An experiment with Lubuntu

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

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

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

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

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

Reverting to Jammy Jellyfish

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chamber pots, provenance, and globalisation

 

F Winkle potters mark on chamberpot base

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

So where were these chamber pots made?

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

• Wedgewood

• Swinnerton’s 

• J and G Meakin

• Johnson Brothers

• W H Grindley

• Thomas Poole and Gladstone Staffordshire

• F Winkle

•  W Adderley

And from Australia:

• Hoffman Brunswick Australia

• Robert Fowler (Australia)

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

How do I know this?

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

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

But then perhaps that's not so surprising.

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

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

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

Provenancing oil lamps

 Oil lamps were a feature of the Victorian age.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some fun with Ubuntu sandboxes

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

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

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

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

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

It simply didn't start.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Lake View House documentation project has restarted

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Haval Jolion

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

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

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

Well we didn’t.

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

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

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

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

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

And there’s a story here:

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

Dramatically.

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

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

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