Technology and the road trip

 As I've written elsewhere, we're just back from a road trip to Port Lincoln in South Australia.

Technologywise, we took more or less the same as we took to Tasmania  last year - I took the HP ProBook which continues to function well as a travel computer, supplemented by the little Lenovo M8 tablet to read the news in the morning, and my second hand Canon Powershot.

I did take a film camera with me as well but it ended up staying in the bag for the whole trip.

Everywhere we stayed provided internet, but of variable quality - for example in Glenelg the internet in the short stay apartment was quite slow, and we ended up using my 4G travel modem, especially as J had to make a zoom call one morning.

In other places, for example in our rental cottage in Goolwa it was blisteringly fast.

In a couple of places, motels used these damn captive portal solutions where you have to jump through hoops to log on, and we simply used the 4G modem in preference as it provided reasonable speed for minimal hassle ...

Landfill and Windows 10

 Back in February I was fairly scathing about a news report that suggested that the end of support for Windows 10 would result in a tide of older machines incapable of running Windows 11 being dumped in landfill.

I still don't think that will be the case as regards home users and most corporates have made the jump already - most corporates replace machines every three or four years - but it is interesting that my favourite supplier of cheap refurbished laptops is running a promotion on cheap sub $300 laptops and almost all the machines are Windows 10 machines - most of their more expensive offerings are Windows 11 based suggesting that some corporate are already into their first Windows 11 refresh.

It also suggests that most of the buyers of refurbished machines are already on the lookout for a Windows 11 machine as a second machine, which does tend to suggest they are not installing linux on them.

And yet linux does have an advantage in that it is not the product of an American megacorp, and in these days of uncertainty about the USA and its role in the world, there may increasingly be people who would prefer their computer operating system to be independent of the megacorps.

And it's not just the paranoid - there are cases of various governments moving to linux, or at least experimenting with it as an option.

Perhaps and just perhaps, and given some people's dislike for AI in everything, the end of Windows 10 might nudge the uptake of linux on the desktop along a bit ...

Documenting artefacts - a tweak to the mechanicals

 For the last eight or nine years I've been volunteering as a cataloguer for the National Trust of Victoria, first documenting the contents of Dow's pharmacy in Chiltern, and then Lake View House, also in Chiltern.

And the methodology I use has not changed much from the method I first described back in 2017.

There were some changes along the way, such as the use of One Drive directly rather than uploading the data from a USB stick at the end of the day but the procedure at the end of the project was still essentially the same, as is the procedure used at Lake View, except that the data is entered into a spreadsheet designed to ease the ingest of the data into the Trust's digital asset management system - so while the way I structure the data may have changed, the procedure is basically the same starting with a descriptive entry written in longhand in an A4 notebook which is transcribed into the appropriate columns of the data entry spreadsheet.

As a procedure it's robust and it works well - don't knock it, and longhand entries in notebooks have a certain permanence.

But yesterday, I tried a slightly different procedure.

I was working on the contents of the kitchen, which is a detached brick building separate to the main house. The kitchen lacks power sockets, and lacks any free surface on which to write, the available surfaces being covered in exhibits, and I didn't want to have to carry artefacts from the kitchen to the main house to document them one by one.

However, we have plastic chairs in store for outside presentations etc and a large brick floor area suitable for photographing artefacts on against a white sheet (and equally if I needed to use my lightbox, it can be run off a powerbank).

So, I thought, why not take a second laptop in, sit on one of the plastic chairs, and create a basic spreadsheet not unlike the original ones I made up at Dow's and then cut and paste the data as required into the bigger and more formal spreadsheet.

To do this I used my linux based IdeaPad 1 and created a base spreadsheet using Libre Office Calc

There's nothing magical about using Linux here, you could equally well use a Mac or a Chromebook, or even a second windows device.

I settled on the IdeaPad as it has decent battery life and can drive my endoscope if required to capture a makers name or serial number on an artefact. I did think about using my lightweight research machine but the lack of power sockets in the kitchen worked against it - it only manages two to three hours on a full charge, and can be slow to recharge. The IdeaPad usually manages a little over four hours on a charge and recharges fairly quickly meaning it can be charged over lunch for an afternoon session.

Likewise there's nothing special about using Libre Office Calc, Numbers or a Mac or Google sheets on a ChromeBook, the only special thing I did was save the spreadsheet in a recent Excel 365 format.

After documenting about ten or twelve artefacts - which roughly takes an hour I would upload the spreadsheet to a scratch work area on One Drive via the web interface.

Documentation sessions are separated on the worksheet by blank lines to make sure that we are copying the correct data - it would be a bit of a problem if objects were accidentally duplicated.

I would then go across to the main house and my desk, and on my main work computer - a Thinkpad running Windows 10 cut and paste data from the scratch spreadsheet to the main sheet, doing any editing and restructuring required along the way, and add in the photo data.

While it sounds a bit of a pfaff, I found that not having to retype the data entries from my longhand notes did speed the process up a bit.

Obviously I could have simply uploaded the data and taken it home to work on, but I did want to check the quality of the photographs as I went, and perhaps do a little basic photo editing to make a makers' name or feature clearer.

All in all, I think using a second machine like this was a win, even if the procedure sounds a little clumsy...

Microsoft are closing Skype

 I had an email this morning from Microsoft to tell me they are closing Skype.

Back in the early days Skype was invaluable, allowing me to keep in touch with my parents who lived overseas - allowing me to call my father daily as my mother was slowly dying, and the same thing to my brother when my father died, not to mention interminable conversations with lawyers on the other side of the planet to sort out his estate.

I used to use Skype to call home when travelling overseas, and for work calls to colleagues overseas and in Australia.

Through sheer inertia, I still have a Skype account and a Skype number, even though the need for them has disappeared.

Once, when internet coverage was patchy, long distance and international calls were still pricy, and phones didn't support internet calling, the ability to call someone's land line or mobile for a few cents was a godsend.

Nowadays, everyone has a smartphone, and we have alternatives such as WhatsApp, Google Meet, and Zoom, the pandemic darling application, Skype has perhaps outlived its usefulness.

Still, it was good while it lasted, and almost unique as an application that genuinely added to the quality of life.

Endoscope fun

 After my fun trying to photograph a typewriter serial number I had a look into the cost of endoscope cameras, and basic units are amazingly cheap these days - for less than the cost of a couple of beers I picked up this little toy from Amazon

to which I added a USB C converter and plugged it into my Ubuntu laptop, ran up cheese (a webcam management app), and selected the USB device, and hey presto! - it just worked

and if you've ever wondered what a 20c coin looks like in close up, here's a test image

Ok, it's not the greatest quality photograph, but I'm quietly impressed that it took me longer to get it out of the Amazon delivery satchel than it did to get it working ...

Finding Catherine

 Really this post should be titled 'Finding Katherine'.

As is my wont, I thought I would delve a little into the life of Catherine Scragg, the young woman assaulted on a train near Shrewsbury, close to the border between England and Wales, in August 1887.

I do this, in part, to humanise them and make them more than simply a name on a page.

At first Catherine seemed incredibly elusive, she seemed not to exist in the 1881 census.

Well that just shows that you shouldn't believe everything you read in the newspapers. Catherine was in fact Katherine, and was in fact born in 1866, making her 21 or 22 at the time of the attack not 25 as in some of the reports of the time.

As newspapers of the time tended to copy from each other with wild abandon, and fact checking was an unknown construct, the mistakes were reproduced over and over again.

However, the Shropshire Assizes for October 1887 correctly list her as Katherine Scragg. As there's only one Katherine Scragg in the 1881 census for the Stoke on Trent area (her parents lived in 41 Talbot Street in Hanley - checking on Google StreetView suggests that the house is long gone - and she was returning from a visit home when she was attacked) we can be reasonably certain that she was the same Katherine Scragg listed in the 1881 census as a pupil teacher.

But what of her life after the assault?

Well, there is a Katherine Scragg listed in both the 1891 and 1901 census listed as working as a school teacher in Cheslyn Hay in the English midlands between Wolverhampton and Lichfield, and not really that far from Stoke on Trent.

I'm not able to find when she died, but there's a hint that she may have married later in life, but to run that down is going to require a trip to the library to use their copy of  ancestry ...

Goodbye Lubuntu, hello Ubuntu

 

You might remember, back in October, that after my troubles with the latest Ubuntu upgrade and my Lenovo Ideapad, as an experiment I installed Lubuntu on the old Dell Latitude E5250 that I'd bought J as a stopgap machine when her old machine carked it at the start of the pandemic.

As an experiment it was pretty successful, and it's lack of external dependencies - no cloud storage for one - made a useful machine, so useful in fact that I've found myself using it for some family history stuff, especially where I don't necessarily have access to good fast internet. 

Despite the machine being being nine or so years old the machine's pretty responsive, and the keyboard is nice to type on and the screen is nice and bright.

And certainly Lubuntu does not stress the machine - it really is light and fast, and gets the most out of old hardware.

Lubuntu is however a community maintained distribution and as such updates can lag behind the main distribution, and as the machine seemed to be becoming a production machine, I thought I would move it over to standard Ubuntu before I had too much work on it.

So, I backed up my work to a USB stick, burned myself a bootable USB with the latest version of Ubuntu, and rebooted the machine.

I basically just followed the bouncing ball as regards the installation, reinstalled my extra software and copied back my data. Probably took a bit over an hour, but certainly less than two.

On first use the machine seems as capable under Ubuntu as it did under Lubuntu, but as with all these things only time will tell ...