tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-45027081344783008052024-03-16T12:11:38.342+11:00Stuff, geeky stuffComputing, archiving, digital media, and a bit of historical speculationdgmhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16429298708780406789noreply@blogger.comBlogger1170125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4502708134478300805.post-50546211490154602542024-02-29T15:51:00.008+11:002024-03-02T15:54:55.494+11:00Codes, cryptography and the Russo Japanese war<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOMnyll4mEvRvzRuKCnAAhaKAK7KYmgi1TSCckTIwtsDQgH8lv6cd-nfH63JcgG4cLUU4nV2NslTDfYdHOTzdhrEPowOj8PTRwUb0Tz-T76qU4HxWAllfA-X-RJH_QDOx9c1Ky_cW1x-tLDV6K2N6u-CJDRytDQ_GrO7Ot_9zU3KJKpNO5_pMd0B6K390/s1400/1869%20telegraph%20map.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="901" data-original-width="1400" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOMnyll4mEvRvzRuKCnAAhaKAK7KYmgi1TSCckTIwtsDQgH8lv6cd-nfH63JcgG4cLUU4nV2NslTDfYdHOTzdhrEPowOj8PTRwUb0Tz-T76qU4HxWAllfA-X-RJH_QDOx9c1Ky_cW1x-tLDV6K2N6u-CJDRytDQ_GrO7Ot_9zU3KJKpNO5_pMd0B6K390/w413-h266/1869%20telegraph%20map.jpg" width="413" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><span style="font-size: x-small;">International telegraph lines in the 1870s</span></i></div>Here's a little bit of a puzzle.<p></p><p>By the early 1870's the telegraph network, the internet of its day, was essentially complete. Some links had still to be completed such as the link from Darwin via Batavia (now Jakarta) to Singapore, or indeed the line across Siberia to Vladivostok and on to Beijing, but we can say that by 1880 the global network was complete.</p><p>Everything went across the network and the technology used made intercepting messages trivial.</p><p>Everyone knew that telegrams, <a href="https://moncurdg.com/2023/04/30/postcards-and-encryption/"> like postcards</a> were not really private, so people sometimes encoded messages in simple ways both to keep the word count down and hide the contents of the message.</p><p>I can remember my father, who was an engineer surveyor, someone who inspected and certified industrial plant on behalf of insurance companies, having a list of codes pinned up in his home office to allow him to send a confidential telegram warning of a major incident - so that a three word message such as '<i>egg fish bean</i>' might mean '<i>explosion, severe damage, no loss of life</i>'.</p><p>Sometimes, as telegrams were paid for by the word, encryption was simply a way to reduce costs as in the <i><a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/code-silk-dress-cryptogram-1.7056758">'Silk Dress Cryptogram'</a></i>.</p><p>Government and other official correspondence was often encrypted using a variety of ciphers, to preserve secrecy. and where possible, secure routings were used, such as the <a href="https://moncurdg.com/2022/02/25/the-ocean-telegraph-to-india/">Indian Ocean Telegraph</a>, built to securely link British possessions in India and South East Asia, and avoiding an overland link via Constantinople and Teheran.</p><p>Likewise, the Trans Siberian telegraph would have provided a secure link between St Petersburg and the large Russian naval base in Vladivostok.</p><p>Vladivostok has the major disadvantage that it is not ice free, and after a variety of machinations, the Russians persuaded the Qing state to grant them the lease of the Liaodong peninsula, where they built a naval base at <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalian">Dalian</a>.</p><p>Imperial Japan also sought control over the area, not least because Russia posed a threat, especially since the building of a railway across Manchuria via Harbin to Dalian. Eventually these disputes escalated to a full scale war in 1905, a war that Russia decisively lost to Japan. </p><p>Russia and Japan also <a href="https://knowledgegeek.blogspot.com/2012/01/partitioning-korea-in-1896.html">duelled over Korea</a>, with Russia initially seeking control over the whole Korean peninsula. After 1905 Russia was in no position to try to maintain Korea as a buffer state between itself and Japan, leading to the Japanese occupation of Korea in 1910.</p><p>Now, during the Crimean war some fifty years before, Britain, thanks in part to Charles Babbage, <a href="https://moncurdg.com/2023/04/16/codes-the-crimean-war-and-a-hint-of-incest/">had successfully cracked the Russian telegraph codes </a>allowing them to read Russian diplomatic correspondence.</p><p>So far, so good.</p><p>But reading about the Russo Japanese war a few days ago - yes, another Manchurian rabbit hole - I came across a comment that the British helped the Japanese by reading Russian messages sent via India and Malaya. This story is repeated in several places but I have been unable to track down a source to the story.</p><p><span style="color: #444444;">This suggests that the Russians were still using a variant of the <span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Vignère cipher some fifty years later, despite Kasiski having published a technique for cracking </span></span><span style="background-color: white;">Vignère ciphe</span><span style="background-color: white;">rs in the 1870s.</span></span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444;">Or maybe they weren't - in the absence of a definitive source for the story I don't know.</span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444;">However it is known that in 1904 HMS Diana, stationed in the Suez canal, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signals_intelligence_in_modern_history">was able to intercept Russian wireless message</a>s ordering the mobilization of the fleet. Unfortunately, there's no publicly available information as to how the messages were encoded. Common sense suggests that the Russian would have encoded their messages using the same method as they used to encode telegraph messages, but given the use of radio for ship to shore communications was still highly experimental its possible that the Russians did not use a strong encryption method.</span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444;">That's the first puzzle, the second one is slightly more interesting - what exactly were the telegraph messages the British were decrypting? The Russians after all had their own secure telegraph line to Vladivostok and had control of the railway (and the telegraph line) via Harbin.</span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444;">And then I remembered the</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;"> <a href="https://www.warhistoryonline.com/history/bear-steams-east-russian-fleet.html">mad journey of the Russian Baltic fleet</a>.</span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;">With much of the Pacific fleet trapped at Dalian by the Japanese navy, the Russians decided to send the Baltic fleet halfway around the world to break the Japanese navy's blockade.</span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;">And, as we can see from <a href="https://1drv.ms/b/s!AtYbSNElUwfog6p1XGSEttR4jmfRAg?e=5FAlTX">this newspaper report of the time</a>, the fleet passed through the Straits of Malacca and rounded Singapore and was presumed to be heading across the Gulf of Thailand towards what is now Vietnam and was then French Indochina.</span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;">Crucially, the report also mentions that the Russian consul sailed out to the fleet and handed over dispatches - I can only assume that these must have included instructions from St Petersburg and information on the course of the war so far, and that this was the information the British passed to the Japanese ...</span></p>dgmhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16429298708780406789noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4502708134478300805.post-78216760766314018442024-01-18T15:14:00.003+11:002024-01-18T15:26:36.994+11:00Using the distraction free machine<p> </p><p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
When I did my <a href="https://knowledgegeek.blogspot.com/2023/12/techology-and-me-in-2023.html">annual personal technology review at the end of last year</a>, I mentioned that I hadn’t made as much use of the <a href="https://knowledgegeek.blogspot.com/2023/07/another-iteration-of-lightweight.html">distraction free machine</a> as I’d hoped, in part due to my actually <a href="https://knowledgegeek.blogspot.com/2023/08/i-might-actually-have-finished.html">finishing the documentation of Dow’s pharmacy</a>.</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Since I had my
<a href="https://listservsandanoraks.blogspot.com/2024/01/sclerotherapy.html">sclerotherapy </a>last week that’s changed. </p><p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">For the first few days I
found it difficult to sit for a prolonged period at my desk to write,
so when writing, I sat with my leg up on the sofa with the
distraction free machine on my lap – hopelessly unergonomic I know
– and caught up on my blogging.</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">And it’s been
good.</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">As I said at the
time the machine is nice to type on and it’s of a size to sit
comfortably on my lap, making it as an ideal writing machine.</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">I’ve been using
Libre Office as a writing tool rather than a text editor such as kate
or gedit to create either simply structured plain text or markdown to
feed through a conversion tool such as pandoc.</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Once finished I send
the text to OneDrive using Emailitin, where I finish it off on my
windows 10 desk laptop, and then cut and paste it into a blogging
tool such as open live writer for Wordpress, or in the case of
blogger simply paste it into the edit window, and tweak the
formatting if necessary.</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">I’ve been being a
good little vegemite and making sure I walk my ten thousand steps a
day (as counted by my fitbit) with the result that I’m healing
nicely and can now sit at my desk for an extended period, but having
started seriously using the lightweight machine I’ve kept on using it.</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">It’s quite a
pleasant way to write, with either ABC Classic or Radio National
burbling away in the background. As I say it’s unergonomic, but
pleasant.</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">One of the
advantages of working this way is that it is truly distraction free.</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">While the machine is
connected to the internet there’s no web browser or email client
running unless I actively want to run one, perhaps to check
something, which coupled with <a href="https://listservsandanoraks.blogspot.com/2024/01/being-off-socials.html">my withdrawal from social media</a>, it’s
a good way to work.</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">I also make a point
of leaving my phone in the study while I’m sitting downstairs
writing, or working on something, something which also makes for a
distraction free environment.</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">I’m very tempted,
once we’ve cleaned out the old garage which is going to be studio
for J with a bit of extra desk space for me <a href="https://moncurdg.com/2024/01/11/yet-another-post-about-retro-photography/">to bugger about with film photography</a>, to find a half way decent second hand sofa to allow me
to continue working in my lazy distraction free writing ...</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</p>dgmhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16429298708780406789noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4502708134478300805.post-86026557501014230192024-01-04T10:23:00.005+11:002024-01-04T10:56:50.623+11:00Roman ghosts (again)<p>I'm probably I'm going to get a reputation as some sort of strange crank for going on about this but this time I'm going to blame Mary Beard.</p><p>I've been spending the past few hot sticky afternoons rereading her '<a href="https://www.booktopia.com.au/confronting-the-classics-mary-beard/book/9781781250495.html">Confronting the Classics</a>', which is basically a collection of reviews written for various classical journals and literary magazines.</p><p>The first time around I must admit I tended to dismiss it as 'professors arguing with professors', but this time, perhaps because I know more and have thought more, I can see more depth to the collection.</p><p>Anyway, in discussing Boudicca she mentions a theory that she was buried on <a href="https://coflein.gov.uk/en/site/306725/">Gop hill in Flintshire</a> and that her ghostly chariot can sometimes be seen careering about (personally I suspect Boudicca's body was lost and thrown into a mass grave at best).</p><p>However, I'd never heard of Gop hill, so I looked it up and it turns out to be a substantial prehistoric mound of unknown purpose.</p><p>The various sites I looked at didn't mention any legend of Boudicca's burial but one did mention a legend that the ghost of Aurelian (identified as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambrosius_Aurelianus">Ambrosius Aurelianus</a>) was sometimes seen on the site, and included a link to an <a href="https://paranormaldatabase.com/">online database of ghost sightings</a> in the UK.</p><p>Now, normally I wouldn't bother with such things, but as my post about <a href="https://knowledgegeek.blogspot.com/2023/11/roman-ghosts-in-nineteenth-century.html">Roman ghost sightings in the nineteenth century</a> was one of my most popular blog posts in 2023, I thought I'd take a look at the database for mentions of Roman ghosts and I was immediately struck by two things:</p><p>(a) where the provenance of a story is known it is from the nineteen twenties at the earliest</p><p>(b) many of the stories repeat features from other stories, eg a group of Roman soldiers is seen walking down a street, but are cut off at the knees, presumably because the Roman road surface was lower than today's, suggesting a degree of re-invention.</p><p>Which kind of reinforces my view that ghosts of dead Romans were not a nineteenth century thing ...</p><p><br /></p>dgmhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16429298708780406789noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4502708134478300805.post-90907142814700403222023-12-21T10:46:00.008+11:002023-12-21T14:47:18.501+11:00Codd bottles<p> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codd-neck_bottle">Codd, or Codd neck bottles</a> were a Victorian invention.</p><p>Invented by one Hiram Codd they were a stunningly simple design - a thick glass bottle with a rubber washer and a marble in the neck. The marble was pressed against the washer by the internal pressure of the the aerated drink inside - aerated drinks were very much a Victorian thing as well, in part due to the temperance movement - to make a seal. A special pointy opener would push the marble down allowing to contents to be poured into a glass.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://victoriancollections.net.au/media/collectors/4f729f6197f83e03086016a4/items/50caab632162ef0b74ab5279/item-media/50cab1e92162ef0b74ab54b4/item-350High.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="350" data-original-width="154" height="350" src="https://victoriancollections.net.au/media/collectors/4f729f6197f83e03086016a4/items/50caab632162ef0b74ab5279/item-media/50cab1e92162ef0b74ab54b4/item-350High.jpg" width="154" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><span style="font-size: x-small;">1915 Codd Bottle - Orbost Historical society</span></i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Codd bottles were in common use in Australia but relatively few have survived due to children breaking the necks of the bottles to get at the marble inside.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Recently, when gardening, I <a href="https://listservsandanoraks.blogspot.com/2023/12/todays-little-bit-of-garden-archaeology.html">found a small glass 1cm diameter sphere</a>, which I assumed was probably a child's marble that had been lost.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Having spent some time trawling the web, I'm not so sure. Victorian children's marbles were usually either coloured pottery or patterned glass rather than plain glass.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">However marbles obtained by smashing the necks are usually plain blue green glass, like the marble I found.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">This is where I start getting all hand wavy.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Our house was not built until around 1880, and it's said - I havn't delved into this in detail - that prior to this the land our block and neighbouring blocks are on was an orchard and that Billson's brewery (which is less than 100m from our house and directly opposite on Last Street) would sometimes stable their horses there. Certainly I've found a discarded horseshoe and a set of broken nineteenth century farrier's pliers while gardening so perhaps there's some truth in the story.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">There's also quite a lot of broken nineteenth century glass in the soil. I havn't found a complete recognisable nineteenth century bottle, so I don't know if the brewery also used the vacant land as a dumping ground for broken bottles, or whether they just ended up there by chance, or from the householders dumping broken bottles in the garden.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">However, I did find <a href="https://abcrauctions.com.au/past-auctions/2274/abcr-auction-17/18/billson-beechworth-shield-codd-marble-bottle/">an example online</a> of Billson's brewery using Codd bottles for aerated drinks</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://media.bidjs.com//image/upload/v1660714549/bdx/18_xayivk.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="260" height="683" src="https://media.bidjs.com//image/upload/v1660714549/bdx/18_xayivk.jpg" width="222" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">which again is made of the same blue green glass that the marble I found.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">So, still furiously waving my hands, I'm going to hypothesize that the marble came from a Codd bottle from the brewery. Whether it got there by being dumped in a pile of brewery waste, or whether a child smashed the neck of a bottle to get the marble sometime at the end of the Victorian era, is something we'll never know ...</div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><p><br /></p>dgmhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16429298708780406789noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4502708134478300805.post-90395499250135850952023-12-19T10:33:00.004+11:002023-12-19T12:33:03.379+11:00The end of Usenet news?<p> Earlier today I tooted a link to a news article about Google <a href="https://www.theregister.com/2023/12/18/google_ends_usenet_links/">discontinuing links to Usenet news</a>.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhx1lOpqdTCOT3fbb5Kyninu4GrDjYSWvsG-_6ZMny04leOxpsugNZWak0YWFNYFdZ23Ny9fLeoXLfwIrd_QsHP-Zn7jlW9X4dSjtGkoUsFbPo4GCbyuGoSCt-k2t7nMHhsvhtItty9MlHvYZKSlSwLckhTOhQr88194WDvPIRkfpUB38ZksmksknG0ZRo/s865/Screenshot%202023-12-19%20100926.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="345" data-original-width="865" height="128" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhx1lOpqdTCOT3fbb5Kyninu4GrDjYSWvsG-_6ZMny04leOxpsugNZWak0YWFNYFdZ23Ny9fLeoXLfwIrd_QsHP-Zn7jlW9X4dSjtGkoUsFbPo4GCbyuGoSCt-k2t7nMHhsvhtItty9MlHvYZKSlSwLckhTOhQr88194WDvPIRkfpUB38ZksmksknG0ZRo/s320/Screenshot%202023-12-19%20100926.png" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p>Personally, I'd more or less forgotten Usenet news existed.</p><p>Over fifteen years ago we killed off our Usenet news service at my then work. The exercise was bit of a hoot as we had an SLA with a couple of other institutions to provide a news feed, and of course needed their agreement.</p><p>In one case getting agreement was easy, in the other they'd outsourced their IT provision to a windows based commercial provider, and somewhere along the line they'd forgotten to include NNTP provision as one of the contracted services, and of course all the original people had moved on, and there was no one left who actually knew what Usenet news was, or even if they still had a forgotten box sitting quietly in a cabinet somewhere...</p><p>Anyway, once they understood the problem, they found someone to agree to the termination of the SLA. I don't know if they ever found if they still had an nntp server running.</p><p>Because I was interested in Roman archaeology and some environmental science topics I would occasionally <a href="https://knowledgegeek.blogspot.com/2013/10/usenet-vms-and-pan.html">check in on Usenet</a> even after we turned off our server via a server at a university in the Netherlands, but eventually everything I was interested in migrated to blogs and the service formerly known as twitter, and in the end I simply stopped using it.</p><p>For old times sake I checked in on a couple of the groups I used to follow via google groups this morning.</p><p>The moderated ones are simply moribund - moderators retire or get tired of the job and the groups just die and remain there frozen in time.</p><p>Unmoderated groups seem to be full of irrelevant porn and posts offering dodgy financial services, and even the mad conspiracy theorists who used to rave on about the fringes of US politics seem to have moved to another echo chamber.</p><p>I guess that's how services end, not a bang, not a whimper, but a long drawn out death rattle ...</p>dgmhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16429298708780406789noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4502708134478300805.post-87524007572109696882023-12-09T12:17:00.008+11:002023-12-13T10:24:47.529+11:00Technology and me in 2023...<p><span style="font-family: inherit;">It has become something of a tradition for me to blog about my
personal use of technology in the past year about now.</span></p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">There’s nothing
particularly special about this year, I havn’t updated or replaced
any of my machines with the exception of my putting my money where my
mouth was and building<a href="https://knowledgegeek.blogspot.com/2023/07/another-iteration-of-lightweight.html">
a distraction free lightweight machine for research</a>, which,
because I finally finished the pandemic interrupted documentation of
Dow’s pharmacy a few weeks later, hasn’t seen as much use as I
hoped.</span></p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I expect that to
change in the new year, but until then I’m enjoying my downtime.</span></p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The refurbished
Thinkpad I bought in 2022 to allow me to finish the documentation of
Dow’s gave excellent service, and will probably see me onto another
documentation project.</span></p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">My now five year old
windows 10 laptop that sits on my desk continues to work well, and I
don’t yet feel a need to upgrade it.</span></p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The only doubts I
have are about the very lightweight computer I had bought a few years
ago to replace my Macbook Air as a travel computer.</span></p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">It gave excellent
service until we were in a remote area of Tuscany - I don't think being in the foothills of the Appenines had anything to do with it, it was more a case of creeping software bloat - when it started
complaining about swap space. </span></p><p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">As a temporary fix I deleted a whole
lot stuff, told it to write everything more than a day old to
OneDrive, and removed various little used applications.</span></p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">That worked, but it
still gets slow when using chrome with a lot (>5) tabs open.</span></p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Various solutions
are possible, including converting it to Linux, and using basically
the same build as I did with the lightweight research machine,
perhaps with the addition of chromium and some basic photo editing
software.</span></p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">However, before I do
that I need to check the specification carefully I have an eMMC based
model (why it was so cheap in the first place) and linux support can
be a bit tricky on eMMC based machines.</span></p><p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I actually don't know this - looking at the blogs and discussion boards some people seem to have had trouble with eMMC machines - of course you never hear of the success stories. I would assume that the eMMC device presents itself as a standard storage device, so it should work. Equally, while the machine is more or less usable, I don't particularly want to brick it - probably procrastination with a purpose is a valid way of dealing with the problem.</span></p><p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">(Confusingly Lenovo also sell
an SSD based version of the same machine in some markets and as you
would expect, Linux works well on the SSD machines.)</span></p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The alternative is
to buy a refurbished machine as an alternative travel computer –
refurbished due to the cost, and also because I don’t really want
to carry around anything with a screen size much over 12”, if only
because a lot of my backpacks only really support a 12” screen
size.</span></p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Basic machines tend
to some with larger screens these days, making them a non starter.</span></p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Or I could just use
the lightweight research machine (or indeed my Chromebook, which has
the problem of having only a single USB3 port which means that I
would need to carry an external card reader around for photo
imports.)</span></p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">All of that’s a
decision for the coming year.</span></p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Again my pandemic
era Huawei tablet continues to perform well as does the dogfood
tablet, both doing everything I ask of them.</span></p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I still have my old
mac mini and keyboard combo as a note taker, but again, since the end
of the Dow’s documentation project it’s seen relatively little
use.</span></p><p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">While it seemed a big deal at the time we went from an FTTC to a pure fibre FTTP connection here at chez Moncur - after the<a href="https://knowledgegeek.blogspot.com/2023/08/well-weve-finally-got-fttp-connection.html"> initial hassle of the migration process</a> it faded into the background and totally unnoticeable, as all good infrastructure upgrades should.</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">All in all the only
major change has been my ditching an iPhone for a mid range Android
phone, after being so impressed by the performance of my Oppo phone
when we went <a href="https://knowledgegeek.blogspot.com/2023/11/travel-in-2023.html">travelling
earlier this year</a>.</span></p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I’ve always had a
suspicion that Apple is not the most cost effective for phone
purposes and that there was nothing particularly special about their
hardware capability and having swapped from android to Apple’s
walled garden and back again, I’m more and more sure that they are
over priced for what they deliver – a bit like the early 1990’s
mini computer market where Digital was clearly the dominant player,
and their hardware was good and highly capable, but there were all
these other newer, more cost effective, manufacturers with Unix based
machines that year by year became more and more capable and
eventually pushed them out of the market. These vendors in turn fell victim to Linux on upspecc'd commodity hardware... </span></p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</p>dgmhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16429298708780406789noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4502708134478300805.post-18462102442486992012023-12-06T09:55:00.002+11:002023-12-06T12:12:53.331+11:00Another possible skirt weight<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgH-TO361m9CBu96oNIAcw2ncrDlHF8UxUAL64SQBmw0vWBKsnVzIONt3wvu6h_yyncoX1MY8hjlwmIG2EsqXIua177Te25Q22LGD1M6mQsWqAzFKi_SvcTnjXThGqwc294PMWTZhZNFciCxBbYAQnTiCo4UbAnII1EBFCtV7J8zTxIG3JijXzuEw8d1o0/s4000/IMG20231206093701.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4000" data-original-width="3000" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgH-TO361m9CBu96oNIAcw2ncrDlHF8UxUAL64SQBmw0vWBKsnVzIONt3wvu6h_yyncoX1MY8hjlwmIG2EsqXIua177Te25Q22LGD1M6mQsWqAzFKi_SvcTnjXThGqwc294PMWTZhZNFciCxBbYAQnTiCo4UbAnII1EBFCtV7J8zTxIG3JijXzuEw8d1o0/s320/IMG20231206093701.jpg" width="240" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Back in September I blogged about how I'd found a <a href="https://knowledgegeek.blogspot.com/2023/09/house-and-garden-archaeology.html">possible nineteenth century skirt weight</a> while gardening.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Well I've found another, a quite attractive one made of blue glass. I don't think there's anything significant in the colour, I suspect they were typically made of either recycled or waste glass.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">But the colour is significant in another way. When I say I found it, I simply picked it up off an empty patch of dirt in the yard.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">We've been having a problem with a native bird (or birds) that has a liking for blue objects. They've picked out all the blue clothes pegs out of the peg basket and scattered them round the yard, and have stolen other blue items from elsewhere, including a pair ear defenders and a bright blue lanyard.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">In this case, because the glass weight was lying on the surface of an undug patch of garden I suspect that a bird had picked it out of someone else's garden and dropped it here ...</div><br /><p></p>dgmhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16429298708780406789noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4502708134478300805.post-6759380769430793032023-11-29T10:22:00.006+11:002023-12-01T12:47:38.769+11:00So why were there no Roman ghosts in the nineteenth century?<p>My little post about <a href="https://knowledgegeek.blogspot.com/2023/11/roman-ghosts-in-nineteenth-century.html">Roman
ghosts was not being a thing</a> in the nineteenth century, of
course leads on to the obvious question of why?</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Well, I don’t
know, but I have a theory.</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Nineteenth century
people loved ghost stories, as much, if not more than we do. Like us
they liked being creeped out, so it’s not a distaste for the actual
idea of ghosts.</p><p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">It's more to do with a lack of awareness of Roman remains in Britain in the nineteenth century.</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Thirty or so years
ago I used to live in the middle of York, near the centre of the old
city, in a nineteenth century terraced house, and the standing joke
was that if you wanted your garden dug over, all that you had to do
was notify the York Archaeological Trust that you’d found
something, and you’d get a van load of spade wielding diggers round
that afternoon.</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Not true, but
there’s a bit of truth in the story. Archaeology only achieved any
sort of popularity in the nineteen eighties, before that it was seen
as an occupation of dotty academics who spent the summer poking about
ruins in Greece or Italy, or equally enthusiastically went on about
crop marks.</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Again not true, but
not exactly untrue either.</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Lets wind back to
the nineteenth century.</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">There was no
archaeology until the latter half of the nineteenth century. There
was the odd antiquarian, and some of them were quite odd, who would
sometimes investigate the odd bronze age grave mound or some Roman
masonry they found on their property, but that was about it.</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Some were quite
systematic, and some were decided amateurs, and some like seventeenth
century antiquarian Edward Lhwyd made <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-61712158">valid
inferences based on the evidence available</a>.</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Archaeology as we
know it developed on the back of Schliemann’s mis-discovery of Troy
and the discoveries of Nineveh and Babylon, and was something that
happened out there, rather than closer to home.</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">It’s only later,
in the early twentieth century that one starts to see something like
systematic archaeological investigations in England and Wales.</p><p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">While local antiquarian societies would occasionally sponsor digs, and finds of Roman coins and pottery would occasionally be reported in newspapers, reports only start to become common after about 1880 - which is slightly strange as I thought the railway construction boom of the mid 1800s might sometimes turn up Roman remains, but if they did, they appear not to have been reported widely in the newspapers of the day.</p><p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Before the early twentieth century, little was known about the Roman presence, because there actually were relatively few visible remains from the
Roman period, people simply forgot about the Romans, and hence no stories
about Roman ghosts, because there was nothing to inspire them ...</p>dgmhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16429298708780406789noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4502708134478300805.post-62410379095359983052023-11-26T10:45:00.005+11:002023-11-27T15:27:35.632+11:00Roman ghosts in the nineteenth century<p> I've been down an internet rabbit hole on this one - I was reading <a href="https://www.hachette.com.au/irving-finkel/the-first-ghosts-a-rich-history-of-ancient-ghosts-and-ghost-stories-from-the-british-museum-curator">Irving Finkel's The first ghosts</a> about ghosts in early Mesopotamian culture.</p><p>In passing Finkel discusses how deeply embedded in our culture stories about ghosts or encounters with ghosts are and I was reminded of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasurer%27s_House,_York#Roman_soldiers_apparition">the story of the Roman soldiers appearing in the Treasurer's House in York</a>.</p><p>For no reason other than it was raining, I wondered about nineteenth century newspaper accounts of encounters with Roman Ghosts and turned to Welsh Newspapers online.</p><p>Interestingly, there are none.</p><p>Sure, there are plenty of articles about ghosts and encounters with ghosts, but none with Roman ghosts.</p><p>Trove is much the same if you search over the long nineteenth century, say 1800-1914.</p><p>Yet if you search the Google Books corpus with the Ngram viewer you get a small number of hits</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLMxbh0MaAM2WMGkRq-vGHi80-O-xxGoriOUlVEheaB2AdufEKQnNbAN7vB6tYzBL_d-e1j2bIBBmtjsew6u1pNCS04t1JBx2udlQRYsKoRgYCysyEGFu211Bu1wpiNsBO2-aClkZd4ScGzG3DRttNydr8DsIjemyi3AsjtdbJJOXi5YH-niUNZcndEhk/s1714/roman%20ghost.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="796" data-original-width="1714" height="149" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLMxbh0MaAM2WMGkRq-vGHi80-O-xxGoriOUlVEheaB2AdufEKQnNbAN7vB6tYzBL_d-e1j2bIBBmtjsew6u1pNCS04t1JBx2udlQRYsKoRgYCysyEGFu211Bu1wpiNsBO2-aClkZd4ScGzG3DRttNydr8DsIjemyi3AsjtdbJJOXi5YH-niUNZcndEhk/s320/roman%20ghost.png" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i>(click to view)</i></div><div><br /></div>but random sampling some of the links suggests that very few if any items link to stories about encounters with Roman ghosts.<div><br /></div><div>It's not as if people didn't tell ghost stories - a young Charlotte Bronte was reprimanded at school for scaring the purple pussy cats out of her room mates by telling ghost stories after dark, but despite both the interest and familiarity with the classics in the nineteenth century, and the popularity of gothic novels in the first half of the nineteenth century, Roman ghosts seem not to feature ...<br /><p><br /></p></div>dgmhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16429298708780406789noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4502708134478300805.post-65772929610551994272023-11-09T09:51:00.000+11:002023-11-09T09:51:04.292+11:00Optus<p> Yesterday, for causes still unknown, Optus, Australia's second biggest telco, went off line.</p><p>While we all had a bit of a snigger about the lady who found out about the outage by her cat complaining to management that the wifi enabled cat feeder was offline and not dispensing cat nibbles as it should, it does show how dependent we are on the internet.</p><p>Imagine the following scenario:</p><p>A health worker trying to get to work yesterday - the commuter trains in Melbourne stopped because signalling relies on Optus - and of course because the internet was down they couldn't get a cab or an Uber, and if they were lucky enough to flag down a cab old style, they were unable to pay because the cab's eftpos was down.</p><p>Oh, and the hospital couldn't text you to say your appointment was postponed due to staff shortages.</p><p>That's just one scenario.</p><p>I'm sure there's more. And because the internet is pervasive, when we lose connectivity, the world stops.</p><p>Equally, it's not just about the ability to make calls or send texts, its about performing basic tasks like paying bills, ordering your groceries. It's how we consume media, be it Spotify, online radio, or catchup TV - it's notable that outside the cities Australia doesn't do DAB - it's internet based radio in one form or another. </p><p>When I was in rural Tuscany in a village which remarkably had no mobile phone signal, life carried on because there was really good wifi. People texted, made phone calls, even put their rubbish out - the dumpsters were internet enabled and you needed a magic card to open one - because they had internet access.</p><p>So, what the Optus outage shows us is that the internet is the jizz that keeps things running. And because of that we need to consider what steps we need to make to give resilience.</p><p>And that's where it gets tricky. People are focusing on roaming as a solution, where if your mobile internet provider goes down you fail over onto another network, much as what happens with SOS calls in rural areas.</p><p>However, that's not the complete answer - remember Optus went down, not only taking out their mobile services but their fixed infrastructure NBN based services, which is why some businesses had problems, and that is a trickier one to resolve...</p>dgmhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16429298708780406789noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4502708134478300805.post-28606424620812806152023-11-06T17:12:00.006+11:002023-11-07T12:15:11.691+11:00Travel in 2023<p> As I've written elsewhere <a href="https://moncurdg.com/2023/11/05/so-we-went-to-europe/">we've just been to Europe for a few weeks.</a></p><p>Many things were different from pre pandemic travel - like that the use of cash had disappeared.</p><p>Yes cabs and informal market vendors preferred cash, as did cafes in Italy if all you wanted was a couple of espresso lungos, but in the main Europe had gone cashless. Having a low cost debit card such as our ING bank cards proved invaluable, as did having a second debit card, this time from HSBC, for dealing with self service petrol pumps and automated motorway toll stations - I have a paranoia about one of these machines swallowing my card.</p><p>In the even all the motorway toll plazas accepted contactless payments and the self service petrol pumps proved reliable - none of the fun and games we had in Portugal a few years ago where selfservice pumps would randomly take a dislike to an overseas card and spit them back out in disgust.</p><p>We did use trains and planes, and where possible we preprinted our tickets before we left.</p><p>Telstra has this absolutely stupid way of charging a flat $10 fee per day for roaming which made downloading tickets to our phones an expensive exercise - although we did <a href="https://knowledgegeek.blogspot.com/2023/06/oppo.html">take a phone with roaming enabled</a>, and installed the various train booking apps on it in case one of the scanners along the way didn't like one of our printouts.</p><p>I guess we could have download the tickets over wifi prior to travelling, and stored them in a wallet application, but to be honest, I didn't think of that, especially as I didn't realise that French train stations now need you to scan your ticket prior to boarding - Italy is still old school with train conductors who carry what looks like a modified phone to scan your ticket.</p><p>The Oppo phone performed excellently, and Belong's roaming coverage was so good we didn't need to buy a second local SIM card.</p><p>In fact I was so impressed with the Oppo's performance, especially with 5G, that when we got back to Australia I decided to ditch <a href="https://knowledgegeek.blogspot.com/2021/11/getting-new-mobile-in-bush.html">my pandemic era iPhone SE</a> and use the Oppo as my phone, and sell my iPhone to a refurbisher, there being a healthy market in old iPhones, even the lowly 4G only SE.</p><p>(Incidentally I don't regret the iPhone SE purchase - it did its job, and did it well, but having used a more advanced phone like the Oppo, its limitations were self evident)</p><p>Our rental car in Italy for some reason didn't have a GPS, instead you were supposed to pair your phone with it over Bluetooth. Belong's data allowances proved more than adequate for getting us to and from rural Tuscany.</p><p>Google maps did get us lost in Siena - I suspect it lost the signal and directed us round in a loop. Restarting the phone cured the problem.</p><p>Airports almost universally used self service machines that scanned your passport and then retrieved your booking allowing you to both print your boarding pass and check your bags, and with the exception of Marseilles all the airports had smart gates with facial recognition. In Marseilles we had to line up old style and have our passports stamped.</p><p>Interestingly, in Bologna, while they had smart gates they still had a pair of border guards in a booth solely to put an exit stamp in your passport.</p><p>Britain and Singapore no longer required any entry and exit stamps, although Singapore did need you to fill in an online form in advance, basically replacing the old arrivals card that you used to have to complete.</p><p>The other thing that I found surprising was the pervasiveness across Europe of Whatsapp as a communication mechanism, especially in rural Tuscany where sometimes mobile phone coverage was surprisingly poor, but wifi was everywhere ...</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>dgmhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16429298708780406789noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4502708134478300805.post-66367038399073884862023-11-02T10:39:00.003+11:002023-11-02T13:34:10.689+11:00twitter and the enshittification of academic social media<p> It's a year (more or less) since twitter was bought by Elon Musk and began its journey to becoming X.</p><p>I'm not going to comment on the changes, <a href="https://knowledgegeek.blogspot.com/2023/04/so-social-media.html">I jumped ship sometime ago</a>, more because of the gradual change in content, than any inherent distaste for the new ownership.</p><p>Basically, what was happening was enshittification where the signal to noise ratio on a particular channel rises to a level to no longer make it useful. It's also why I don't do facebook, or insta, or anything else - too much crap.</p><p>Interestingly there's <a href="https://thesiswhisperer.com/2023/11/01/more-thoughts-on-the-enshittification-of-academic-social-media/">a post going around</a> about how a large part of the academic community has stayed on twitter because of the community - essentially people are staying there because people are there, and none of the alternatives, for example Mastodon, have the critical mass of individuals to make it worthwhile posting.</p><p>Now I'm not an academic, or even a retired academic, but I have been a digital archiving specialist and more recently worked as volunteer on a project for the National Trust to document the contents of Dow's Pharmacy, and certainly twitter, with its large community, was tremendously useful when I had a something like a transcription problem on a handwritten label.</p><p>Equally, it let me stand on the sidelines and follow my lifelong interest in Roman history and archaeology.</p><p>Twitter was indeed valuable.</p><p>However, I don't miss it.</p><p>Using a RSS reader (I use inoreader) has allowed me to assemble a set of feeds that let me follow my interests in both Roman things and Victorian murders and pharmacology. Likewise mastodon gives me a platform where I follow enough people to get the happenstance effect - like ninety per cent of everything posted is <strike>crap</strike> irrelevant, but every so often there's something interesting or relevant.</p><p>However, what I do see is the fragmentation of communication, with material appearing on SubStack etc, as well as other social media platforms, leading to a loss of universality.</p><p> For a long time twitter was the default because it was the only game in town, and classic blogging platforms because they've been around for years and provided an established platform for longer more complex posts.</p><p>Now things are more fragmented, and that, potentially, is a problem ...</p>dgmhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16429298708780406789noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4502708134478300805.post-30248868719265593582023-09-22T12:13:00.005+10:002023-09-23T15:27:45.216+10:00Not posting links anymore ...<p> For years, since 2007 in fact. I used to post links of things I found interesting to a certain microblogging site now known as X.</p><p>Well, as we know, there's been some changes with X, so on the back of them I took the opportunity not only to quit twitter, but also to abandon all the socials except for Mastodon, and even though I could have started using Mastodon in the same way as I did twitter, I decided to dial it down and post rarely.</p><p>That left me with a little problem - my loyal ex followers.</p><p>Amazingly, well to me anyway, some people actively followed my feed and used it as an information source, so to provide a bridge I started accumulating links and <a href="https://knowledgegeek.blogspot.com/2023/04/wikis.html">posting them to a wiki.</a></p><p>This wasn't terribly arduous - it probably took about an extra fifteen minutes out of my day to save the copied URL's to a text document, add required markup and copy and paste them into my wiki's edit window.</p><p>But it did demand that I had time every day to do this.</p><p>Well in the old days, when the internet was a plaything of academia, and before everything was always on 24/7 you could leave a<span style="font-family: courier;"> .vacation</span> message along the lines of </p><p><span style="font-family: courier;">I am gone from my desk and may be away for a few weeks</span></p><p>and then disappear to the wilds of Anatolia or the rain forests of Laos and no one would care that much.</p><p>Well, we're going travelling again for the first time in ages - nowhere terribly exotic - and as I might not have time to post regularly, I decided to can the wiki posting experiment.</p><p>How much use it was to people I don't know, as I deliberately didn't turn on many metrics.</p><p>Personally, I found it a useful exercise to revisit my wiki editing skills, and certainly I'll be adding pages to my wiki site in the future.</p><p>It also helped me in the process of disengaging from social media by giving me a mechanism to withdraw from compulsively posting anything I found interesting rather than reading it analytically, something I think everyone is guilty of sometimes.</p><p>So it's been valuable - hopefully some other people have also got some value from it.</p><p>I'm not going totally silent - being a bit of an internet chatterbox I will be posting the odd thing to Mastodon but I'm going to try and keep it dialed down ...</p>dgmhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16429298708780406789noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4502708134478300805.post-48372888030369096482023-09-19T13:41:00.001+10:002023-09-19T13:41:12.994+10:00Field Notes<p> A few days ago I posted a link about <a href="https://blog.underoverarch.co.nz/2023/09/field-notes/">field notes from
Christchurch archaeology</a> to my <a href="http://scribbled.wikidot.com/20230915">links page</a> for this week.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Personally I find field notes and how people use them
fascinating, ever since I first managed botanists.</p><p class="MsoNormal"> Full of scribbles, marginal
notes and the rest they record the progress of a survey, or an archaeological
dig in the raw, with all the gritty details, mistakes, corrections and the
rest.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">And there is still a role for the field notebook/workbook/lab notebook in research, even if the final version ends up written up a little
more formally and these days electronically.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">And it’s the immediacy aspect that governs the use of
notebooks.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">For example, even when putting together a <a href="https://moncurdg.com/2022/11/13/using-notable-for-family-history-research/">set
of notes for family history research</a>, I find there’s an intermediate stage
when one writes down some rough notes and then writes them up in a more coherent
manner – probably I ought to maintain a genealogy workbook, but I’m afraid I
tend to use scrap paper and photograph any of my scrawls that are potentially
useful.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">So while the lightweight research machine is excellent for
writing things up and putting things together systematically as one goes, I
find I need a rough book.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">And it is the immediacy factor – it doesn’t matter too much
about the weather, one can simply pull out the rough book to write something
down.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I’ve tried using an iPad, and while they’re great for a lot
of desk based work – recording references and the like – they do need an
internet connection for a lot of applications to work.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Paper is immediate.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">So, when I was <a href="https://knowledgegeek.blogspot.com/2023/08/so-how-did-i-document-contents-of-dows.html">documenting
Dow’s</a>, a rough book formed part of the process.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">As the various bottles and boxes contained god knows what,
and possibly in a dubious condition the use of nitrile gloves to protect one’s
hands was a given. Personally, I find it almost impossible to type even on a
full size keyboard wearing nitrile gloves, and on a smaller size keyboard well,
it just doesn’t work.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">So, when examining the artefact I would write a basic
description in my rough book<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p><br /></o:p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyl35UiBCXkSEQ2yMrs0jMxLCZAVshXDetEPpWe36bHH0Ht9bSQM0wYlx5lVJmxN8fe5JRy3sz-NUgbeWJ9EkZ4RYY1JtH6MlupjabFU-ymgVhBZj08ERAnzAEuX5f2H1JRt53bRhTzhvo4228lH9LVgsKKR4WzFHuDllfQ0oQu-MZtasUYuXl_PfZyE8/s3972/IMG20230919120956.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="An example rough book pge" border="0" data-original-height="3972" data-original-width="2979" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyl35UiBCXkSEQ2yMrs0jMxLCZAVshXDetEPpWe36bHH0Ht9bSQM0wYlx5lVJmxN8fe5JRy3sz-NUgbeWJ9EkZ4RYY1JtH6MlupjabFU-ymgVhBZj08ERAnzAEuX5f2H1JRt53bRhTzhvo4228lH9LVgsKKR4WzFHuDllfQ0oQu-MZtasUYuXl_PfZyE8/w240-h320/IMG20230919120956.jpg" width="240" /></a></div><br /><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">My workbook was more than usually illegible, but as I was
the only one reading it that didn’t really matter. Sometimes there were
crossings out and correction, but as the object descriptions were fairly well
structured, pages tended to follow the same layout: object: separator: object
and with aspects listed line by line.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">After I’d examined and photographed the object I would
upload, review, and edit the object photographs, and then add the image names
to my rough book, before adding the object to the cataloguing spreadsheet.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">This method is fairly generic, and having a rough book like
this allows you to check back on your work to make sure you havn’t miskeyed something
or missed something….<o:p></o:p></p>dgmhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16429298708780406789noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4502708134478300805.post-10332645256499850192023-09-13T17:58:00.006+10:002023-09-17T07:55:30.634+10:00House and garden archaeology<p> We live in an old wooden house, the core of which probably dates to the 1880's.</p><p>Exactly when I'm not sure, but like all wooden houses it has been extended and changed over the years, and while the front of the house looks authentic (but isn't, for example our front door and the <a href="https://auroraglassblast.com/flash">Victorian etched glass </a>in the door case dates to 1860 and came from a completely different house) the rear of the house most definitely is not, with multiple extensions over the years, most recently by ourselves in 2016.</p><p>I could, I suppose, research the date the house was originally built, but certainly, in 1856, while the block had been surveyed when the town was laid out, the town plan does not show a house on the block,</p><p>I've been told that at one time our block formed part of an orchard, and that the brewery sometimes stabled dray horses on it.</p><p>Certainly I've found an old horseshoe and a broken set of nineteenth century farriers' pliers, so perhaps there's some truth in the story.</p><p>In the course of gardening I've turned up old ceramic electrical fittings, the neck of a nineteenth century bottle, an old flat iron, a couple of 1920's medicine bottles, and a lot of broken glass, mostly from nineteenth and early twentieth century beer bottles.</p><p>So turning up bits and pieces isn't that unusual.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxPIdENE-sAVyDe_CBdzIMHl3RDxn87tl3jT4Coztl1nd2UUW_uHao92uPT1qD_yW5rjeCW-MzeqClN7G16vb_5MqAzrqh_l7X0dV7beCC-yTXPmQCQcifpTvHep93Kx99T1I7yWoS21cmI5zk0vQoH35MkEBKIestkUXnwXdrhekUpgAbW4efQcaBrvw/s2424/IMG_0832.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2424" data-original-width="2275" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxPIdENE-sAVyDe_CBdzIMHl3RDxn87tl3jT4Coztl1nd2UUW_uHao92uPT1qD_yW5rjeCW-MzeqClN7G16vb_5MqAzrqh_l7X0dV7beCC-yTXPmQCQcifpTvHep93Kx99T1I7yWoS21cmI5zk0vQoH35MkEBKIestkUXnwXdrhekUpgAbW4efQcaBrvw/s320/IMG_0832.jpg" width="300" /></a></div><br /><p>Today's finds consisted of a little glass object that looked a little like a glass chocolate button, and what at first sight looked like the base of a nineteenth century medicine bottle, except that</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfkUtdKhFOTY9RmPAwDwm5gHDX24D0x9m-6nHPmr4ffXh4kxPo_BDz3Yvq-us58cDXT49ygLftHeAZeNkhkDXV72wOSwrn8xKDtb2LTN-b7v5pv1Q-pnb4O-0EFDyE5ISWKuaRKuQ3oXMGcuCd_9d8JvjAZKqUODD_cOPveFLUjrXjqz0Jj1A3pTwhMzI/s3350/IMG_0834.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3350" data-original-width="2851" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfkUtdKhFOTY9RmPAwDwm5gHDX24D0x9m-6nHPmr4ffXh4kxPo_BDz3Yvq-us58cDXT49ygLftHeAZeNkhkDXV72wOSwrn8xKDtb2LTN-b7v5pv1Q-pnb4O-0EFDyE5ISWKuaRKuQ3oXMGcuCd_9d8JvjAZKqUODD_cOPveFLUjrXjqz0Jj1A3pTwhMzI/s320/IMG_0834.jpg" width="272" /></a></div><br /><p>the glass is very clear and transparent and lacks the thickness and also the little bubbles and inclusions typically found in nineteenth century glass. My guess is that it's a bit of a relatively modern, say post war, bottle that was made in the style of an earlier bottle.</p><p>The other find is a little more interesting, a little glass object around 15mm in diameter and shaped a little like a chocolate button</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiz5nOx2l3IHGEn3jOazE4PuQE5haOvdeAApYdh3ebSsuC1WkB-sxALT4Y9vQEVhPSOx2rS0oLX4MbVYwaacyjTdgXlWF8EZPc54O6cBS_JPjdXdcUkRnXwL11DaQEJCi2qwIo6D0Za7GLz-BWdvfUOi2UfpeM56UEMWb8H1zuPoO4ZoKkY1xFocesJ1M/s1598/IMG_0835.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1598" data-original-width="1474" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiz5nOx2l3IHGEn3jOazE4PuQE5haOvdeAApYdh3ebSsuC1WkB-sxALT4Y9vQEVhPSOx2rS0oLX4MbVYwaacyjTdgXlWF8EZPc54O6cBS_JPjdXdcUkRnXwL11DaQEJCi2qwIo6D0Za7GLz-BWdvfUOi2UfpeM56UEMWb8H1zuPoO4ZoKkY1xFocesJ1M/s320/IMG_0835.jpg" width="295" /></a></div><br /><p>The glass is almost certainly nineteenth century with a greenish hue and little air bubbles trapped in it</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgc9BGXMFUNofj8hSJeL4SL5n9gAfVQt235mxIP9j3oWGvgGsj-KiVK9M2aTDU9fbnjwkrnq4uv5Csp36N5p-qcc0avDxmglXsqtYGTsnnpFDMCyUV69y5mr6_eMqkAJtBL5V8LmGJSMFmC2JcLWvTRnera2gVK1kEOeKTqpe2EVdqpBwSIGGxShk1cY8Y/s3024/IMG_0833.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2918" data-original-width="3024" height="309" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgc9BGXMFUNofj8hSJeL4SL5n9gAfVQt235mxIP9j3oWGvgGsj-KiVK9M2aTDU9fbnjwkrnq4uv5Csp36N5p-qcc0avDxmglXsqtYGTsnnpFDMCyUV69y5mr6_eMqkAJtBL5V8LmGJSMFmC2JcLWvTRnera2gVK1kEOeKTqpe2EVdqpBwSIGGxShk1cY8Y/s320/IMG_0833.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p>My guess is that it is a skirt weight from the hem of a woman's dress in the nineteenth century.</p><p>Skirt weights were sewn into the hems of skirts and dresses to stop them blowing about and to help them hang properly.</p><p>Unfortunately, while the internet provides plenty of examples of metal nineteenth century hem weights, I've been unable to turn up any images of glass hem weights.</p><p><br /></p>dgmhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16429298708780406789noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4502708134478300805.post-21452548860438693662023-09-05T18:31:00.003+10:002023-09-06T10:00:38.339+10:00The end of wordpad<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUKeAox-D6sPGI0YoOsyoS-7UX70S1NjMCnxLH9eyM7FpJHbPvms40IdYqF6qULBp-VQIEUm9Wj6H2lw9ooE-zrzctM5UOSjoPd-f1VOFQ9qPzY9E9ovec539j1TCzTLlulc1avzB7eRv05GwWreEjvN20vCH6k6CAX5sR9Jms5BzWMtBCwwgou4ss2Us/s858/wordpad.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="423" data-original-width="858" height="158" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUKeAox-D6sPGI0YoOsyoS-7UX70S1NjMCnxLH9eyM7FpJHbPvms40IdYqF6qULBp-VQIEUm9Wj6H2lw9ooE-zrzctM5UOSjoPd-f1VOFQ9qPzY9E9ovec539j1TCzTLlulc1avzB7eRv05GwWreEjvN20vCH6k6CAX5sR9Jms5BzWMtBCwwgou4ss2Us/s320/wordpad.png" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p>I recently tooted an article from The Register that<a href="https://ausglam.space/@moncur_d/111005319475505688"> Microsoft was killing off WordPad</a>.</p><p>To be honest I'd forgotten that WordPad existed, but its demise is symptomatic of the move to cloud centric computing.</p><p>Now sometimes you need to produce some minimally formatted text.</p><p>Focuswriter, while great as a distraction free editor, doesn't let you structure text. You could, of course, use Markdown and do the whole Pandoc thing, but realistically you wouldn't - we're visual beings, and sometimes you need something simple to organise your thoughts with.</p><p>Solutions that hark back to the days of green on black VT100's and LaTeX really don't fly.</p><p>On the <a href="https://knowledgegeek.blogspot.com/2023/07/another-iteration-of-lightweight.html">lightweight research machine</a>, I must admit to using <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AbiWord">AbiWord</a> simply because it's not particularly CPU intensive, and despite a few idiosyncrasies it works well enough for making a document with headers, bullet points and a bit of text with inline formatting, and you can save the document in a format something else can read, such as <span style="font-family: courier;">.odt</span> .</p><p>This of course doesn't help you if you're on Windows.</p><p>Usually I use GoogleDocs, but that, of course, assumes an internet connection, which is not always the case - V/line trains for example, which don't have wifi, making offline working the default. (It's of course possible to <a href="https://www.pcworld.com/article/618143/how-to-use-google-docs-or-google-sheets-offline.html">use Google Docs offline</a>, but you first need to be online to make the document available offline - not ideal.)</p><p>To do most of what you need you probably only need an rtf capable editor that doesn't need an internet connection. Googling suggests a number of alternative, but I'm hesitant about recommending one until I've tried them ...</p>dgmhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16429298708780406789noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4502708134478300805.post-84112783675538225162023-08-28T17:58:00.006+10:002023-08-29T12:11:30.428+10:00So how did I document the contents of Dow's?<p> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The actual procedure was pretty straightforward – basically the
pharmacy contents consisted of carboard boxes and glass bottles.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The bottles, especially after the consolidation of the
Australian glass industry <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>in the 1920s,
were all pretty similar, and the cardboard boxes, were, well cardboard boxes.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Some were interesting in terms of their design<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSzeP_J7fqmqZusS3MVmD14EoqxVlcZOisnYMUbWkUYP50FSedmx1bcfEiZ_S_iBSxL9yDBOqtOlNZeGlKlBY32t0PFawLpgHppeQ1uw5lTCVqVg3qWXinBCER-SZOopFwrEGLg436rSGVg3GbqBw8JAZTbG5Bcp9GfFgGe5rXhPon4CwvcpUMdaeNzZk/s3698/DSCN2278.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3698" data-original-width="2085" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSzeP_J7fqmqZusS3MVmD14EoqxVlcZOisnYMUbWkUYP50FSedmx1bcfEiZ_S_iBSxL9yDBOqtOlNZeGlKlBY32t0PFawLpgHppeQ1uw5lTCVqVg3qWXinBCER-SZOopFwrEGLg436rSGVg3GbqBw8JAZTbG5Bcp9GfFgGe5rXhPon4CwvcpUMdaeNzZk/s320/DSCN2278.jpg" width="180" /></a></div><br /><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">But all were much of a muchness.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">What it comes down to is that bottles are on the whole
pretty boring, but the stories they can tell are interesting such as what the
distribution of bottles of <a href="https://moncurdg.com/2023/08/07/owbridges-lung-tonic/">Owbridge’s lung
tonic</a> tells us about trade in the nineteenth century.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">So, the procedure was fairly simple:<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="Standard"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: x-small; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">The pharmacy was divided into a set of areas, and a thematically
named directory was created for each area.</span></p>
<p class="Standard"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: x-small; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Photographs were taken of each area and a Markdown document was
created for each area as a finding aid, listing the locations of the objects.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="Standard"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: verdana; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Markdown was chosen as it is a well known structured text format
and can be read without special software.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Filenames were of the format </span><span><span style="font-family: courier;">area_name.md</span></span></span></p>
<p class="Standard"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: x-small; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">An excel spreadsheet was created for each area. Each spreadsheet
has four columns, a sequence number, an object description an image column and
a comments field. Filenames are of the format </span><span style="font-family: courier; font-size: x-small; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">area_name.xslx</span><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: x-small; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">.</span></p>
<p class="Standard"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: x-small; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Description fields contain the following, the object type, eg a
glass bottle or a cardboard box, the label contents if present and whether the
contents are present. If the contents are liquid this is noted as an aid to
future conservation work. Colons are used to delimit the individual parts of
the entry as an aid to converting and manipulating the data for ingest into
some long term preservation solution.</span></p>
<p class="Standard"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: x-small; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">An example entry may read</span></p>
<p class="Standard"><span><span style="font-family: courier; font-size: x-small;">hexagonal blue glass bottle ~100mm: cork stopper: no label:
contents not present</span></span></p>
<p class="Standard"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: x-small;"><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" style="mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">The second image column contains filename of a digital image of
the object. Images are always stored in a sub directory named </span><span><span>Reference
Pictures</span></span></span></p>
<p class="Standard"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: x-small; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">If the object is a cardboard box the image will be of the box and
any contents, such as a metal ointment tube.</span></p>
<p class="Standard"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: x-small; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">The final column is a freeform colon delimited text field.</span></p>
<p class="Standard"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: x-small; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">If the object is a bottle and has a label, typically the first
entry will the filename of an image of the label followed by an image of the
rear label if present, then any embossing on the bottle. If a manufacturer is
known the manufacturer will always be the last entry.</span></p>
<p class="Standard"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: x-small; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Information about manufacturers and individual products was
researched and saved in a OneNote notebook to assist with the creation of
detailed catalogue entries where required.</span></p>
<p class="Standard"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: x-small; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">If the item is a cardboard box, the first four entries will be photographs
of the faces of the box, followed by a description of the contents and one or
more photographs of the box contents. As before, the final entry will be the
manufacturers name if known.</span></p>
<p class="Standard"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: x-small; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Each object was examined and photographed and the basic parameters
recorded. If leakage or damage was noticed, this was recorded in the comments
section.</span></p>
<p class="Standard"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: x-small; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">In the case of a cardboard box, it will be noted if the box was
judged too fragile to be opened and the contents examined. Likewise it will be
recorded if the box was sealed, preventing further examination.</span></p>
<p class="Standard"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: x-small; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">At no time was any container opened due to the risks associated
with exposure to the contents.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: x-small;">A variation in this methodology was used in documenting the
contents of drawers in the shop area of the pharmacy.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18pt;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: x-small;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span></span></span><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Drawers were documented in sequence starting at the
top left and finishing at the bottom right<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18pt;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: x-small;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span></span></span><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Each drawer is to have its label and contents
photographed in situ<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18pt;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: x-small;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span></span></span><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Each drawer is to be treated as an individual artefact
and the contents are to be documented as a set of contents within the artefact<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-left: 72pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level2 lfo1; text-indent: -18pt;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: x-small;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">o<span style="font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Each separate
artefact’s description is to be added to the comments field and <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>is to be prefaced with the word contains<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-left: 72pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level2 lfo1; text-indent: -18pt;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><!--[if !supportLists]--></span><span><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">o<span style="font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><!--[endif]--></span><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Where an
artefact itself contains multiple objects each component object is to be
recorded in the comments field and prefaced with the string </span><span style="font-family: courier;">item_contains</span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18pt;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: x-small;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Contents may then be removed, photographed and
documented in the standard manner<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18pt;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: x-small;"><!--[if !supportLists]--></span><span><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: x-small;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span></span></span><!--[endif]--></span><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: x-small;">Each drawer label is to be recorded.</span><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18pt;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: x-small;"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span></span></span><!--[endif]--></span><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: x-small;">If the label is damaged or missing that is to be
recorded along with the position of the drawer in sequence</span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">So essentially one ends up with a directory with a human readable
name that contains a finding aid in markdown format, an excel spreadsheet and a
subdirectory containing all the reference pictures.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5lGJMcq4rtbM7VT_LonSdiWxCxbyBTDTOfx3cDZ_OWW0m5DP2P3XcTvDr6TOE1AAEOaVXpzqpaqPj7MsZ_BXBqpjsZI7zGK0qI-Ytp_6ljlNloxoTIfjKJx3r7NagKCCOhD4ShXkJow39FJk3P0M1oG3zHBE08t2dLxKQj9BmbWTzdsgB36Dc6uS44-A/s1500/Screenshot%202023-08-29%20121034.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="466" data-original-width="1500" height="135" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5lGJMcq4rtbM7VT_LonSdiWxCxbyBTDTOfx3cDZ_OWW0m5DP2P3XcTvDr6TOE1AAEOaVXpzqpaqPj7MsZ_BXBqpjsZI7zGK0qI-Ytp_6ljlNloxoTIfjKJx3r7NagKCCOhD4ShXkJow39FJk3P0M1oG3zHBE08t2dLxKQj9BmbWTzdsgB36Dc6uS44-A/w436-h135/Screenshot%202023-08-29%20121034.png" width="436" /></a></span></div><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><br /></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: 264.5pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>dgmhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16429298708780406789noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4502708134478300805.post-68181073126536872212023-08-27T17:51:00.004+10:002023-08-27T17:59:28.507+10:00Standardising my Linux machines<p> I'm well pleased with my latest iteration of a<a href="http://knowledgegeek.blogspot.com/2023/07/another-iteration-of-lightweight.html"> lightweight research machine</a>, that I decided that I would rebuild the old Dell 6320 that I used in the earlier <a href="http://knowledgegeek.blogspot.com/2020/05/building-xubuntu-machine-for-research.html">Xubuntu based iteration.</a></p><p>This machine sits in a corner of the outdoor studio, really a converted garage, and has been running the <a href="https://knowledgegeek.blogspot.com/2022/07/building-raspberry-pi-x86-desktop.html">Raspberry Pi X86 desktop</a>.</p><p>The machine doesn't need to do much - really all it does is let me look at the weather forecast when I'm working outside in the garden, and perhaps write up the odd gardening note.</p><p>In part, this is because the outdoor studio is currently a giant junk pile, but we have plans to clean it out this summer to provide a large painting space for J and provide me with a project bench for playing with old cameras etc.</p><p>And that of course means I'll need a machine in there to look up old camera manuals etc.</p><p>Even though the Dell's battery is not in the best of health the machine has a decent sized screen and a keyboard that is reasonably nice to type on.</p><p>So this afternoon I installed crunchbang linux. The network connection in the studio isn't quite as robust as it could be, and my first attempt at an install failed when the wifi repeater reset itself, but the second time installation just worked giving me a usable machine.</p><p>As the machine's not going to see serious use in the first instance it's not quite the same as my more serious lightweight machine - I decided not to set up deja dup, or add my extra applications (kate, ristretto, notable etc - these can be installed later if need be) as for the moment all I really need is a web browser and a text editor for writing raw markdown if required ...</p><p><br /></p>dgmhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16429298708780406789noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4502708134478300805.post-8684455727667594702023-08-25T17:00:00.005+10:002023-08-26T12:30:56.203+10:00Why a folksonomy?<p> When I was cataloguing the contents of Dow’s pharmacy I used a
folksonomy rather than a formal controlled vocabulary.</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">A folksonomy is of
course simply an informal controlled vocabulary that is readily
extensible, which is a good thing where, as in Dows, there was no
clear understanding of what exactly the contents of the pharmacy might be.</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">So, and object at
Dows can be</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;"></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>a glass jar – jars
have wide openings</li><li>a glass bottle –
bottles are taller than they are wide and have narrow openings</li><li>a cardboard box</li><li>something else such
as a metal or plastic tube</li></ul><p></p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">a glass bottle can
be</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;"></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>clear – contents
for internal use</li><li>brown – contents
for external use</li><li>blue – contains
something very nasty</li></ul><p></p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">except in very early
bottles, blue and brown bottles are usually embossed <i>Not to be Taken</i>,
and ribbed to aid identification in poor light. (incidentally it’s
because of this ribbing we could say with some degree of plausibility
that <a href="http://knowledgegeek.blogspot.com/2023/04/green-nineteenth-century-pharmacy.html">green pharmacy bottles</a> are an alternative to brown bottles)</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">So, you get the
idea, it’s quite simple to build up a classification model, and
because we’re not encumbered by any previous sets of terms used, make up something that is human readable as well as machine readable.</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">The point about it
being machine readable is that the standardisation of terms makes it
easy to import and convert object descriptions into a more complex
schema (as well as auto generate catalogue entries in the standard house style.)</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">So why did I use a
folksonomy rather than pillaging an existing controlled vocabulary?</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Well, folksonomies
are simple, make sense to the humans doing the cataloguing – in
this case it was only me, but if someone else had joined me on the
project it would have been fairly simple to write down a set of
definitions so that everything was classified the same way.</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">I’ve found in the
past that using a controlled vocabulary doesn’t really work – the people actually doing the cataloguing tend to find them too complex to work
with, and as a consequence you tend to find one person’s bottle is
another person’s jar.</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">So, in cataloguing
as in so much else in life, keeping things simple pays dividends...</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</p>dgmhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16429298708780406789noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4502708134478300805.post-22357098835322562272023-08-14T14:58:00.003+10:002023-08-14T15:55:41.202+10:00The costs of citizen science (part ii)<p>Until very recently I've been volunteering as, what I'm not sure - something between a cataloguer and a curator - to document the contents of Dow's pharmacy in Chiltern.</p><p>Back in 2020 <a href="https://knowledgegeek.blogspot.com/2020/02/the-costs-of-citizen-science.html">I blogged about the costs of being a volunteer</a>.</p><p>While they're not substantial, they do exist, but equally I've spent just as much money on my other interests - researching Victorian murderers, old cameras and family history, so I can't really complain.</p><p>However, coincident with finishing up on Dow's I filled in this year's tax return. </p><p>I don't work, I'm retired and we live on our superannuation and aged pension payments, but I also get a small pension from the UK Department of Work and Pensions.</p><p>The fiction is that this is treated as if it was earned income and taken into account by both Centrelink and the Australian Tax Office. It normally sits comfortably below the thresholds for tax or being penalised for working while claiming Centrelink benefits, but recently our dollar has not being doing that well against the pound, its value has increased.</p><p>So, I wondered if there was a way of offsetting expenses incurred as a volunteer against tax, just as I did when I was working.</p><p>The answer's utterly unambiguous. </p><p>No.</p><p>The ATO has the perfectly reasonable viewpoint that if you are a volunteer, you are donating your time freely, and cannot be deemed an employee or self-employed. Interestingly the ATO do recognise that you may have out of pocket expenses as a volunteer and that rather than reclaiming petty cash payments for things like rubber gloves and notebooks, <a href="https://www.ato.gov.au/Non-profit/Types-of-Not-for-profit-workers/Not-for-profit-volunteers/paying-volunteers/">it's perfectly acceptable to be paid as small honorarium</a>, ie an ex gratia lump sum payment in lieu of any petty cash expenses incurred.</p><p>In fact it's a pretty sensible approach.</p><p>However, we have a little problem here. In both the ATO's view, and organisation such as <a href="https://www.volunteeringvictoria.org.au/">Volunteering Victoria</a>, a volunteer is a volunteer, no matter what they do. </p><p>So, if you go along to an archaeological project, say, and wash pottery fragments, you'll have a great time and probably won't have much in the way of out of pocket expenses. If you volunteer as a finds officer on the same project, collecting and documenting these fragments, you'll need gloves, tweezers, magnifying glasses and access to a computer, and perhaps some cloud storage for data backup.</p><p>Again the costs are minimal, but may be a barrier to some people lending their expertise.</p><p>Having done the whole volunteer thing I think there regrettably needs to be a bit more formality about the process of becoming a volunteer with some sort of dummy contract that as well as rights and responsibilities, covers how minor expenses will be handled, hopefully in a way that does not cause a bureaucratic overhead.</p>dgmhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16429298708780406789noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4502708134478300805.post-82526084118318674982023-08-12T14:12:00.004+10:002023-08-12T14:21:34.377+10:00Digitisation - what is it good for?<p>I'm sure everybody who works on digitisation projects has at some point worked with material so obscure that you wondered 'what's the bloody point?'</p><p>I certainly have. Not the big ticket stuff like Trove, but boring stuff like the correspondence of an obscure, and clearly personality challenged Victorian botanist whose private diary includes such gems as </p><p><i>'Matilda came to tea today and we discussed saxifrages'</i></p><p>Yeah, exactly.</p><p>However, I have a personal story to show that all data is valuable.</p><p>Twenty years ago, when I was (just) still living in England, I had an operation for varicose veins.</p><p>It's something that runs in my family, like my having slightly high blood pressure, my brother had them, my father had them, I had them.</p><p>And it wasn't due to lifestyle. My father swam, went walking, rode his bike well into his seventies and played golf as long as he was able to. My brother played cricket well into his forties. I went bushwalking and rode my bike, as well as running a decent distance three or four times a week.</p><p>As I say it's genetics, and unfortunately the cards you're dealt aren't always the best.</p><p>So, shortly before I moved permanently to Australia I had quite a radical procedure to strip out the damaged veins. Given the genetic component, it wasn't a guaranteed fix, and there was a 10-20% risk of recurrent varicosities associated with the procedure.</p><p>Well, for about fifteen years everything was fine, but one day when were at the beach J noticed a knotty purple patch behind my left knee. It wasn't painful, and if I rode my bike a bit more than usual it seemed to diminish, but it was clear that it wasn't going to go away.</p><p>So, I arranged to go and see a specialist. </p><p>Didn't happen, the pandemic intervened and all treatment for non life threatening conditions was postponed.</p><p>Now I couldn't remember the precise details of the procedure, or the date. But I had read that you could ask the NHS in Britain for a copy of your case notes as a freedom of information thing.</p><p>So I emailed the hospital where I was treated and asked them if they still had my case notes as I wished to pass them to my specialist in Australia.</p><p>I fully expected that they would say no, they had long since been pulped, but to my great surprise, they said yes, they still had some of my records and even better, they had been digitised.</p><p>So after some to and fro over how I was to prove I was me - we settled on a scan of my passport and my UK national insurance number - they packaged up what they had for me to download as a password protected zip file.</p><p>They didn't have everything, but they had the details of the procedure, the results of the pre operation diagnostic tests, and the post operative assessment, which is probably all my Australian specialist will need when I see her next week.</p><p>So, key takeaway, digitisation and digital archiving is a good thing - it might just save you some pain and discomfort down the track...</p><p><br /></p>dgmhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16429298708780406789noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4502708134478300805.post-91454834399129431152023-08-10T15:56:00.002+10:002023-08-10T17:52:40.156+10:00Well we've finally got an FTTP connection ...<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSKwizn938-KbQ1eO8IvWgSDDgXbflhonpBtS1h9dJAN439OTm1thQb0KwAr0Es5Do6jvJWesTZG65F0adDc6sKWGSkEelLMywn24HbqAS2ShTKz1mB5nAuXElJH_QL0LT9ehYJoe_pjHweNDFrGjprVpajNAfHwFySEkDeRfOc4yxe1GFdgqG29RSUYc/s706/Screenshot%202023-08-10%20150401.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="706" data-original-width="631" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSKwizn938-KbQ1eO8IvWgSDDgXbflhonpBtS1h9dJAN439OTm1thQb0KwAr0Es5Do6jvJWesTZG65F0adDc6sKWGSkEelLMywn24HbqAS2ShTKz1mB5nAuXElJH_QL0LT9ehYJoe_pjHweNDFrGjprVpajNAfHwFySEkDeRfOc4yxe1GFdgqG29RSUYc/s320/Screenshot%202023-08-10%20150401.png" width="286" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Well, we've finally got a <a href="http://knowledgegeek.blogspot.com/2023/07/some-fttp-progress.html">working FTTP connection</a>.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">The NBN technicians came and installed our FTTP box yesterday - unfortunately they couldn't put it where we wanted it so it ended up under one of the study windows on the wall without power sockets and is currently connected to power via an extension lead and to the modem via a 10m cat5e cable I just happened to have.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Ideally this should probably be a cat6 cable, but being country, you can't just nip out and buy a 10m network cable, you need to order one and wait for it to come in the mail. However swapping the cable is incredibly straight forward and the NBN people even give you a little guide as to how to pop the top of the FTTP box to swap the cable, so I don't think it's going to be a drama.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Apart from having to end up on the 'wrong' wall the physical installation was fine. Any confusion in the process came from the NBN and Telstra people using different scripts.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">For example, Telstra called me the day before and checked if we were ready to go ahead (we were), and explicitly said that after the physical installation, I should keep everything connected to the (old) FTTC connection.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">The NBN people of course swapped everything to the new FTTP connection, which even though physically connected didn't work as there has to be a migration process by Telstra.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Our modem, which has automatic failover to 5G, did exactly that, much to my surprise.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Normally it just complains about a poor signal - I'm guessing we must have finally have got coverage, even if it's not officially in production yet.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Anyway, I swapped it back to the old FTTC wiring for the afternoon and was duly rewarded with a working connection.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">In their usual helpful way, Telstra then sent me an email to say that they were going to transfer the service from FTTC to FTTP, but to stay connected to FTTC, closely followed by one say they couldn't see the modem on the FTTP service.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I'd already got the cables in place to swap over between the connections and plugged in the FTTP connection, and hey presto!, it worked.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">There's still a few minor details to be sorted out, including what to do with the old NBN FTTC box that has a sticker on it saying it belongs to NBNco and should not be removed from the premises, but we'll get there ...</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><br /><p></p>dgmhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16429298708780406789noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4502708134478300805.post-24174754692039746342023-08-04T15:39:00.003+10:002023-08-04T15:39:35.766+10:00I might actually have finished ...<p> If you've been following this blog, you'll be aware that I've spent the last <a href="http://knowledgegeek.blogspot.com/2017/08/documenting-artefacts-methodology.html">six years documenting </a> the contents of <a href="https://www.nationaltrust.org.au/places/dows-pharmacy/">Dow's Pharmacy</a> in Chiltern for the National Trust.</p><p>Due to the pandemic, the whole exercise has taken longer than it should, but even so, four and a bit years of work has gone into it.</p><p>Well I'm finished now. Possibly not finished finished, as there were a couple of ambiguities in the brief that might see me back to document some unprovenanced material, but even so, it's more or less done.</p><p>I've had a lot of fun doing it, but now that it's over, I'm strangely relieved ...</p>dgmhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16429298708780406789noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4502708134478300805.post-76659113019633297162023-08-04T12:28:00.004+10:002023-08-04T16:46:42.190+10:00An unexpected plus with the lightweight machine<p> As I'm sure you're all to aware, a lot of modern software tends to assume the presence of an internet link, if only to sync local filestore contents to a cloud service in real time.</p><p>The prime example is Apple's Pages, especially when used on an iPad, but a lot of Microsoft office products are heading that way as well</p><p>On the whole this is a plus, but sometimes it can be a pain if you are working somewhere with poor connectivity, such as a hole in a paddock, otherwise known as an archaeological dig.</p><p>One unexpected benefit of my <a href="http://knowledgegeek.blogspot.com/2023/07/another-iteration-of-lightweight.html">current iteration of the lightweight research machine</a> is that it doen't require an internet connection to do its stuff.</p><p>Sure it's useful, but not necessary.</p><p>I'd like to say that this was a deliberate design feature, but I didn't really think about the zero connectivity scenario, I'd become so used to having connectivity, if only over a 4G modem link.</p><p>Dumping everything in <span style="font-family: courier;">~/documents</span> and then running <span style="font-family: courier;">deja dup</span> when one gets back to base, or even a coffee shop with decent wifi, meets the requirements to back up work in progress, but allows you to work offline when required.</p><p>For the really paranoid, or really remote, work in progress data can be written to a usb stick as a backup.</p><p>Simples really. </p>dgmhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16429298708780406789noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4502708134478300805.post-56348496412196191952023-07-25T14:14:00.003+10:002023-08-04T12:39:02.309+10:00Hardware reuse and recycling<p> I recently boosted a post about how some US school systems have come up against a problem with Chromebooks - the fact <a href="https://ausglam.space/@mcc@mastodon.social/110771429897549868">they fall off the supported hardware list </a>after about five or six years.</p><p>This is a problem.</p><p>Often the hardware has more life left in it that the artificial cut off date, and while in the past I've used a <a href="https://knowledgegeek.blogspot.com/2021/10/the-dance-of-dying-chromebook.html">chromebook well past its use by date</a>, this is not something that you would want to do in a production environment where you need everything to be kept at (more or less) the same release level.</p><p>Now, you might think I would go all precious and point to how I turned a 10 year old refurbished machine into a <a href="https://knowledgegeek.blogspot.com/2023/07/another-iteration-of-lightweight.html">decent little research workhorse</a>, but I won't.</p><p>It's one thing for me to do this, it's another thing to do this at scale and provide a supported environment, simply because to do it at scale would need technicians to do the installation and troubleshooting, some user training, and a little helpdesk team to support the user community. And that of course costs - human beings are incredibly expensive to employ compared with the other costs involved.</p><p>I'm not saying it couldn't be done, but to quote a former colleague 'yes, but you're you', ie I have the experience, expertise and technical skills to put together a solution that works for me.</p><p>Not everyone does so, nor should we expect them to.</p><p>What one of course needs is an easy to install, easy to maintain, Chromebook like environment with some user support behind it.</p><p>Given that most educational services have a set of preferred hardware this ought to be possible to deliver, but other than a few experiments in Latin America, such as <a href="https://knowledgegeek.blogspot.com/2015/11/huayra-31.html">Huayra</a>, I'm damned if I can think of one ...</p><p><i><b>[update 04/08/2023]</b></i></p><p>One of the problems with the longterm support of Chromebooks is that often they use weird processors rather than the standard Intel range, which complicates the problem of updating them to an alternate operating system for long term support.</p><p>However, I've just learned of a new project, <a href="https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/03/lacros_extends_chromeos_lifespan/">LaCros</a>, that aims to allow you to install an updated browser on top of the old ChromeOS monolithic operating system and browser binary.</p><p>As the browser component is updated more frequently than the operating system on Chromebooks this potentially provides a way of running a more recent and secure browser on an older version of the underlying operating system.</p>dgmhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16429298708780406789noreply@blogger.com0