A phone camera stand...

 Documenting small artefacts like coins at home is a pain.

They're small, they're fiddly and they need to be photographed at a fairly high resolution.

Often the best camera to hand is your phone, and holding it steady to get a straight down shot is tricky.

So, when an advert for a phone camera stand like this popped into my facebook feed, I was interested so I went digging and found the same items for sale a little cheaper on ebay

Well, it was only just over twenty bucks, so I thought I'd give it a go.

It arrived as a set of plastic bits (I'm guessing 3D printed) with no instructions

but assembly was fairly intuitive

and with my phone in place the end result looks like this

Assembled, it's a little wobbly - the fit of the components is not particularly tight, but the image quality produced is more than reasonable at a 320% zoom on my phone as in this image of a 1928 Irish Free State penny. (Incidentally, the phone used is nothing special, a mid range Android phone, an Oppo Reno 4 bought as a runout model in 2023. I'm guessing just about any standard form factor phone will work with the stand.)

For what it cost, I think I've got myself a bargain.

Obviously I could glue the bits together to make a more rigid structure, but I've decided to keep them as is for the moment, as that will make the item more easily transportable in one of my gear boxes for onsite documentation ...

Well it's Friday, so it's cataloguing time

 After last week's hiatus, it was back to normal with my Friday cataloguing session up at the Athenaeum.

No real finds this week but a couple of little items that connected with other things I've written about recently.

In the end papers of a copy of Dan the Dollar by Shan Bullock, and published in the early 1900's by Maunsell's in Dublin, there's an advert for a literary magazine, edited by W.B. Yeats, which uses Irish script for items written in Irish. 

I've written elsewhere about how, before 1916, Irish intellectuals self consciously used Irish script to construct an Irish identity separate from the prevailing Anglo Irish identity. It's interesting to see it used in print as early as 1905 as well as in handwritten communications such as postcards.

The other interesting item was a bookseller's label fro Stephen's in Melbourne on an 1866 book by Elihu Burritt describing a walk from London to John O'Groats in the far north of Scotland.

As the accession registers are missing we have no idea when and from where the Athenaeum acquired the book but I'll wave my hands about and guess some time between 1866 and 1876.

What's interesting is that the sticker says 'New Books, Magazines and Newspapers received by every mail steamer'.

This of course meant books and magazines imported from England, as well as newspapers, and suggests that Stephens had a regular order for English newspapers and magazines, as well as for new books.

While it's not quite the same Orwell, in Burmese Days, his novel based on his experiences in colonial Burma in the 1920s, talks of going to an English language bookshop in Rangoon to look at the latest books from England. So too it must have been in Melbourne in the 1860s and 70s before books began to be printed locally.

Before Australia was connected by telegraph in the 1870s to the rest of the planet, newpapers brought by mail steamers were the principal source of overseas news (There's the probably apocryphal story of a wealthy member of the squatocracy who had a copy of that day's Times of London posted to him every day, and when they arrived in batches via the mail steamer, stacked them in order and read them one at a time with breakfast.)

What it also shows is the importance of the mail reaching the mail steamer in time, and hence the use by the postal service of a 'Too Late' postmark when the mail missed the boat (literally)...

Leaving Evernote

 I've been an Evernote user since 2011, however the latest round of price increases have finally persuaded me to bite the bullet and close my account. This isn't because it's a bad product, it's simply that I'm paying a lot for features that are of no use to me - as it has added AI based features and group working tools it has moved a long way away from what was simply a very good records management solution.

Closing my account of means moving my content out of Evernote and to somewhere or something else.

I'm going to tell you how I did it - I was not particularly clever in the way I approached it, but then the simplest approaches are often the best.

It's important to understand how I used Evernote to understand why my approach worked for me.

I used Evernote as a standard records management system - basically a database which allows you to search and index content and stores your content in an object store of some sort.

What I didn't use was the group working and clever new AI based tools it now comes with.

When I first started with Evernote back in 2011 it was good, really good. So good that I used my own hard earned cash to buy a subscription to the product.

The fact it was multi platform was great - it meant you could go to a meeting, whip out an iPad and pull up the relevant document in a few clicks.

Nowadays, as opposed to the situation in 2011, there are a number of products out there that can happily function as a basic records management solution - Standard Notes, OneNote and even the open source Notable.app will do this - I'm sure there are others. 

But of course, I'm retired, so why do I need a records management solution?

Well, the world's gone digital. Invoices come as emailed pdf's, as do utility bills, various legal documents and so on, so in the same way as once you would have had a drawer of household files, now you need somehwere where you can find a copy of your house or car insurance, or a copy of a utilty bill.

Like everyone else on the planet I was never very good at clearing out the old material, so a certain amount of cruft had built up, so the first thing I did was go through all my evernote notebooks and reduce them to a manageable size - this got rid of about 75% of my Evernote content.

But how to migrate it, and what to migrate it to?

Pragmatically, the answer was Microsoft's OneNote - I already had quite a lot of work related material from my work with the National Trust in OneNote, so I knew it could do the job, I had plenty of storage free, and more importantly there was a freely available migration tool that allowed you to import an .enex format Evernote notebook export file into OneNote.

So having pruned my content, I exported each of my Evernote notebooks as an .enex file, then ran the conversion tool.

Also, as I'm a paranoid bugger, I've saved all my .enex exports to a directory on OneDrive, just in case I need to go back to them. Remarkably it's only about half a gigabyte of data, so it doesn't add much to my overall storage usage.

Randomly opening some note in the imported notebooks suggests everything's there. I perhaps need to do a little bit of renaming and tidying and a bit more checking, but basically I seem to have got everything out of Evernote that I wanted to.

Then all that remains is the matter of cancelling your subscription.

You need to be strong, as they will make a number of counter offers - in my case a 45% discount on the renewal cost - and I must admit to being tempted - but just keep clicking cancel. You never quite escape, they leave you with a free subscription just in case you have a change of heart.

Then it's simply a matter of uninstalling the clients from the various computers I use, in my case the laptop on my desk, the machine I use for cataloguing and the laptop I take travelling, plus an ipad and an android tablet, and my phone.

Most of the others - basically Windows 10 machines that I havn't quite decided what to do with can wait, and as Evernote never did do a Linux client that's not an issue to worry about.