Xubuntu on an i5 based Thinkpad

 

I had an old Thinkpad running Windows 10 (and I do mean old - it's a 2013 vintage T440) that I used for the latter half of the Dow's project cataloguing, and for cataloguing the contents of Lake View.

I even used it for some of my work up at the Athenaeum before I changed over to using a Windows 11 based Acer Spin for my cataloguing work.

Since then it's basically just sat on my desk in the outside studio, so yesterday I decided to install Xubuntu on it.

Why Xubuntu and not full Ubuntu?

Well, Ubuntu's quite a big beast these days and given that the machine only had a 128GB SSD and 4MB of RAM, I thought a lighter weight distro might be a better choice, and anyway, I havn't played with Xubuntu for a few years. 

In fact not seriously since the 2000's when, for a couple of years I used it on an old PPC based iMac, although I did use it on and off as a lighter weight alternative to Ubuntu, before switching almost exclusively to Crunchbang as a preferred lightweight distro sometime around 2020.

So, download the image. Only available as a torrent but I did have µtorrent installed, so that wasn't an issue, just a little tedious.

I then ran Rufus to make myself an install USB.

As always I chose to write it using dd format rather than Rufus's default hybrid iso format, as over the years I've found that the dd format USB's boot and install more reliably.

Well not this time.

After it booted from the USB it sat there saying GRUB with a blinking cursor.

Basically it didn't work.

Googling produced all sorts of absurdly technical suggestions that I was not going to pursue, so I wiped the USB using diskpart and rewrote it using Rufus's hybrid ISO default.

This time it booted into the live environment and allowed me to install Xubuntu from there.

Once installed it rebooted cleanly.

I'm going to guess that the firmware had some strange mismatch with the bootable dd format USB but I don't really know.

I'm putting this down to experience. 

As I said, I've had trouble with hybrid format volumes not booting and always used to go for dd as the more reliable choice, but I've learned now to always try the hybrid volume if the other one fails...

Distraction free writing

 Back in August last year, I took an old Chromebook which had turned out not to be as useful as I hoped and installed Crunchbang++ Linux on it.

Inadvertantly, I seem to have made myself a distraction free writing machine.

Why? How?

Well, when it starts up there are no background programs running. No mail client, no virus checker, nothing. That and a very sparse interface - the OpenBox window manager in its default configuration reminds me of one of these eighties hacker games, where you started with a blank screen and had to guess the correct magic sequence of keys to get it to do anything.

So, want a text editor to knock out some dot points?

Right click and select 'text editor'. Being venerable, and having started before wysiwyg screen displays happened, I'm comfortable with markup and happily knock out dot pointers with Markdown style markup.

(if you prefer something a bit more wysiwyg focuswriter works well

giving you a distraction free editing experience and can produce .odt and .docx files as well as plain text if required)

If you want something a little less minimalist to produce a document with a bit of inline formatting I use Abiword - not the best or greatest word processor on the planet, but good enough for drafting a document, a blog post of whatever, and with the great benefit of being able to reliably save files as either .odt or .docx.

All these applications are small and light, and don't need an internet connection to work - offline working is fine. 

And needless to say, this solution is AI free, and the data stays in local storage until you actually decide to save it to some online storage solution.

That said, these days it's useless to pretend the internet doesn't exist, so I have firefox installed to let me check wikipedia etc, and having firefox installed means it's easy to upload the draft to somewhere cloudy, from where I usually finish it off on an Ubutu or Windows based device as appropriate.

The other reason it has turned out to be useful, is that the machine itself is small and light, but despite that, having been built for classroom use it's robustly made, and has a decent screen and a keyboard that's easy and comfortable to type on

even on your knees - not the most ergonomic way of working, but unlike using a bulkier or heavier device it's perfectly usable, even if cramped in a bus.

There's nothing special here, it's just a combination of form factor and operating environment, and as such, it's a recipe, not a design.

Any smaller laptop will do, for example a Lenovo Ideapad 1, or similar. If you're going to try going down this path, be aware that some older laptops, for example Dell Latitudes, can be a bit bulkier and heavier, and really need to be used on a desk or a fold out table on a train or bus.

And of course, the operating environment is important. The minimalism of the default setup of the OpenBox window manager means that it's distraction free out of the box...

Using the phone camera stand

 A couple of weeks ago I bought myself a 3D printed phone camera stand off of ebay.

At the time I said that the component fit was a little loose.

This means that the stand does not hold the phone at exactly 90° to the vertical, which leads to potential perspective distortion.

Using it to photograph small objects like coins this not a serious issue

any slight perspective distortion is hardly noticeable.

With larger objects such as postcards, it's a bit more of a problem

producing pictures where the top is a little wider than the bottom.

For practical purposes this does not matter, it's still perfectly legible for transcription purposes, but, aesthetically ...

Now I do a lot of my image transcription and manipulation on J's old imac, which runs Ubuntu, so any solution would have to be Linux based.

Googling mentioned perspec as an automatic utility, or as an alternative Darktable which is interactive, in that you manually select the image, run an automated perspective analysis tool, and then, if you like the result, bascially click on 'fix this please'.

After a little bit of trial and error I managed to produce this fixed image

which, I think you'll agree, is a bit better as regards perspective.

Quietly pleased, and certainly something I'll use again when preparing images for use in presentations and so on...

Hygenic Libraries in the 1950s

 I'd been assuming that hygenic libraries were a feature of the years between the first and second world wars, especially after the 1919 flu pandemic and subsequent repeat outbreaks, as well as several severe outbreaks of polio in Melbourne in the 1930s.

While it's true that the arrival of antibiotics after the second world war got rid of a whole range of bacterial diseases such as tuberculosis,  almost overnight, that was not the case with viral diseases such as polio - there was no effective vaccine until the mid 1950s, and treatment was still pretty basic.

So, it's probably no great surprise that commercial hygenic libraries persisted into the 1950s as seen in this library sticker inside a Mills and Boon romance published in 1952.

Perhaps, not such a surprise - I remember as a child in Scotland in the early 1960s (well before vaccination for measles, rubella and mumps) that library books from the city library came with a stern warning that in the event of an outbreak of disease in the household they should be returned not to the library but to the town medical officer for sterlisation. 

I even have a vague memory of going to the old mansion in Randolphfield (long gone, and now replaced by the police headquarters building) used as offices by the Chief Medical Officer with my mother to return books for sterilisation after a bout of chickenpox when I was seven or eight, which would make it 1963 or 64...

Cuts, cuts, cuts !

 It's that time of year when councils and state governments start to think about saving money, and inevitably they look at their GLAM services (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums), and wonder if they can make some cost savings

which these days that usually means letting people go, which inevitably means a loss of expertise locally, and you can't just replace that expertise with a succession of interns.

Sure, they may be good technically, and some are very good, but they don't have the experience or indeed the social network that your now down sized archivist or conservator has built up over the years.

And when you complain you inevitably get comments along the lines of 'you can get it all on YouTube nowadays' or 'who needs libraries, Amazon provides a better service', comments that reveal complete ignorance on the part of our local legislators of what the GLAM services deliver.

I've worked in universities, I've worked in cultural institutions, and for ten years after I retired I volunteered with the National Trust on a collections documentation project, and now, because I like messing about with old documents, artefacts and computers, I'm cataloguing the historic book collection at Stanley Athenaeum, as well as the usual bits and pieces - first level IT support mostly - on the side.

The Athenaeum functions as a family history resource for the area and we get visitors from across Australia and New Zealand trying to trace how their forebears ended up where they did.

We're all volunteers. Quite a few of us won't see seventy again.

And inevitably, as we all get older, some of us will give up due to ill health, or just getting too old to do it any more - we have a continual struggle to attract and retain committed volunteers.

Some of us know about local and family history, and can coax valuable information out of  both Ancestry and the Public Records office with ease, some of us have a some sort of a heritage cum museum background and bring those skill to the table, and some of us are just interested. We're all experts in our own way, but we'd all admit that we have gaps in our skills and our knowledge.

And this is where having access to a funded resource like our local museums is invaluable, often to simply talk to one of the professional archivists or conservators.

Yes, it's true sometimes I use YouTube to find out how best to do something, but then we all do that, these days - even my GP does it, like when she says in the midst of a consultation "I'm not sure, I'll just check Google".

And as heritage services become more and more attenuated, and increasingly shift to a volunteer based model, local professional core institutions become more and more valuable for the support role they provide as a local centre of expertise and the specialist facilities they can provide, and indeed for providing continuity, given the inevitable churn among the volunteer community (and the loss of skills that goes with the churn).

And that's something you can't just get from a YouTube video...

A phone camera stand...

 Documenting small artefacts like coins at home is a pain.

They're small, they're fiddly and they need to be photographed at a fairly high resolution.

Often the best camera to hand is your phone, and holding it steady to get a straight down shot is tricky.

So, when an advert for a phone camera stand like this popped into my facebook feed, I was interested so I went digging and found the same items for sale a little cheaper on ebay

Well, it was only just over twenty bucks, so I thought I'd give it a go.

It arrived as a set of plastic bits (I'm guessing 3D printed) with no instructions

but assembly was fairly intuitive

and with my phone in place the end result looks like this

Assembled, it's a little wobbly - the fit of the components is not particularly tight, but the image quality produced is more than reasonable at a 320% zoom on my phone as in this image of a 1928 Irish Free State penny. (Incidentally, the phone used is nothing special, a mid range Android phone, an Oppo Reno 4 bought as a runout model in 2023. I'm guessing just about any standard form factor phone will work with the stand.)

For what it cost, I think I've got myself a bargain.

Obviously I could glue the bits together to make a more rigid structure, but I've decided to keep them as is for the moment, as that will make the item more easily transportable in one of my gear boxes for onsite documentation ...

Well it's Friday, so it's cataloguing time

 After last week's hiatus, it was back to normal with my Friday cataloguing session up at the Athenaeum.

No real finds this week but a couple of little items that connected with other things I've written about recently.

In the end papers of a copy of Dan the Dollar by Shan Bullock, and published in the early 1900's by Maunsell's in Dublin, there's an advert for a literary magazine, edited by W.B. Yeats, which uses Irish script for items written in Irish. 

I've written elsewhere about how, before 1916, Irish intellectuals self consciously used Irish script to construct an Irish identity separate from the prevailing Anglo Irish identity. It's interesting to see it used in print as early as 1905 as well as in handwritten communications such as postcards.

The other interesting item was a bookseller's label fro Stephen's in Melbourne on an 1866 book by Elihu Burritt describing a walk from London to John O'Groats in the far north of Scotland.

As the accession registers are missing we have no idea when and from where the Athenaeum acquired the book but I'll wave my hands about and guess some time between 1866 and 1876.

What's interesting is that the sticker says 'New Books, Magazines and Newspapers received by every mail steamer'.

This of course meant books and magazines imported from England, as well as newspapers, and suggests that Stephens had a regular order for English newspapers and magazines, as well as for new books.

While it's not quite the same Orwell, in Burmese Days, his novel based on his experiences in colonial Burma in the 1920s, talks of going to an English language bookshop in Rangoon to look at the latest books from England. So too it must have been in Melbourne in the 1860s and 70s before books began to be printed locally.

Before Australia was connected by telegraph in the 1870s to the rest of the planet, newpapers brought by mail steamers were the principal source of overseas news (There's the probably apocryphal story of a wealthy member of the squatocracy who had a copy of that day's Times of London posted to him every day, and when they arrived in batches via the mail steamer, stacked them in order and read them one at a time with breakfast.)

What it also shows is the importance of the mail reaching the mail steamer in time, and hence the use by the postal service of a 'Too Late' postmark when the mail missed the boat (literally)...