Travels with an old surface

 We’re mid way through a road trip out west in the south west corner of WA.

Not the best time – what with the chaos in the Middle East and dodgy petrol supplies.

However, this is not what this is about. We had hired a little, and I mean little, rental MG that sips unleaded 91 with the frugality of an elderly aunt with a cup of darjeeling, so we are managing. Yes fuel is a lot more expensive, but so far it's not the big deal it might have been

However, this is not what this post is about.

It’s about what sort of technology I took with me, as this time I did something a little different. 

Normally I take an old laptop with me. This works fine for online banking, uploading photos from my camera - normally I take a little point and shoot iXus with me, it’s a little more versatile in bright light etc than my phone - email, and a little bit of writing. 

Usually I take a windows device, but there’s no reason why, just habit. Any of my Linux laptop would work just as well, and as Chrome’s now available for Linux there’s none of the dread ‘unsupported browser’ errors that you don’t want to see in the middle of some online banking.

Until it died on me I used to use my 2012 vintage MacBook Air, before that a little Linux netbook.

After the Air died on me I’ve been through a couple of refurbished windows machines, which work well, but do tend to be heavier and bulkier than my old Air, which is a consideration when flying as I usually take an old iPad with me these days to read the news and a bit of recreational surfing, not to mention a bit of streaming and casting.

One thing we’re increasingly noticing is AirBnB’s where there’s no antenna - you can watch the internet channels, or if the app for the service you want isn’t installed, cast from your iPad. (Usually they seem to have Netflix and Stan installed, plus the apps for the commercial networks, but no ABC or SBS)

The same goes for radio. Want to listen to the ABC morning news?

Download ABC listen and stream via your iPad.

Way of the world I guess.

We flew to Perth from Melbourne. 

On an end to end road trip it doesn’t matter what I take, there will always be space for a laptop and an iPad.

If you’re flying part of the way it’s a little different, especially since airlines started getting twitchy about the size and weight of cabin bags, not to mention the sheer hassle of taking a heavy bulky backpack through security.

So this time, as well as a checked bag, I took a smaller backpack, the sort of one you’d take on a day hike, say 30-35 litres, into which I stuffed an extra warm layer in case the plane was cold, an iPad, and my refurbished Surface, and other essentials that you don’t want to lose along the way, like the Surface’s charger (new ones don’t need a special charger, but my old refurbished device does), my glasses, diary, pens, paper and my kindle, as well as my phone and my wallet.

This made for a reasonably compact pack well within Qantas’s cabin bag guidelines, and everything else was in my medium size case that fitted into the back of our little rental MG.

As a solution this worked well. 

The Surface did everything I asked of it - not quite true, my portable SD card reader didn’t work with it for some reason, but it let me do our online banking, and a bit of writing, and was comfortable to use as long as I had access to a table. 

Public libraries are an absolute godsend in this regard.

And for everything else there was the iPad.

So, why not simply use my Chromebook?

Good question. After all I do use my Chromebook when we’re away for a night or two.

One, the Chromebook is heavier than an iPad - it’s about the same weight as the Surface, and it has only one single USB3 socket, which potentially makes uploading from my camera a bit of finger in the ear exercise.

There's also the problem that it needs reasonably decent internet to be more than a gray plastic brick. While things are definitely better with an internet connection the Surface can be used without connectivity.

The Surface had a single old style usb socket into which I could plug my SD card reader. The theory was that it would just work.

Unfortunately the theory was wrong.

If it had worked I should have been able to drag’n’drop as I would on a Windows or Linux laptop.

As it was it didn’t - I should have tested it and it’s my bad I didn’t.

And that brings us to the second reason for choosing the surface. It is fundamentally a general purpose Windows computer and I can run my preferred software ( Libre Office, Notable, Thunderbird) on it and save to one drive, which is my preferred storage solution…

A morning of puzzles

 

Today at the Athenaeum was most definitely a day of puzzles.

I’m continuing to work on either those books which were published anonymously, such as by ‘A Lady’ or those where the book has lost its title page and some detective work is required to trace the book.

First up was Mattie: - a stray by Frederick William Robinson, easy enough to track down with the new British Library catalogue, but all three volumes had very damaged labels from a circulating library I did not recognise

If you play about with the image you end up with something like this

And if you squint you can just make out the word Buzzard about two thirds of the way down.

Searching Google for phrases such as Buzzard lending library was frustrating. Put quotes around it and a search produced zero results. With out quotes, Google, in its AI powered clever dick way wanted to tell me about lending libraries, but I eventually tracked down an entry from a Sands and MacDougall directory from the 1860s that listed Buzzards Lending library as having been founded in 1853 and having a collection of over 5000 volumes – obviously Buzzards were a substantial concern in their time before Mullens dominated the Melbourne circulating library scene.

As a bonus, the Sands and Macdougall directory included an advert for Buzzards

Which was most definitely a win.

The other find was an 1841 edition of The heiress and her suitors. First published in 1838, The identity of the author has remained a mystery since publication. If you're curious to have a look at the book, following the link will take you to a digitised version on Google Books via the National Library of Scotland’s online catalogue.

As I said, the identity of the author has defeated generations of scholars, but when I opened up the book to catalogue it I found something almost as interesting,  this most impressive stamp from Joseph King's circulating library in Norwich in the UK:

While it clearly shows that the book had originally come from Joseph King’s circulating library in Norwich, I’ve not been able to trace the library in Bridewell Alley Norwich, but it’s interesting that such an early publication ended up in the Stanley Athenaeum on the other side of the world some twenty or thirty years after it was published…

A generic e-reader

 I've just bought myself a generic e-reader.

 It came from ebay for around a hundred bucks. If you search on ebay for 'ereader' you will see that various retailers are selling what looks to be basically the same device, sometimes branded, sometimes not.

This example was unbranded and came nicely packed in a decent box with some shock absorbing packaging around it. 

My reason for buying it was simple - to replace the dogfood tablet .

There are a lot of interesting nineteenth century traveller's accounts out there not to mention that a lot of golden age mystery novels are becoming public domain and available via Gutenberg, and while I have a kindle, and an iPad, I was finding that I needed a second simple e-reader for the public domain epubs.

The model I chose is fairly simple. No wifi or anything like that, you simply plug it in to a USB port on your computer and it presents as a USB file system

 and you simply copy files to it.

It has quite a nice colour e-ink screen, but it's not a touch screen meaning that navigation is via a set of clicky buttons on one side of the device.

 and, while I havn't investigated its capabilities, it claims to be able to play mp3 files, meaning that I could potentially use it to listen to downloaded podcasts.

No bluetooth of course,  but there's a headphone jack for a pair of old school wired earbuds.

The model I bought came with 16GB of storage and there is an option to add additional storage via a tf card.

Basically, the device is not much more than a 2026 re-imagining of my long gone Interead Cool-er.

As always with such devices, the real test will be how much I use it and how well it stands up to use. I'll provide an update in six months or so on how it's going 

 

Ah, the online safety act

Recently, I wanted to read a post by the historian Lucy Worsley.

Like some other people whose work interests me, she tries to monetise her posts by posting on SubStack - nothing wrong with that, I've even thought about doing that myself - but given that SubStack has gained a reputation for hosting some politically dubious material, I have never signed up for a SubStack account,

But the post was allegedly free to read, so as an experiment, I thought I'd create an account using a dummy email id  which I'd delete later. After all no money needed to change hands, and Ebeneezer Wallaby would count just as much as a click as yours truly.

Well, creating a dummy account worked, or rather it did until the Online Safety Act got in the way.

Australia, bless its little cotton socks, tries to protect young people from some of the excesses of social media by not allowing kids under sixteen to have accounts. 

Personally I have some reservations about this - it could make kids in rural areas who are a bit different - say they are interested in botany rather than footy - even more isolated as it shuts them out of online communities of like minded individuals, but overall the intention behind the act is good.

On the other hand, I've seen some things on the internet that I wouldn't like my niece's fifteen year year old daughter to see while she's still young and impressionable.

Substack, though it is not legally required to, now requires age verification to create an account, which is a good thing, and that either means a selfie or government id like my drivers licence or passport number.

Now I don't mind sharing a selfie - I'm an ordinary looking old bald guy who wears glasses

and my picture is probably scattered around the internet already, but I do object to sharing my government id for the simple reason that's what things like banks use to confirm that you are you and that's the sort of information I give out grudgingly.

However, at this point I decided I was on a losing wicket and abandoned the attempt, so I'll never know what Lucy Worsley wrote about Tudor personal cleanliness...

 

Fumigation

 It's a Friday, which in my case means a morning cataloguing up at the Athenaeum.

I'm finally on to shelf A1, which includes all these anonymous Victorian novels by 'A Lady' or some such anonymous pseudonym, plus quite a few novels where the spine has split and the title page has gone missing, and no one quite knew what to do with them.

Tracing these usually includes a bit of sleuthing, but usually, if the spine is at all legible, the British Library and National Library of Scotland list the editions - and sometimes you can work out the likely edition from habit of late nineteenth century publishers of putting adverts for upcoming new books in the rear of the book, which can give you the actual publisher and the approximate date of publication - for example, if the British Library records 'Daisy's cycling adventure' was first published in 1894 and had published an edition of the book you are trying to catalogue in 1893 and another edition in 1897, chances are you are holding the 1893 edition.

A bit hand wavy I know, but the best I can do under the circumstances.

I've also found a nice example of a library label that explicitly mentions fumigation

and which dates from the early 1930s and ties in with what I've already worked out about Hygenic libraries and how they functioned.

Otherwise, no really spectacular finds, a couple of Mullen's labels on older pre 1880's books that fits in with what I've already deduced, that they were sourcing books second hand from both Mullen's and overseas.

Now we know that a Mullen's subscription was a bit like a subscription to Netflix, and at a guinea a year (roughly equivalent to A$220 today and not that different from the cost of a standard ad free Netflix subscription today), but how much did a standard Victorian triple decker novel cost?

Well, I have not been able to trace the cost in Australia, but in the UK a three volume novel cost something around thirty shillings (£1.50) in 1870 which using the Bank of England inflation calculator come to roughly £150 or a little under A$300 today, making outright purchase something only the wealthy could afford.

(As a comparison the Aunt Mildred's of the 1870s, surviving on their fixed incomes of around £500 a year (roughly A$100000 today) might seem not to badly off and and able to afford a novel or two, but she would have to maintain a household out of her income - a ladies maid would cost Aunt Mildred £20 a year plus living expenses. Add a cook and a maid of all work to do the less glamourous tasks, that's probably a fifth of Aunt Mildred's income gone on domestic help. 

Under such circumstances it's not surprising that Aunt Mildred probably had a subscription to Mullen's, rather than buying books outright.

Inflation wasn't a real problem in the late nineteenth century, but by the early 1900's, advances in technology and increased competition meant that books were much cheaper, meaning that my grandfather's first wife, Catherine Gracie, who was a housemaid would have been easily able to afford a yellowback novel or two priced at between one and two shillings out of her £25 salary, while thirty or so years earlier, her mother would not despite earning similar amounts.)

It's storage, stupid!

 Recently there's been some posts here and there about abandoning Big Tech (Amazon, Microsoft, Google, etc) and going it alone.

Partly driven by distaste for Big Tech, and partly out of concerns about digital sovereignty, and it's usually accompanied by a lot of handwringing about what alternatives to choose.

Well, I've been there. Inadvertently, but I've been there.

In the nineties I managed a PC desktop service for a university in England.

This included both student computer labs and (some) staff and admin desktops.

Budgets were tight, computers were relatively expensive, so we had a cost containment exercise. One of the constraints was the cost of software licences from Microsoft. To provide an office suite solely using Microsoft products would put a hole in the budget.

So we didn't.

We went out and bought a whole lot of alternative products with considerably lower licensing costs.

What eventually helped kill off our strategy was that the file formats we were using were incompatible with those used by the rest of the planet - it's no use writing documents in WordPerfect if you need to exchange them with colleagues elsewhere who use Word.

So, the first lesson is that whatever software suites you choose as your standards, they've got to seamlessly interwork with the default formats, which these days means Microsoft Office.

It probably doesn't matter what you choose, as long as it's well supported and unlikely to disappear. If it was me I'd start with Libre Office and make regular donations to keep the project funded, after all I wouldn't be paying for all these Office licences.

The other thing that helped kill using a Microsoft-lite desktop was the rise of the laptop.

We had a pretty good storage solution in place using large NAS servers, and once people had authenticated their managed desktop connected to their storage, which was backed up and managed for them.

However, storage was rationed as the hardware to provide a robust solution was expensive and providing a suitable backup service even more so.

Networking wasn't universal these days, so what usually happened is that people with laptops, which of course were used in a variety of locations between home, work and the cafe down the road, would keep their files locally on their machine, and if you were lucky they would back them up to some managed central storage now and again.

And then Microsoft started bundling Skydrive, now OneDrive, with office, and suddenly laptop users found they didn't need central provision anymore.

So, when companies like Microsoft, Google and the rest offered to provide storage and backup (as well as email) for a competitive cost, universities and large corporates jumped at it - it was cheaper and we didn't need so many of these pesky IT people.

And that has given us the world we have today.

And let's face it, it works reasonably well. 

I've used OneDrive extensively for cataloguing and documentation exercises and to share the data with the project sponsors.

I've also used OneDrive to exchange documents between Linux and Windows machines in a work situation - yes Linux is fiddly and not for everyone, but it can be done.

Equally, you can use a lightweight distraction free machine for offline research and documentation and then upload your work at the end of the day, or if that's not possible, save a copy to a USB stick as  a backup.

But the thing we always come back to is storage. 

We are assuming in all our designs reasonably pervasive internet and access to storage. And yes, we can use non Microsoft office suites as an alternative, and these days, if you choose the right distro, changing from Windows to Linux is no more complex than changing from Windows to a Mac.

The elephant in the room is storage provision. Most organisations have outsourced storage (and its accompanying services like backup and consistency checking) to Big Tech for entirely sensible reasons.

If you truly want to free yourself from being dependent on Big Tech for reasons of digital sovereignty, you need to provide an alternative storage infrastructure at scale. And that is neither cheap, nor easy...

Palmerston railway station

I was looking at the 1891 Australian Handbook, and came across this little snippet in the entry for Beechworth

 All fairly clear, except for one tiny problem, I had no idea where Palmerston was. (Except it most definitely was not the one in NZ!)

Wikipedia's quite good on closed railway stations in Victoria, but it's not perfect - there's no entry for Palmerston.

Stations did sometimes change their names so I did a human eyeball check on the map of Victorian railway lines in 1890, and there it was

the last station before Myrtleford on the Bright line. The railway had reached Myrtleford in 1883, but didn't reach Bright until 1890.

My guess is that the coach from Beechworth to Palmerston was intended to allow people to catch the train on to Bright and vice versa, and even today the V/line bus to Beechworth continues on to Bright to provide a connection between the rail line at Wangaratta and the Alpine towns.

The only problem is, there's no such place as Palmerston today. Obviously the name must have been changed at some point.

Well, the 1930 rail map shows the station is now called Gapstead

Unfortunately, the one railway station Wikipedia's article on the Bright railway line does not have a link to, is, you guessed it, Gapstead.

However VicSig does have a comprehensive page on the former railway station at Gapstead, and shows that it changed from being Palmerston station to Gapstead station on 20 November 1922.

Unfortunately, a search of Trove's digitised newspapers from 1922 does not turn up anything about the name change, or why it took place, so I'm none the wiser as to the reasons for the change.

I also spent an unsuccessful morning online searching for old maps of the area to try and work out the location of the station.

The 1916 army maps of Victoria don't cover the Ovens valley, and there doesn't seem to be any topographic maps of the area when the railway was operating online.

Google maps satellite view doesn't help much either - while the track of the rail trail that follows the the old railway line is clear, there's no obvious feature that marks where the station was.

That's not particularly surprising - when I rode my bike to Baarmutha a few years ago, there was almost nothing left of the halt, basically just a mound where the platform had been and a few bricks.

Probably, the best solution is to go and have a walk along the rail trail one afternoon...

Stanley in the 1891 Australian handbook

 

Interesting find, an entry in the Australian Handbook of 1891 that mentions the Athenaeum and its library.

Given that I'm in the middle of cataloguing the library, and the last spreadsheet we have lists 3200 volumes, including Victorian triple deckers, each volume of which has its own entry (yes, well), it suggests that there must have been some degree of churn in the collection, albeit rather less than would be expected...

An old surface ...

 

Over Christmas, Microsoft had a special offer on the snapdragon based Surface Pro, and I took advantage of the offer to buy J one.

While I didn't like the install procedure, I was impressed with the lightness and power of the device, so much so that a few days ago I bought myself a refurbished Windows 10 based model.

It wasn't that expensive - a tad over two hundred bucks with shipping, power supply and keyboard included. The screen is good and bright and the keyboard looks hardly used. The case is scuff free and unless you looked closely the machine would pass for new.

I would guess that being as it's the turn of the year a lot of corporates and government bodies are rolling over their machines to newer ARM based devices, and its comparative cheapness comes from it being stuck on Windows 10 until it goes to the big network in the sky.

It has a number of advantages for me over the newer models, intel, not ARM based, meaning I can install my standard Windows tools, as well as use VirtualBox to make a virtual Linux machine should I need some Linux in my life (in theory, you can install Linux as a replacement operating system but the procedure's a bit finger-in-the-ear, more so than installing Linux on an old Chromebook, so I'll go with VirtualBox for the moment).

But the main draw is the form factor - it's light, and even though the battery is a little tired, battery life is still good enough for four or five hours.

With a USB A and a USB C port I have the external connectivity I need for archiving work, and of course it connects to OneDrive.

As you know, I've spent a lot of time trying to put together a highly portable little machine for research and cataloguing, and while I've come close, every iteration has either been too heavy or had poor battery life, both of which are a pain if you are planning on carrying it about in the course of a working day.

This time I might just have hit the sweet spot...

Hygenic libraries (again)

 I've written before about Hygenic Libraries.

Today's cataloguing exercise up at the Athenaeum brought to light another hygenic library label

this time from a library in St Kilda.

Again, there's no real information on what the procedure used was, but a little digging suggests that the books were either wiped down with formaldehyde solution, or, for a slightly more sophisticated treatment (and one less risky to the library staff) fumigated by being placed in a  chamber with formaldehyde vapour, perhaps like this 1930's example of a fumigation cabinet

Libraries and archives centres still carry out periodic fumigation to control silverfish and and the like - for example, when I worked at ANU, I had an office on the top floor of the Menzies library, and every Christmas shutdown they warned us that the building was closed as they were fumigating the books...

In the 1920s and 1930s, in the wake of the flu pandemic, and other local epidemics, such as the polio outbreak in Melbourne in the late 1920s, there were serious concerns that diseases might be spread by library books, and as I've written elsewhere, public libraries were still sterilising books as late as the 1960s if the borrower had come down with a notifiable infectious disease,

The advent of antibiotics, widespread vaccination and generally better public health meant  that by the late 1960s,  books in public libraries were no longer normally sterilised between loans, although during the recent Covid pandemic libraries that kept lending books did sometimes use UV sterilisation boxes.

Formalin is a pretty powerful sterilisation agent and was used extensively in hospitals and is still sometimes used in laboratory situations, but is not usually used on museum specimens. to sterilse them or get rid of insect infestation.

A shoestring circulating library

 Well, after the Christmas and New Year break, it was back to cataloguing the Athenaeum's historic book collection. I'd managed to complete shelves A4 and A5 before the seasonal break, so today I made a start on A3. (A1 and A2 need a ladder, which has health and safety implications, principally that there's someone else there to call triple zero in case I miss my step and fall off the damned thing.)

Before Christmas I'd accumulated enough evidence to show that the people running the library in the latter part of the nineteenth century were buying second hand books discarded by Mullen's circulating library in Melbourne, or imported second had books from England.

Not all books were bought second hand but quite a few of them have been, including this copy of JM Barrie's A Window in Thrums, dating to 1890.

Initially it didn't look to be terribly promising with a circulating library label on the front of the book.

The label was in poor condition and only just legible

but if you stare at it you can make out the words Horsham and Mechanics Institute. At this point I was envisaging the fun I had tracing the circulating library in Ryde, but they had made it easy for me, with a second copy of the label on the inside fly leaf

showing it came from the Horsham Mechanics's Institute - that's Horsham Victoria, not the one in England. 

There was a mechanics institute in the English Horsham but it seems to have closed down in the 1860s. Given that the book in question was published in 1890, I feel confident in saying it is from the Horsham in the western district of Victoria.

We have a partial provenance in the form or two handwritten notes on the flyleaf, one to say it was acquired for 6/- on 02/01/1891 and a second note in a different hand saying it was acquired on 13/12/1901, presumably by the Athenaeum.

In contrast to the Athenaeum, which was clearly run on the smell of an oily rag the Mechanics Institute in Horsham was a well funded organisation which regularly purchased new books as in this article in the Horsham Times of 28 June 1912.

(Horsham Mechanics Institute Building in 2008 - wikimedia commons)

The Mechanics Institute later transitioned to become Horsham's public library. The old Mechanic's Institute building is no longer the town library, but is now home to the Horsham Historical Society.

I had a look on StreetView and the building still looked much the same in 2024, rather unglamorously located next to a Bunning's carpark ...

I guess the only remaining question is why gentlemen were charged a quarterly subscription of three shillings but ladies were charged 2/6. Was it, given the attitudes of the time, because men were expected to use it for serious study, while women only used it to read romances and sensation novels ...?