Newspaper access solved

I've recently written about my experiences doing family history online, and if you've been following my stuff more generally, you'l also know I use Trove, the NLA's  digital archive quite a lot.

What I don't have access to is UK newspapers, or I didn't until now.

Now I live in rural Victoria, and while I knew the State Library had access to a lot of these online, I thought that you had to visit the State Library itself to use some of the resources. (I remember discussions with database vendors in the early days of CDROM networking where access was restricted to a block of ip addresses - something they called access within a single building and I called frustrating).

Anyway I discovered that the State Library provides networked access to a shedload of resources including the Times and the Irish Times archives, but you need to (a) sign up and (b) prove you are a Victorian resident, usually by showing some ID to the membership team at the State Library, or by a more complex postal procedure.

Well, I was in Melbourne for other reasons, so I made time to go to the State Library and sign up for resource access.

I was so curious to see if it worked, that when I got back to our AirBnB apartment, I tried it using my iPad over our 4G modem - and it just worked!

Having spent a good part of my professional life trying to get these things to work I was quite astounded at just how good the service was (mind you, to get the best you probably need something with a little more poke than an iPad).

The service looks to be provided via Ex Libris, nothing special there, and uses the standard ProQuest databases. And it works.

I'm quietly happy ...

router spam (sort of)

I've written before about our new 4G portable router, including its ability to be used like a pager to receive SMS requests.

Well, a few days ago I turned it on, and it told me I had a new SMS. I assumed it was a warning of a planned service outage, so I clicked on it to see if it was relevant to where I was.

It wasn't.

It was an SMS spam message telling me that there was an inheritance waiting for me and to email a totally unlikely looking email address.

Needless to say I didn't ...

I bought an ipad ...

Until a few weeks ago I was possibly almost unique in the western world for never having laid a finger on an ipad in any sort of serious way.

Sure I'd fondled them in an Apple store, looked at them when people showed me documents and images on them, but I'd never used one or owned one.

Not that I was tablet agnostic - I bought myself an Android tablet in 2011, and while I've been through several since, for a long time they did the job - as a notetaker, for research work in public libraries, and a few other tasks.

While most people use a tablet to surf the web and check their email in bed, I mostly use a Chromebook - principally because it has a keyboard and I can write on it, so my tablet use has gradually declined.

At the same time, I've begun to listen to podcasts more and more, and I've got some reference material in pdf's which is mostly digitised nineteenth century directories (family history folks!) and so on.

And with it's sudden wifi wierdness my Pixi wasn't cutting it anymore.

So I bought myself a refurbished iPad mini. They're reasonably cheap, as a lot of them come out of point of sales devices, and since they've usually spent a large part of their lives in a protective housing, they're usually in pretty good order.

To it, I added the logitech canvas keyboard - they were on discount on amazon, I only paid around fifty bucks for mine, and that's given me a device about the size of an A5 notebook on which I can type, listen to podcasts, and do web based stuff, be it research or fun.

I've yet to use it for serious typing, but I've downloaded both a plain text editor and a copy of pages, and I guess I could always use Google docs if necessary.

What I can report is for scrolling through things such as the 1865 Scottish County directory - all 500 odd pages of it - iBooks certainly does the job better than anything I've found for Android, and of course one gets the Apple niceness - one suspects that some of the people who put the environment together wear ties and nicely pressed chinos - which after linux, windows and android comes as a pleasant change ...