

Ten or so years ago, if you'd asked me what my preferred markdown editor was, I'd have replied ReText.

And I did use it on an earlier implementation of  the distraction free writing machine which was based on the my old 7" Eee.

And it worked really well, until it didn't. I really liked the simplicity of the interface

and the way you could toggle between edit and preview mode - something that I found valuable when working on a comparatively small laptop screen

(both these screenshots come from my Lenovo IdeaPad 1 running Ubuntu,

 

but trust me, it works just as well with Crunchbang ++ on my distraction free machine - here showing ReText with live preview mode turned on)

As I say, I used to like ReText, but then the authors upgraded it and the new version did not play well on the Eee's eccentrically sized small screen - to be fair they were not the only application with that problem, and I did correspond with the authors about the problem. To be fair, they did try to fix it, but it didn't prove possible to produce a stable version.

I had much the same problem a bit later when I converted a windows MSI netbook to Linux, so I stopped using ReText, and more or less forgot about it.

Up till now, I've been using Ghostwriter as a markdown editor, but I've kind of missed the simplicity of ReText, so I decided to try it again, and it's an excellent note taker, and as I've said elsewhere, you really don't need an in depth knowledge of markdown to create reasonable structured text ...

Poo in nineteenth century York

 For Proust it was a madeleine, but for me it was nineteenth century scoria bricks.

I mentioned how sometimes in the walls of back lanes you could still sometimes see hatches, like oversize cat doors, that were associated with pail closets in the nineteenth century..

Well, I must have seen them somewhere else in the north of England, because apparently York never implemented a collection system for poo buckets. Which, given  that Ouse has propensity to flood in winter, and the very bad cholera outbreak in the 1830s, is surprising.

But perhaps that's not so surprising. When I first moved to York in the mid 1980's the railway works was still a major employer, as were Rowntree's and Terry's confectionery businesses, and the glass works - that made glass jars for the confectionery business had only just closed, so you would have expected that York had developed as an industrial centre as did other towns in Yorkshire.

However, that really wasn't the case. despite the arrival of the railway in the 1840s, York was, for a good part of the nineteenth century solely an ecclesiastical and administrative centre.

Industry, and the accompanying population growth, only really began in the 1880's, and so, while the middle classes of mid-Victorian York would have had access to flushing toilets that either dumped their contents in the river or in a local cesspit, the poor would have made do with a bucket and a midden at the end of the street that was probably periodically removed for sale as manure, or alternatively washed down the river when it flooded.

(This is why fieldwalking in England, especially with the aid of a metal detector, often turns up nineteenth century small change. Poor they may have been but not poor enough to search the poo bucket for a dropped farthing.)

However, the slow growth of the city in the Victorian era probably means that quite a few houses in York, especially those dating from after the 1880s when the city began to grow and sewerage provision improved, probably only ever had a flush toilet, even if it was one in the back yard. 

Certainly, our house in Darnborough Street, which dated from early Edwardian period had a brick built coal shed and disused outside flushing toilet that probably dated from when the house was built.

Even though it must have been excruciatingly cold in the depths of a bone chillingly cold foggy York winter, it would have represented a major improvement over pooing in a bucket and periodically emptying the contents in a midden somewhere ...

Scoria bricks

 In the early 1990s I lived on Lower Darnborough Street in York, in England.

The house was at the lower end of the street, and even though it never flooded due the river overtopping the staithes while we lived there, we had a few close calls when the Ouse had risen substantially after snowmelt on the Moors.

When there was a risk of flooding I would always walk down before bedtime to the junction between River Street and Clementhorpe to see how high the river was getting.

A couple of times the junction was under water and I cut down the back lane between Colenso and River street to get down to Clementhorpe.

The back lane was a normal, quite unremarkable back lane of the sort that are found all over England between streets of terrace houses that allowed access from the street to people's back yards and were often used by night soil collectors in the days before sewage, and more recently by bin men collecting rubbish as well as providing access for the men delivering coal in the days when coal fires were the main source of heat in homes in England.

Sometimes you can see still hatches like oversize cat doors in the walls of people's back yards - the idea was that the night soil collectors would open the hatch, remove the poo bucket and (hopefully) replace it.

I can't remember noticing any poo bucket hatches but I do remember that the lane was paved with these incised pattern hexagonal ceramic bricks that  looked a bit like engineering bricks.

 

Back lane behind Colenso St - Clementshall Local History Group

At the time remember noticing them and thinking that they looked pretty unique, and I started noticing them poking out in a number of places round about in the kerbside gutters that hadn't been fully tarred over.

Given my insatiable curiosity about such things, you might have thought I would have researched them at the time, but this was just before the internet became a thing, and there was no google, no wikipedia, and no search engines - even altavista was a year or two in the future, so I pigeonholed the topic, meaning to come back to it, but never did.

York, is of course short of local sources of building stone - which is why most of the old city is built of local brick, and I just sort of assumed that it was a sensible Victorian response to a shortage of hard stone to turn into cobbles, and probably made in the local brickworks.

It turns out I was wrong on both counts - unlike engineering bricks which are made of clay and fired at a high temperature, the scoria bricks were made on Teeside of slag from blast furnaces that resulted in a hard, durable and waterproof brick.

Apparently they were also used as ballast on ships and exported to the Netherlands, Canada, the West Indies and other places.

I havn't been able to find any record of their use in Australia, but when Launceston was debating the introduction of tram system in the early 1900s,  one of the city engineers wrote to a number of similar sized towns in Britain for details of their tramway systems.

One of the cities that replied was Darlington, which commented on the use of scoria bricks to surface the tramway between the tracks.

Historic photographs of the Launceston tram system suggest that they used a fairly standard infill, so they obviously decided not to follow Darlington's lead.

Postcards, chess and encryption

 I've written from time to time about cryptography and postcards. and how in the nineteenth century especially, some people would try and obfuscate the content of what was essentially an open medium to conceal what was being said, perhaps to conceal an assignation or other private arrangement.

Sometimes they would write the message in Latin or Greek, or use a simple substitution cipher, or else use some agreed set of code words to convey meaning.

However there is a subset of postcards that at first sight look to be encrypted but aren't.

People would sometimes play chess against each other by writing their moves on postcards and mailing them to their playing partner - for example, think of a clergyman in an isolated parish who had no one to play with, might play chess by post with a former playing partner now living elsewhere.

After all postcards were cheap to send, and provided the postal service was reasonably efficient it would be possible manage a couple of moves a week. Usually these postcards contain a couple of lines of conventional greeting and a chess move in algebraic notation.

You used to be able to see examples of chess notation in use in the chess columns of the more heavyweight newspapers, but nowadays chess columns have mostly gone the way of all flesh.

However, people still play chess with remote partners, but usually today they use a dedicated chess server, although some people have played chess by email or text message using chess notation.

Besides postcards with a little string of algebraic notation there are other more complex specialist postcards, often with a chessboard grid, produced by chess clubs for people playing chess by post.

Searching on ebay and etsy for examples, most seem to originate from the former socialist countries of Eastern Europe - no surprises there, the communists always took chess seriously, and date from before 1989.

I'm going to make a wild surmise here, that people in Eastern Europe playing chess by correspondence during the post war socialist period (a) felt it was safer to belong to a recognised chess club and (b) use an 'official' chess postcard to avoid attracting the attention of the security apparatus - after all no one would have wanted a visit from the Ministry of Certain Things as a result of an innocent chess game ...