Stuff, geeky stuff
Computing, archiving, digital media, and a bit of historical speculation
Tuesday 5 November 2024
Owner bound sheet music in the nineteenth century
Friday 1 November 2024
Really popular authors in the nineteenth century
Up at the Athenaeum I've been working on the heritage book collection, which basically consists of all the books bought by the Reading room from the early 1860s to the 1950s.
Uniquely, the collection was never broken up, so we can get a picture from its contents of what people actually wanted to read.
Sometimes a book was so popular that they bought a second copy, and sometimes a book was so worn it was replaced with a newer edition, so following on from my previous post what were the good folk of Stanley reading in the 1870s and 1880s?
Totally unscientifically, I roughly scanned the collection listing for a number of well known nineteenth century authors - as some books from the period don't have a date of publication in the front matter (Not all nineteenth century publishers included a date of publication on either the title page or its reverse) and just to add to the fun some books have multiple copies with different dates and different publishers - I resorted to manual scan of the collection listing.
And what did I find?
Sensation novels mostly, Wilkie Collins, Mary Braddon as well as Louisa M. Alcott, Bulwer-Lytton, plus more than a dash of Charles Dickens.
There are more serious books as well, Charles Darwin's Origin of the Species, books on poultry raising and so on, bust basically, just like us, they liked a dash of excitement in their bedtime reading ...
Wednesday 30 October 2024
Really popular literature in the nineteenth century
Recently, I've been cataloguing the books used to 'dress' Lakeview, ie nineteenth century books bought as job lots at auctions and from garage sales that are used as props to help give the impression of what the house would be like when people actually lived there in the late nineteenth century.
The books fall into roughly two categories - boring didactic books of overtly Christian stories, often given as prizes for 'general advancement and conduct' at Sunday school, and books by popular authors of the time such as Charles Dickens and Louisa M. Alcott.
Well, while it's hardly a scientific study, one thing that is noticeable is the the more popular books have damaged spines, are more likely to have been given as presents for birthdays, and quite worn, suggesting that they have been read and reread, possibly by several generations
Saturday 26 October 2024
A wifi enabled cat feeder
We are a cat keeping household, which can be a problem when we both need to be away overnight,
Up to now we've relied on these cheap plastic gravity fed cat feeders, which work but have their own problems, including a tendency to sometimes jam.
One of our cats, Lucy, is a bit of a guzzler, and is not above stealing some of our other cat's food. At home we feed them together and make sure that Oscar gets to eat his dinner while Lucy eats hers.
So we decided we needed something a little more sophisticated and settled on a wifi enabled cat feeder
Saturday 12 October 2024
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.
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...
Thursday 10 October 2024
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...
Monday 7 October 2024
Chamber pots, provenance, and globalisation
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.
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.