And now, an old Thinkpad

My old Dell Inspiron that I've used since 2010 is finally reaching the stage where it's running out of puff, not disastrously, but getting to the stage where one would start to think about replacing it.

Of course I could just put up with it's huffing and puffing and use my MacBook Air as a day to day machine, but I'd reached the stage where a new Windows machine seemed like a necessity.

The only problem was that we'd just paid out for a trip to Borneo, and I really couldn't justify the extra money right now.

Well, I'd always half planned to buy myself an ex-lease Thinkpad for Linux work, so after a little bit of agonising I bought myself a X230 with Windows 7 professional license, reasoning that I could use it as a windows machine, and perhaps even convert it to dual boot - Windows 7 and Linux, for the simple reason that the documentation project I've volunteered for is built around windows, meaning I need One Note, and that most of the rest of my personal notes and documentation is in Evernote, which again is not available for Linux.

So I paid my two hundred and thirty bucks to one of these companies that refurbish ex-lease machines and a few days later it arrived, beautifully packed in shock absorbing packaging and with a refurbisher's test report, and nicely imaged with a clean copy of Windows 7 with an install of Open Office 3 thrown in.

Out of the box, battery life was better than my Air, which realistically manages about two hours work these days between charges. The Thinkpad claimed a realistic four hours thirty out of the box and the what's more the battery is easy to replace down the track if needs be.

So, installing things.

First off were the standard utilities that I use:

• Focuswriter - for distraction free writing
• Kate - for when only a text editor would do
• Open live writer - an open source clone of windows live writer for bloggin
• Tweeten - a desktop twitter client
• Gnumeric - spreadsheet for data manipulation
• Libre Office - when I need to write something and format it nicely
• Thunderbird - for email and calendaring
• Texts - for wysiwyg markdown editing

And then it was the data intensive things

• Dropbox - for data sharing
• One Drive - cloudy filestore
• One Note - Microsoft's note management tool which has all my project documentation
• Evernote - which basically contains my entire life, invoices, bills, research notes and so on

All in all, close to 40GB of data to download, which took around a day with a few timeouts when we wanted to watch the morning news on iView, or actually use the internet. Given that our internet and phone plan has a stupidly large cap ( a terabyte of data per 28 days - effectively it's unlimited, we usually only use around 10% of it) I wan't worried by the download size..

Also given my general interest in note taking applications I installed Standard Notes for fun, and I should probably also install the windows version of CherryTree given that I waxed lyrical about it a few months ago.

It might have been quicker, but windows also wanted to download a zillion patches (actually a little over 200) and apply them, all of which took time out of the process.

At the end of it I've a machine with reasonable battery life, a decent form factor for working on the train and these silly little tables.

I havn't installed virtual box yet, but I'm planning to do so to build a virtual machine to put together a prototype Omeka site to showcase the project so far.

Sooner of later I'll probably add a couple of extra applications - such as the Gramps family history tool.

The only Linux software I really need is tesseract and cuneiform for OCR work on pdfs from old printed documents and they'll run equally well in a Linux VM.

So, next steps.

Basically use it, and keep the old Inspiron for backing up data from documentation project.

I do face a decision down the track as to whether I keep the machine, or migrate it to linux as originally intended. If I keep the machine I probably need to think about an upgrade to Windows 10, but for the moment seven is good enough. After all it's the software base that's important, not the operating system...

[update 18/03/2018]

... and this morning I was looking up some references and discovered I'd totally forgotten to install my preferred refernce maneger - Zotero, doh!

Lecture recordings and intellectual property

There's a strike over pensions in the UK university system at the moment and it's brought to light an interesting little argument over intellectual property.

Obviously, if a lecturer is on strike, a scheduled lecture is not going to be delivered. Some universities have tried to force lecturers to deliver cancelled lectures once they return to work, or persuade non striking colleagues to deliver them with varied degrees of success.

But some have tried a different tack, giving students access to the lecture recording of the previous years lecture.

Lecture recordings vary. Some simply record voice or else voice and video somewhat in the style of nineteen seventies Open University recordings. Others record voice and the accompanying powerpoint slides.

Lecture recording systems are usually touted as a revision aid for students, or else as allowing students at multi site institutions access to material delivered at another location. Cynically, it allows students who discover Statistics 1B is timetabled for 0830 on a Monday an extra hour in bed.

Individual universities rules on intellectual property and lecture content all differ slightly.

In many cases they were drawn up  some years ago before lecture capture systems were in widespread use, and before the world went digital.

In some cases the university owns the teaching material, some cases the individual owns it, and in some cases the lecture is owned by the university, but handouts, including the powerpoint slides, are owned by the individual.

And some lecture recording products have terms of use that require consent by the lecturer before the material can be reused. And of course there's the case where a teaching assistant delivers a lecture using existing notes and material when the lecturer whose course it is is on sabbatical. We won't talk about MOOCs here, but that's another problem, especially if material from other lecture courses is reused.

Basically it's a very grey area. In fact once you start to poke into it it's a complete nightmare ...

When an isbn isn't really an isbn...

Now we all know that isbn's are persistent identifiers par excellence, but I recently came across a case where they weren't

I'd bought a version of Valentine Baker's Clouds in the East, the book he wrote while imprisoned for his assault on Miss Dickinson, as part of my reading about the Great Game.

I'd bought the reprint from one of these Indian print on demand companies that reprint out of print out of copyright nineteenth century books.

Unlike some of these reprints this one came nicely bound with a card, as opposed to paper, cover and had a barcode, an isbn, and a suggested price in both Indian Rupees and US dollars, in other words rather than print on demand it looked like one of batch produced for retail sale.

So I entered it into LibraryThing - no such ISBN. Now I know from past experience of having bought books from India that they usually in Amazon's database, so I was a little surprised.

I tried Amazon India directly - no such luck. Neither was it on isbnsearch.org or barcodelookup.com, so I'm guessing it's an invalid isbn generated by the publisher when packaging the book up to make it look like a 'proper' retail copy.

Strange, hadn't come across that before ...