Using google lens to identify an object

 Down at Lake View today I came across this

basically it's a cane covered glass bottle with some weird apparatus on top and the inscription 'By Royal letters patent No. 2'.

I knew I'd seen one before somewhere and had an idea that it might be something to do with soda, as in aerated water, but I was absolutely buggered if I could remember where and what.

So, I pasted the image into Google Lens to do an image search, and it came back with two results, one from the PowerHouse Museum in Sydney, and one from the Sparklets Collector's site - apparently there are people out there who collect old soda syphons.

Crucially the Sparklets Collectors site mentioned that the P01/WK model, made from 1897 to 1913 could have either By Royal Letters Patent No.2 or No.5, as in the PowerHouse museum examples.

Incredibly useful and undoubtedly saved me a bit of head scratching.

I'd previously used Google lens once or twice to help identify the source of an image, and have been impressed by its image finding capabilities, but I'm doubly impressed by the effectiveness of this slightly left field technique to identify artefacts ...

jrnl - a command line journal tool

 Journalling seems to be having a moment.

It gained some traction during covid lockdowns as a way to help give meaning to what was happening - basically as a form of psychotherapy.

Essentially, it's like keeping a diary in which you write down thoughts, feelings, and the fact that the postie looked at you in a funny way this morning.

Well, I'm not going to talk about that sort of journalling, I'm going to talk about something else.

When I was working I always kept notes and records of meetings and so on.

I must admit I wasn't terribly organised about it, and should have written some structured notes about what happened at the end of each day. Eventually I discovered Planner diaries - the ones with a diary page for a week and a notes page - Leuchtturm and Moleskine both produce them, and I'm sure other people do as well.

And that worked pretty well for me.

Fast forward to 2024. I'm retired but I'm volunteering on two entirely separate archiving projects for two separate bodies.

Lets say the possibilities for confusion are infinite, so at the end of each day's volunteering I write my self some notes about what was discussed, what I did and if there needs to be any special preparation for the next weeks work.

And it works for me, and gives me something to check back on if I've forgotten something.

At the same time, sad anorak that I am, I keep a set of of one line gardening notes in a Notable notebook about when things have been planted out, fed, etc.

So I was interested to come across jrnl, a command line journalling tool for Linux and a few other operating systems

For the moment I'm only trying it out, and I've only installed it on my Lenovo IdeaPad, which runs ubuntu.

Ubuntu, provide a snap meaning installation is literally a couple of clicks - I did find that it helps to have decided where you want your journal file to live, before you start - for the moment mine is in the incredibly unimaginative ~/journal/journal.txt

In use it's incredibly simple - type jrnl to get started, type away and then Ctrl+D exit

and the resulting file looks like

which is pretty simple.

Personally, I think of the design of the program points one to creating a series of terse entries along the lines of 'toner cartridge changed in docuprint', whiich is undoubtedly valuable but would probably bear collating with other notes etc in an end of week write up rather than treated as a journal per se.

For example, when I was cataloguing the contents of Dow's I would write some fairly basic weekly notes about the building temperature, whether I had noticed any degradation in any of the artefacts, and which items had been catalogued.

Jrnl would have been an ideal tool for this.

However in creating a single monolithic text file I could see it becoming unwieldy.

You also of course need to think about backup, perhaps by copying it to a cloud based filestore on a periodic basis, or by using a utility such as deja-dup.

That said, I think it's potentially valuable as a tool for capturing what happened during a day's fieldwork etc, without resorting to anything more complicated than a terminal window ...

[update 13 November 2024]

Well, I went to install jrnl on my Lubuntu machine, and found that the Lubuntu software library tool didn't have it in its list of available packages, so I installed it from the application's website using pipx, and ended up with what is obviously a later version.

In usage it's not that different, but importantly it no longer creates a monolithic text file but creates a set of directories ../year/month and creates individual files named date.txt

so, as today's the 13th we have a file called 13.txt, which makes managing the entries much easier, especially when collating them into a weekly report or something similar ...

Owner bound sheet music in the nineteenth century

 

Today, down at Lake View I catalogued some bound sets of sheet music dating from the 1880s or thereabouts.

At first I was a little confused by the collections as some of the sheet music had different people’s names - one waltz in the bound set might have Phoebe Illegible on the cover and another Mary O’Scribble while the volume itself said it belonged to Mary Higgins.

And then I realised - people, particularly in country Australia, in the nineteenth century probably collected and exchanged sheet music just as we used to sell CDs to second hand music shops, and buy others from the same shops - after all a set of sheet music was typically priced at between 2s and 2s 6d - which, using the RBA's inflation calculator, would come out at around between $20 and $30 today allowing for inflation - and strangely enough roughly the cost of a CD.

Sheet music was popular - a quick search of Trove will show any number of stationers offering popular composers at discount.

The reason of course was quite simple - if you wanted music, on the whole you had to make it yourself, or else wait for a travelling music group to pitch up at the local music hall, which outside of the cities could be quite a long wait.

And people crave entertainment, especially in the cold dark nights of winter, where there was nowhere much to go - and remember in small country towns where everyone knew everyone, there was only so far a social soiree could go to alleviate boredom.

So just as people, especially middle class people read books to pass the time, they would also play the piano, the violin, the flute or simply sing to entertain each other, and for that reason, people would have the pieces they especially enjoyed playing bound together to make them more manageable, and more portable, perhaps much as we would gather favourite CDs together to take on a long car trip ...

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 ...

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

while the goody two shoes overtly Christian books seem to have been little read with bindings that are still tight and have undamaged covers.

There's obviously a curatorial risk here - if you select the books in good condition to make a nicer display, do you risk suggesting that people were more overtly religious than they actually were?

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

it's basically just a little machine that doles out about 10g of cat nibbles at set times throughout the day and. having two bowls means that if they are hungry and hear the cat feeder, they can both eat at the same time.

You can get more sophisticated versions with a camera, a speaker and so on so that you can have something kind of like Facetime for Felines, but we just went for the base version.

The device is powered from a USB socket, and has a battery backup so that the furries will still get fed if the power goes out - always something to consider if you live rurally, as we do.

Setup is fairly straightforward, or would have been if I'd remembered to put in the back up battery first.

You download an app and connect via bluetooth to the cat feeder, configure a wifi connection and then configure the device.

It's all fairly intuitive. 

At first I thought wifi was overkill, but actually it turned out to be useful, as the internet connection meant you could check that the cats had been fed, and that something had not gone awry with the device. 

You can also cancel feeding sessions remotely, which meant that once we knew roughly when we were going to be home we could stop it dispensing cat kibble, as we would feed them wet food when we got home.

While we wouldn't want to leave the cats alone for too long with only Radio National for company (perhaps because we have RN on at home in the mornings they've grown to like it as background noise), it does mean that we can leave them alone overnight or possibly even a couple of days if necessary ...

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...