More on Google Lens and object identification

 I've written before about my experiences with Google Lens as a tool to identify nineteenth century artefacts.

Earlier this week I had quite a productive day at Lake View, working on a collection of nineteenth century surgical instruments.

Most of them I photographed using my cheap Temu lightbox which I powered from a powerbank to save trailing extension cables everywhere, which worked well as a solution

Working on the instruments had its problems. I didn’t know what some of the instruments were, or what they were called, so when I didn’t recognise them I used Google Lens to help identify them, with mixed results.

Specialised, unique looking instruments such as a fistula director or a nineteenth century tonsil cutting tool were easy to identify with the aid of Google Lens, often turning up examples in the collection of the UK Science museum, but more generic looking items, such as a tubular surgical probe, were sometimes  mistaken for car fuel system components, and this I think shows a problem with Google Lens - when you are trying to identify something fairly unique it’s quite good, as there are not a lot of possibilities, but where your object looks like a lot of similar looking more commonly searched for objects the results tend to be weighted towards the more common objects.

Nothing wrong with that, in fact in most cases it’s what you would expect the application to do - give you the most common result, but it does mean that when you review the results of the search you should do so critically ...

I bought a (refurbished) ipad...

 

Why, you might ask, given my antipathy to Apple's walled garden?

And the answer is purely pragmatism.

When I did my blog post about my use of technology in 2024, I mentioned that my Huawei pandemic era android tablet was stuck on an old version of Android and that among other problems some apps had stopped working.

Well I wiped it, and that stopped it complaining that it was out of storage, and am now running with a limited set of apps, basically wikipedia and some news apps.

And that's fine for catching up on the news and some basic fact checking, but doesn't get around the problem that one of the apps that has stopped working is Evernote.

If it wasn't for the fact that I have a lot of material stored in Evernote, I could simply have used the web version to check a document, but just because of the sheer volume of material that I have in Evernote, it's a pain.

I could have bought myself a new high quality Android tablet, but they are not exactly cheap, and even a reasonable mid range one was going to cost me in the region of four hundred bucks.

Given the problem of some apps not working on older versions of Android, second hand wasn't an option.

And then I found a refurbisher I've bought quite a few machines for use with Linux and/or fieldwork from had some 'as new' refurbished iPads for sale at under $200.

While it is an old model, it runs the latest version of Apple's operating system, and comes with Apple's 'niceness' baked in, and will hopefully be supported for another couple of years, and as I've found with the old iPad Mini I still use as a note taker, it's perfectly possible to keep using an iPad long after it's fallen off support, as always it is access to the applications that counts.

If the refurbished ipad lasts for over two years the cost of ownership will be about the same as my Huawei tablet, so in a sense, apart from yet more devices cluttering things up, I won't lose anything...

A win for Lubuntu

 As I've written elsewhere, we've been without the internet and all the conveniences of modern life it brings for a few days.

Very much a first world problem but extremely aggravating none the less.

And, because of our connectivity problems, I've been using the town library's free wifi to check my email etc.

The first time I did so, I used the HP windows laptop I bought second hand as a travel computer earlier this year.

This turned out to be a mistake, because it of course, after being powered off since our trip out west to Lake Tyrell, and being windows it of course wanted to download squillions of updates, sync onedrive, and the rest. Normally I power it up once a month to sync itself, and before we go on a trip turn off Windows update and the rest. As luck would have it that was something I was going to do the afternoon our router died.

So, let's just say the windows laptop wasn't a good choice of device, especially as the library's wifi isn't the fastest.

The other time I used the library's wifi, I used my Lubuntu machine. (I could have used the distraction free machine, or my old Ideapad 1, but I'd shafted myself as the distraction free machine is barebones and doesn't have an email client installed, and my Ideapad had software to connect to Google drive and sync installed. What I needed was a machine that had all the tools but no dependencies, and the Lubuntu machine fitted the bill.)

So, up to the library.

Our town library has two public wifi networks - one called 'Public' which is 2.4GHz and a 5GHz service called 'Public-5g', which is less used, in part because some people confuse it with a 5G phone service.

So, power up, connect to the 5g service, open Thunderbird, and it flew - which is pretty good for what after all is a nine year old laptop.

The lack of dependencies on external services, as well as a lightweight but efficient operating system meant that it simply did its job, and did it well.

And what it shows is that (a) Linux really does help you get the best out of old hardware, and (b) all the syncing and background download slows windows down, especially as Microsoft increasingly position it as both a cloud centric and cloud dependent environment ...