So are we headed for a digital dark age?

 Yes and no.

My little blogpost yesterday about the slow death of the postal service brought to mind some of the problems brought about by the demise of physical documents.

While we can still read a 150 year old postcard we may struggle to read a 10 year old Microsoft chat message. 

For official records this not a great problem.

At a governmental level there have been a range of initiatives to avoid the loss of access to contents due to obselesence of both hardware and software.

And having worked in both digital archiving and digital preservation I know it can be done. But I also know it's not necessarily cheap.

In digital preservation there are two and a half problems - old hardware used to store the data, old and undocumented data formats, and once you've retrieved it, how to stop it happening again.

Data can be stored on a variety of physical media. Physical media has its own problems with degradation especially if it has been stored in a less than optimal manner, but on the whole most media from the last twenty or thirty years can be read if you have access to the correct device to read it.

Of course, access to the correct media is the key - and not all media is the same - take the humble 3.5" disk - could be written in the common DOS style 1.44MB format, the less common early Macintosh variable speed 800k format, or some strange format used by early Apricot computers (Long gone now, but once the flagship of the UK domestic PC industry and widely adopted by government and large hospitals at the time).

And sometimes the media is just weird - such as the strange 3" disks used by Amstrad PCW machines that were wildly popular in the UK in the late eighties and early nineties.

And of course the format that the data is written in can be incomprehensible to modern software, although both AbiWord and LibreOffice are quite good at reading a range of legacy word processor formats.

If you belong to reasonably well funded body, such as a university or government sponsored archive service this basically resolves to a set of technical problems, which when solved, allows you to extract the contents of text documents into a useful format. 

Mail can be trickier, but actually the original Unix mbox format was simply a lot of concatenated message bodies, it's usually possible to snip the messages apart with a little programming.

What however does the amateur or family historian do?

They don't have the expertise, or even access to suitable hardware to read all the notes that Aunty Ethel put together on her old Amstrad, or even her old Mac Classic using Claris Works.

Unless she printed them out and put them in a binder, they're essentially lost, so while we might be able to read Great Uncle Jack's letters, we can't actually read Ethel's notes and information gleaned from talking to family members.

And that's a problem.

Ethel may no longer be with us. If Ethel had done a reasonable amount of work talking to people who actually knew Jack, and perhaps interviewing them semi formally, we might have a valuable resource, which can't be repeated as the people who knew Jack have also passed on.

While the image of the amateur family historian might be of some bumbly old person in a battered cardigan (and that can be uncomfortably close to the truth in some cases) a lot of them do good work and are educated people who had professional jobs and who turned to family history in retirement as a way of maintaining their skills.

So a digital dark age?

For official records, probably not, always of course barring a major catastrophe. For small scale amateur history I think we are as technological drift means the paper trail of letters comes to a halt sometime after 1990 when people started regularly having computers at home ...

The lingering death of the postal service ...

 If, in the future, we ever want a date to mark when the postal service began a terminal decline, today, the 15th of April 2024 would probably do as well as any other.

Today is the day that Australia Post finally admitted that letter volumes were unlikely to ever recover, and reduced street deliveries to three days a week.

To be fair, it’s been a long time coming.

Hardly anyone sends personal letters any more - and most bills are emailed. Postcards, both picture postcards and as a way of sending a simple note have more or less ceased to exist.

No more Aerogrammes or letter cards, and a future generation will not experience the anticipation of waiting for a letter from a lover overseas. All gone.

One could of course wallow in nostalgia, but basically the letter service is gone, and unlikely to ever come back. These days the only things I mail are official documents that for whatever reason cannot be scanned and emailed, or on a couple of occasions I've sent a letter to deliberately circumvent a useless virtual agent on a company’s website where they still published a street address but not an email address or simple plain online contact form with no useless ‘helpful’ AI built in.

But I’m ranting.

The demise of the letter service does however provide a serious problem for archival research. Scanned letters and letter books can be easily read, and people did tend to keep letters, either as keepsakes from family members or for official purposes as proof that something happened or was agreed.

1879 Postcard - still perfectly readable

Email messages, WhatsApp messages and the rest less so. We’ve seen the Covid-19 response enquiry in Scotland grind to an inconclusive halt over missing WhatsApp messages, and I know of one major insurance case where the tapes supposedly holding crucial archived email correspondence proved to be unreadable.

And while people have raised concerns, we’ve never really come to any conclusions. But one thing is certain, while today we can read Great Uncle Jack’s letters home from his time in the International Brigades during the Spanish civil war, we won’t be able to read any of today’s messages home.

Having dabbled in family history, I can see that’s a problem, it’s not just the loss of colour and background to flesh out an individual, often, as in the case of our hypothetical Great Uncle Jack, it might be the only real proof of where he was and what happened to him ...

The Athenaeum ...

 A couple of weeks ago I tooted that I was starting back with the National Trust documenting the contents of Lake View House in Chiltern

Well, that's still happening, but due to a totally unforeseen event, the start of the project has had to be delayed until May, by which time it'll be working in thermals and fingerless gloves if the house is anything like as cold as Dow's pharmacy over winter.

In the meantime I've got another gig at Stanley Athenaeum, which comes under the Mechanics Institute of Victoria, documenting stuff that hasn't been previously documented - for example I'm currently working on the records of an anti logging protest group from the early Nineteen nineties just before the internet became a thing - so we've got faxes instead of emails and voluminous printouts of meeting papers rather than piles of word documents.

It's not all papers though, the Athenaeum has a remarkable book collection dating back to the 1860s, including an 1861 edition of Darwin's Origin of the Species, and other more practical publications such as Victorian guides to chicken husbandry, and neatly showcasing both the Victorian desire for self improvement, but also the need for people to learn new skills in a strange land ...

Mechanics Institutes are themselves quite interesting. In Australia Mechanics Institutes were often a more middle class thing and as well as self improvement provided a forum for people to meet and discuss ideas, which is why some were described as Athenaeums, such as in Chiltern and Yackandandah, or as a School of the Arts as in Wahgunyah, to give some local examples.

In some places in time they became public libraries with the buildings repurposed - Stanley is relatively unique in that, while it did serve as a library for the community the collection was never broken up or absorbed into a larger collection.

AI and family history

 I've dabbled in family history.

I wouldn't ever style myself as a genealogist, but during the pandemic when you couldn't go anywhere or do anything as  both a distraction and as a way of keeping my research skills up to speed I dabbled.

I'm sure I wasn't the only one to do this, and like a lot of people I signed up to one of the online family history behemoths.

Now, the one I signed up to, MyHeritage, had a lot of quite useful link building tools to automate searches and build family trees, and this is probably a situation where AI might be helpful in flagging spurious leads and resolving inconsistencies.

I'd bailed from big online family history companies before AI really became a thing, so I've no direct experience of the tools currently available, but at the time I bailed they were touting ways to colorise old photographs and also to assemble images of family groups by combining various group photographs.

Hopefully the exif data on the resulting images would make it plain that it was a synthetic image, but one can see the potential for mischief - 'oh look, there's great aunt Vera with Trotsky' - and the like.

Especially confusing if indeed great aunt Vera might actually have worked in Trotsky's office - think of the rabbit holes that could lead to.

Then this morning I came across the following toot:

So people are actually generating artificial images and using them as profile pictures for uncle Cuthbert.

At one level it's harmless if there's no identifiable photograph of Cuthbert, on another one it's something that makes me uncomfortable.

Some people in my family tree were undoubtedly black and some were mixed race.  And while I havn't pieced together all the evidence to say one way or the other, I may have Maori cousins.

The use of these AI tools is dangerous as it would allow people to airbrush history.

One of the reasons I have mixed race cousins is that a distant relation of mine owned slaves in Jamaica.

Not a pleasant thing to admit to, but there's no denying history.

And for that reason, I think there needs to be an understanding that manipulated images and generated images need to be clearly watermarked as such - yes of course sticking images together for a Christmas card is fine as a bit of fun, but we've got to be clear that it's only a bit of computer generated fun ...

Praktica woes

 I took my old heavy Praktica MTL 3 to Tasmania and it worked perfectly.

However, when I used it last Sunday to photograph an old wooden church, I noticed that the image in the view finder was on an angle.

To try and capture the effect I took a not particularly good mobile phone picture  looking through the viewfinder at some venetian blinds. If you look at the angle of blinds in the view finder compared to the actual blind in the background, you can see that the viewfinder image has developed a bit of a slant, which is a trifle disconcerting.

In film SLR cameras, the light is reflected from a mirror through a clever prism system into the viewfinder. In Praktica cameras the prism is typically held in place against a little bit of shock foam by a spring.

I'm guessing, and it is only a guess, that the shock foam has stopped doing its job properly and the prism has moved slightly out of alignment due to vibration on the journey back from Tasmania.

Given that the camera body only cost me forty dollars - it's the reconditioned lens that's the pricy bit - and I have two other old Praktica bodies compatible with the lens, the answer probably is that the MTL-3 ends up in a display cabinet.

Sadly, it's probably not worth repairing ...

I thought I'd bricked it ...

 Well, despite my worries about installing Linux on an eMMc based machine I bit the bullet and installed Ubuntu on my Lenovo IdeaPad 1, which I'd been using as a lightweight travel computer until it started running out of swap space.

I deliberately chose Ubuntu due to its particularly good hardware support and user friendly graphical installer. While debian based distros are as good if not better, when you run into technical problems they tend to require some advanced technical knowledge that I no longer possess.

The installation went well and Ubuntu recognised the system and the disk but when it came time to restart after installation  it  simply didn't work.

The machine kept looping on boot, flashing a message, shutting down and restarting.

However, after some frantic googling, it turned out that the fix was nothing to do with it being an eMMc based machine, but to disable Intel platform trust technology  in the bios, as in this post about installing Mint on related hardware https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=395951.

following the bouncing ball gave me a working machine,

Up to now I've only ever installed Linux on older machines that lacked the security chip. I'm guessing that was we start to see ex Windows 11 machines - all of which have the security chip turned on by default - being sidegraded to Linux, this problem will become more common ...

[update 22/03/2024]

Since the intention is to use it as an alternative to the lightweight machine, this afternoon I installed Notable, Ristretto, Focuswriter and Kate,

As Ubuntu's backup utility is in fact Deja Dup, it only required to be configured. As always I located the Notable data directory in ~/Documents.

Rather than my One drive account, I decided to back it up to my Google drive account to see how that worked.

Unlike the lightweight machine I also configured Thunderbird to make the machine that little bit more general purpose.

Tasmanian retro photography

 Over on one of my other blogs I've periodically posted about my interest in retro photography.

Before our recent trip to Tasmania I put together a retro photography kit. We were taking the car so weight was not an issue

I bought an old style canvas three compartment camera bag from ebay which allows me to pack my big old Praktica MTL 3 in the middle compartment, the half frame Olympus in one of the end compartments and things like a light meter, spare film etc in the end compartment.

(The cat is not part of the setup, he's merely intensely curious because of all the odd smells in the bag.)

As a solution it works for me - while the bag is quite heavy, its of a size to be easily carryable and with everything in one place makes it simple to take along as an addition to any out door trip.

I did take quite a few pictures with the film cameras, but I've not yet had any scanned. If any are any good, I'll post about the experience ....

Technology and Tasmania

 We're just back from a trip to Tasmania.

As always I took along a computer, but not the lightweight computer I bought back in 2021, but instead a second hand refurbished HP pro book. Ever since the lightweight Lenovo had started complaining about disk space when we were in Tuscany, I realised its days as a travel computer were probably numbered, so I bought myself a refurbished 11" ProBook which worked perfectly, allowing me to upload images from my camera, plus online banking and all the checking of things and booking of restaurants online that is part of travel these days.

While it might seem extravagant, the cost of ownership of the Lenovo - purchase price divided by years used was around the same as my previous refurbished MacBook. The HP cost me less than the Lenovo, so I reckon if I get two years out of it I reckon I'm ahead.

That does leave me the problem of what to do with the Lenovo - I suspect I'll end up installing Linux on it - the machine has a nice keyboard and  decent battery life so I'll probably end up configuring it similarly to the distraction free machine.

I also took along the dogfood tablet.

This wasn't quite so successful - not because the dogfood tablet doesn't function well as an e-reader, but due to mission creep on my part. I started using it to read my email, check online news sites etc in the mornings with a cup of tea simply because it seemed more sociable to do that with J while she looked at her iPad than hide behind a computer.

The dogfood tablet simply wasn't up to it - not enough memory and basically too slow, which is a shame as it still makes a great e-reader.

A little bit of searching showed that the various big box retailers were selling off the last of their stock of the Lenovo Tab M8 - basically a lightweight 8" tablet that has been discontinued.

So I bought myself one as a sort of birthday present.

It's pretty good, and of a size and weight that's just as easy as the original dogfood tablet to slide into a work bag as an extra device.

Unlike the Chromebook Duet, which has some limitations as a computer replacement, the M8 is unashamedly a supplemental device.

 I've only had it for a day or so, but so far I feel positive about it, although it does seem slow to boot, but once it's up an running, its reasonably responsive ...

Codes, cryptography and the Russo Japanese war

 

International telegraph lines in the 1870s

Here's a little bit of a puzzle.

By the early 1870's the telegraph network, the internet of its day, was essentially complete. Some links had still to be completed such as the link from Darwin via Batavia (now Jakarta) to Singapore, or indeed the line across Siberia to Vladivostok and on to Beijing, but we can say that by 1880 the global network was complete.

Everything went across the network and the technology used made intercepting messages trivial.

Everyone knew that telegrams,  like postcards  were not really private, so people sometimes encoded messages in simple ways both to keep the word count down and hide the contents of the message.

I can remember my father, who was an engineer surveyor, someone who inspected and certified industrial plant on behalf of insurance companies, having a list of codes pinned up in his home office to allow him to send a confidential telegram warning of a major incident - so that a three word message such as 'egg fish bean' might mean 'explosion, severe damage, no loss of life'.

Sometimes, as telegrams were paid for by the word, encryption was simply a way to reduce costs as in the 'Silk Dress Cryptogram'.

Government and other official correspondence was often encrypted using a variety of ciphers, to preserve secrecy. and where possible, secure routings were used, such as the Indian Ocean Telegraph, built to securely link British possessions in India and South East Asia, and avoiding an overland link via Constantinople and Teheran.

Likewise, the Trans Siberian telegraph would have provided a secure link between St Petersburg and the large Russian naval base in Vladivostok.

Vladivostok has the major disadvantage that it is not ice free, and after a variety of machinations, the Russians persuaded the Qing state to grant them the lease of the Liaodong peninsula, where they built a naval base at Dalian.

Imperial Japan also sought control over the area, not least because Russia posed a threat, especially since the building of a railway across Manchuria via Harbin to Dalian. Eventually these disputes escalated to a full scale war in 1905, a war that Russia decisively lost to Japan. 

Russia and Japan also duelled over Korea, with Russia initially seeking control over the whole Korean peninsula. After 1905 Russia was in no position to try to maintain Korea as a buffer state between itself and Japan, leading to the Japanese occupation of Korea in 1910.

Now, during the Crimean war some fifty years before, Britain, thanks in part to Charles Babbage, had successfully cracked the Russian telegraph codes allowing them to read Russian diplomatic correspondence.

So far, so good.

But reading about the Russo Japanese war a few days ago - yes, another Manchurian rabbit hole - I came across a comment that the British helped the Japanese by reading Russian messages sent via India and Malaya. This story is repeated in several places but I have been unable to track down a source to the story.

This suggests that the Russians were still using a variant of the Vignère cipher some fifty years later, despite Kasiski having published a technique for cracking Vignère ciphers in the 1870s.

Or maybe they weren't - in the absence of a definitive source for the story I don't know.

However it is known that in 1904 HMS Diana, stationed in the Suez canal,  was able to intercept Russian wireless messages ordering the mobilization of the fleet. Unfortunately, there's no publicly available information as to how the messages were encoded. Common sense suggests that the Russian would have encoded their messages using the same method as they used to encode telegraph messages, but given the use of radio for ship to shore communications was still highly experimental its possible that the Russians did not use a strong encryption method.

That's the first puzzle, the second one is slightly more interesting - what exactly were the telegraph messages the British were decrypting? The Russians after all had their own secure telegraph line to Vladivostok and had control of the railway (and the telegraph line) via Harbin.

And then I remembered the mad journey of the Russian Baltic fleet.

With much of the Pacific fleet trapped at Dalian by the Japanese navy, the Russians decided to send the Baltic fleet halfway around the world to break the Japanese navy's blockade.

And, as we can see from this newspaper report of the time, the fleet passed through the Straits of Malacca and rounded Singapore and was presumed to be heading across the Gulf of Thailand towards what is now Vietnam and was then French Indochina.

Crucially, the report also mentions that the Russian consul sailed out to the fleet and handed over dispatches - I can only assume that these must have included instructions from St Petersburg and information on the course of the war so far, and that this was the information the British passed to the Japanese ...

Using the distraction free machine

 

When I did my annual personal technology review at the end of last year, I mentioned that I hadn’t made as much use of the distraction free machine as I’d hoped, in part due to my actually finishing the documentation of Dow’s pharmacy.

Since I had my sclerotherapy last week that’s changed. 

For the first few days I found it difficult to sit for a prolonged period at my desk to write, so when writing, I sat with my leg up on the sofa with the distraction free machine on my lap – hopelessly unergonomic I know – and caught up on my blogging.

And it’s been good.

As I said at the time the machine is nice to type on and it’s of a size to sit comfortably on my lap, making it as an ideal writing machine.

I’ve been using Libre Office as a writing tool rather than a text editor such as kate or gedit to create either simply structured plain text or markdown to feed through a conversion tool such as pandoc.

Once finished I send the text to OneDrive using Emailitin, where I finish it off on my windows 10 desk laptop, and then cut and paste it into a blogging tool such as open live writer for Wordpress, or in the case of blogger simply paste it into the edit window, and tweak the formatting if necessary.

I’ve been being a good little vegemite and making sure I walk my ten thousand steps a day (as counted by my fitbit) with the result that I’m healing nicely and can now sit at my desk for an extended period, but having started seriously using the lightweight machine I’ve kept on using it.

It’s quite a pleasant way to write, with either ABC Classic or Radio National burbling away in the background. As I say it’s unergonomic, but pleasant.

One of the advantages of working this way is that it is truly distraction free.

While the machine is connected to the internet there’s no web browser or email client running unless I actively want to run one, perhaps to check something, which coupled with my withdrawal from social media, it’s a good way to work.

I also make a point of leaving my phone in the study while I’m sitting downstairs writing, or working on something, something which also makes for a distraction free environment.

I’m very tempted, once we’ve cleaned out the old garage which is going to be studio for J with a bit of extra desk space for me to bugger about with film photography, to find a half way decent second hand sofa to allow me to continue working in my lazy distraction free writing ...

Roman ghosts (again)

I'm probably I'm going to get a reputation as some sort of strange crank for going on about this but this time I'm going to blame Mary Beard.

I've been spending the past few hot sticky afternoons rereading her 'Confronting the Classics', which is basically a collection of reviews written for various classical journals and literary magazines.

The first time around I must admit I tended to dismiss it as 'professors arguing with professors', but this time, perhaps because I know more and have thought more, I can see more depth to the collection.

Anyway, in discussing Boudicca she mentions a theory that she was buried on Gop hill in Flintshire and that her ghostly chariot can sometimes be seen careering about (personally I suspect Boudicca's body was lost and thrown into a mass grave at best).

However, I'd never heard of Gop hill, so I looked it up and it turns out to be a substantial prehistoric mound of unknown purpose.

The various sites I looked at didn't mention any legend of Boudicca's burial but one did mention a legend that the ghost of Aurelian (identified as Ambrosius Aurelianus) was sometimes seen on the site, and included a link to an online database of ghost sightings in the UK.

Now, normally I wouldn't bother with such things, but as my post about Roman ghost sightings in the nineteenth century was one of my most popular blog posts in 2023, I thought I'd take a look at the database for mentions of Roman ghosts and I was immediately struck by two things:

(a) where the provenance of a story is known it is from the nineteen twenties at the earliest

(b) many of the stories repeat features from other stories, eg a group of Roman soldiers is seen walking down a street, but are cut off at the knees, presumably because the Roman road surface was lower than today's, suggesting a degree of re-invention.

Which kind of reinforces my view that ghosts of dead Romans were not a nineteenth century thing ...