Using a film camera for documentation

 A few days ago I tooted to a link from TVNZ on the discovery of evidence for early cannabis use in Siberia.

Beside the TVNZ report, there's slightly more considered report in the NY Times on the same topic.

But this post is not about drug use among Siberian nomads. Various ancient Greek writers described the peoples they called Scythians getting high, so it's not surprising other peoples did so.

If you look at the NY Times post, you will see that it includes an image of an archaeologist with muddy pants and grubby hands taking photographs to document the excavation site.

Zoom in on the camera being used and amazingly it's an old Zenit film camera

which at first seems rather retro.

Zenit was a well known brand of Soviet film camera and was widely exported to the west.

I know, I used to own one.

Like East German Pracktica cameras they were tough, reliable, and heavy and relatively indestructable.

Zenit, while the holding company is still around, stopped making cameras in the early 2000's when digital conquered all.

So why use a film camera?

A question I found intriguing given that I've been dancing around getting into retro photography ever since the pandemic, and building computer configurations for off grid research - these places with no mobile signal, and possibly no onsite access to electricity - think old wooden churches in steep sided valleys.

In cases like that a film camera doesn't seem such a bad idea. Old Zenit cameras survive the wet and cold well, and even the later cameras have the advantage of having little in the way of on board electronics that can fail catastrophically - something that might well make sense in a Siberian peat bog kilometres from anywhere.

It would be relatively simple when documenting items to make a record along the lines of film x; frame y; top view of grave site z, and then when the film is processed and scanned back at base build a set of documentation spreadsheets not unlike the methodology I used to document Dow's Pharmacy.

And of course, at the end of the process you still have the photographic negatives, and while we worry about being able to access digital images in the future due to technology drift and hardware failures we do know that we can still read 90 year old photographic images on 35mm film.

Likewise, apart from the possibility of using Starlink or something similar, remote peat bogs in Siberia  probably don't have a lot of internet connectivity, so again a robust technology like film might seem to make sense as a recording technology - remember that archaeology is by its very nature destructive, and if you don't record it, it's gone - where using electronic devices and getting the data out might be a challenge.

This is of course all wild speculation on my part. I, of course have no idea why a film camera was being used, maybe the archaeologist concerned just likes using a film camera, but it's a useful exercise to speculate why...

A command line upgrade

 I have an old Dell E5250 that originally ran Lubuntu, and which I later moved over to a full install of Ubuntu, and it's been absolutely fine for what I've used it for, basically for taking up to the library to use their wifi when our ISP has buggered our fibre configuration, and to use the library's copy of Ancestry - the library lets you log in to Ancestry from your own machine as long as you're on their wifi network and signed in to the library management system.

Like many of the Lenovo machines quite a few of the professional grade Dell machines are certified for use with Ubuntu, albeit in the case of the E5250 quite an old version. This means that there's usually no problem as regards low level device drivers,

However,  I've never actually upgraded it to the latest release of Ubuntu - sure I've done periodic software updates, but never a release upgrade, and now was probably the time to do it.

The machine is a little tight as regards memory for the current release of Ubuntu, and under normal circumstances I might have moved it over to Xubuntu, but I decided I'd try doing a do-release-upgrade, after all if it broke, I have my Xubuntu install USB stick ready.

I've had mixed experiences with command line upgrades in the past, but, hey, nothing ventured, nothing gained.

I ran an apt-get update and an apt-get upgrade first to make sure everything was up to date, and rebooted the machine before running the release upgrade command. (All the upgrade command of course need to be run as sudo)

Basically, it just worked. Took about an hour, and unlike the iMac, where a couple of things broke, this time everything seemed fine, and all my data was still where I expected it to be.

I havn't used it seriously yet - if I find it's swapping a lot I'll move it over to Xubuntu, but superficially it seems fine, but it'll be interesting to compare performance with the Yoga 11e.

And just for fun, I installed Xubuntu on the IdeaPad

Two or so years ago I upgraded my Lenovo Ideapad to Ubuntu.

Since then, I've used it principally as a lightweight documentation machine for recording artefacts and  the like, and it's been absolutely rock solid, but I've been aware that it's fairly resource tight (4GB RAM and 64GB eMMC storage) for the full version of Ubuntu.

Despite that, the machine was responsive and was pleasant to use with a decent keyboard and screen, despite being not particularly heavy or bulky to carry round.

However, it was still running 24.10LTS and the time had come when it really should be upgraded.

Unfortunately, Ubuntu's got bigger with each upgrade, and now ideally needs 6GB memory and 25GB disk space, so I decided that since I wasn't actively using the machine at the moment, this was the time to change distros to something a little less resource intensive.

I've had quite a lot of success recently with Xubuntu 26.04 on both my old T440 Thinkpad and my Yoga 11e, both of which have only 4GB RAM, but which have 128GB SSD drives for internal storage, Xubuntu only needing around 2GB RAM and a bit under 10GB disk space.

So this afternoon I sidegraded the IdeaPad to Xubuntu given there's no easy way to upgrade either the memory or storage on the machine.

Slightly tedious, but the install went off without a hitch, and while I had to install Notable, Kate, Focuswriter and a couple of other programs that I use in the documentation process, including Cheese to drive my little endosocope camera, everything just worked

Having the same version of Xubuntu on my three work machines makes maintenance and updates easier to keep in sync, valuable when the machines are occasionally used offline

Taking an old iMac to Ubuntu 26.04LTS

 Mid last year, I converted J's old iMac to Ubuntu, and made a useful machine out of it, so much so that I now use it for a bit of my recreational photographing of old coins and postcards. (Actually, I'm not sure that recreational is the right word, sure, I do it for fun, but then I also apply what I learn and discover to more serious documentation projects.)

Anyway, it's been damn useful, so now that the new long term support version of Ubuntu - 26.04 - is available, I thought I'd upgrade it.

I can't tell you how long it took as I left it going overnight (I've spent too much of my life watching things upload, download and install to have the need to watch the process happen - these days I tend to think that if it breaks I'll get a screen full of error messages...)

Well, I didn't get a screen full of error messages, and when I tested it this morning everything seemed to work just fine

everything that is except jrnl which I use to keep a log of when I make configuration changes to the machine.

It didn't want to play but reinstalling it with pipx install jrnl --force seemed to fix things.

Havn't tried it for serious work yet, but I did do a little perspective correction on an image with darktable (perhaps one of the more pernickety of the apps I use) and seemed absolutely fine ...

[Update 16/10/2026]

Spoke a little too soon, yesterday, when I was photographing an Edward VII quarter anna,  and following my standard workflow, I found that when I tried to use the montage command out of ImageMagick, the install was broken. However after a re install of ImageMagick, everything worked as expected ...

A workflow for photographing coins and old postcards...

 Since I acquired the little 3D printed phone stand for photographing coins and other small objects such as postcards, I’ve developed a little workflow for myself, based around my Android phone and a Linux based computer, in this case an old iMac running the current release of Ubuntu.

Nothing in it is particularly remarkable, but I thought I’d document it in a blog post just in case someone else finds it useful

•         Photograph the object using phone and stand

•         Download image(s) from Google Photos to computer

•         Create a set of directories (1 per object) with human readable names

•         Move images into directories

•         Use Gwenview to rotate and crop images as appropriate

•         Use Darktable to carry out any perspective correction required

•         Use the montage command from  imagemagick to produce composite images as required eg front/back, obverse/reverse

•         Use Gwenview to crop composite images if required

•         Create small markdown file describing contents of the directory

•         Upload the directory to OneDrive using ‘folder upload’ option for longer term storage

 

As I said, there is nothing super clever in this however, it’s a fairly effective and repeatable procedure. I’d like to emphasise the use of human readable filenames, doing so ensures that it’s easy to find and reuse the images down the track

Using the Xubuntu Yoga 11e

 I've always been a strong believer in eating my own dog food, ie if I blog about a machine or a bit of software, I damn well use it.

Over the past week or so I've been using the now Xubuntu based Yoga 11e for research and blogging.

 I've basically been using the same methodology based around Notable that I developed for family history research, ie collect notes together in a set of notes, sometimes with images attached (although I mostly save any images and downloads in a sub directory in my work in progress directory), and then use Libre Office to produce either a summary or a blog post and so on.

Sometimes, I've used a tablet to look something up and then write myself a summary using Notable, but that's really no different from writing notes in a notebook, except that it's easier to restructure your notes. Using a paper notebook I tend to find I end up with extra post it notes stuck to the notebook pages. 

As a process, it works quite well, with everything local until I decide to upload it somewhere cloudy for long term storage, and like the distraction free machine, it's AI free.

Ergonomically, it's a little heavier and bulkier than the distraction free machine, but still of a size to use comfortably on one's knees if needs be.

I'm not really using it for anything computational, and performance has been fine browsing, using Notable, or writing using Libre Office.

I do have Thunderbird installed as  a mail client, but I don't start it by default, and I don't have any other processes running in the background. 

I'm actually quite pleased with the outcome, and the machine is of a size that it can be used easily in a public library, and battery life is good enough to avoid the continual search for a table next to a power socket.

I actually find that it's more pleasant to use than the Windows 11 based Acer Travelmate I use for cataloguing, even though the Travelmate is a more recent machine...

Victorian tin hat boxes and AI

 Just over two years ago I asked Gemini and Co Pilot to write me an article on Victorian tin hat boxes.

At the time I'd documented two or three nineteenth century metal hat boxes as part of the Lake View documentation project, and had acquired a temporary and probably superficial expertise through looking at museum websites and antique traders online catalogues. However, the topic did strike me as obscure enough to be a reasonable test of both tools and their ability to handle more specialist queries.

Back in 2024, the results were mixed to say the least, and showed that whatever the strength of the algorithms, the underlying data set wasn't great as regards tin hat boxes.

So, today I retried the same experiment, and here are the opening paragraphs of the two responses

Co Pilot

Victorian tin hat boxes are antique metal containers, typically dating from the 19th century, designed to protect top hats and other formal headwear during travel or storage. They were commonly made from tinplate or toleware (painted tin) and often featured carrying handles, hinged lids, and decorative painted finishes.

Gemini

Victorian tin hat boxes are highly sought-after 19th-century antiques that were originally designed to protect valuable headwear, such as top hats and elaborate bonnets, during railway and steamship travel. Typically made of sheet metal or iron, these sturdy containers are celebrated today for their distinct oval or round shapes, hand-riveted construction, and beautiful aged patina. Many authentic pieces from this era featured japanned black or painted exteriors, warm reddish-brown or contrasting light-coloured interiors, robust brass hardware, and lockable latches

While both articles go on to discuss their collectability as antiques and possible use in interior design we can see that both Gemini and Co Pilot now produce sensible responses  on the historic context and principal features, including mentioning toleware (Co pilot) and the use of japanning (Gemini) - toleware being the American term, and japanning being the British term for essentially the same technique, and both engines provided links to sources, with Gemini in particular citing eHive.

While you still clearly need to verify sources, I'm quite impressed by the improvement in the responses...