Of internet speeds past

 This morning I tooted that our internet speed had jumped to about half a gig, something that is quite amazing in terms of infrastructure for rural Victoria. Admittedly it's only that fast on download, upload speeds are still comparatively slow

but basically fast enough that you really don't need to worry about speed and latency when moving data about. In fact, compared to my first year documenting Dow's when I would upload my days work, typically 70 or 80 jpegs and and a few spreadsheets, at home, I would flood our ADSL connection, it seems pretty magical.

Then, I couldn't actually upload the data at Dow's, the internet was simply too slow down there, so I ended up resorting to sneakernet and saving my work to a USB drive before uploading it at home.

At the time that our fast ADSL connection seemed fairly zippy, especially compared to our house in Canberra where our ADSL connection was incredibly slow and I ended up investing in a 3G router that was plugged into the ISP's modem.

The 3G router used a USB stick modem to connect to the internet, but could be configured to use the ethernet connection to the ISP's modem by default and only fail over to the 3G connection if our rather flaky connection over the old copper wire phone system went away - which it did every time in rained

The fact the phone cable went via our neighbour's apple tree probably didn't help much either..

Before then we had dialup over a 56k modem.

But that wasn't our first dialup internet.

Around 1990 or 1991 I bought a Global Village Teleport Bronze 2400 baud modem which I plugged into the back of my Mac Classic.

There was something quite magical then about being able to open a terminal session and log into the dialup gateway of the university where I then worked and check the health of servers, send emails, and upload and download documents to work on at home.

This was at a time before the worldwide web and text based systems such as gopher were as sophisticated as it got, and there were no real ISPs (in fact we had to shoot down a thought bubble from marketing about starting an ISP in the mid nineties, instead we used to suggest that people use the British Library's service which was a rebadged version of one of the big commercial ISPs.)

It was of course a simpler time.

Letters still came in the mail, and if you needed to order something you either sent the order in the mail, or if it was urgent, by fax, and the internet was really still just an academic plaything.

Contrast that to today, where the internet is essential to just about everything we do, as was shown in the case of Tonga when a volcanic eruption not only cut off the connection to the rest of the planet, but between the main island and outlying islands.

The loss of the internet was crippling, all the more so because the previous satellite based service had been abandoned because the new service was just so much better, and everything, and I mean everything went via the now broken undersea cable ...

Using Acrobat's AI summaries with Trove

In my little bits of nineteenth century historical research I use digitised newspaper resources a lot. 

The various digitised resources I use most often are nineteenth century Scottish newspapers via the SLV's subscription to Gale Newsvault for family history stuff, The Times of London's archives again through the SLV, Welsh Newspapers Online, Papers Past NZ, and above all, the NLA's Trove.

Trove is undoubtedly a great resource, but the quality of the digitised text, to put it politely, is variable.

Trove does provide OCR's summaries of the articles, but the quality of the digitised text can make the OCR'd text read as if it had been transcribed by a Martian - strange combinations of letters and punctuation followed by gobbets of reasonable text.

So, for years, what I have done is use the download option to generate a pdf, download the pdf to an ipad, and then sit and make notes on a 'proper' computer.

Latterly, if the pdf is too hard on the human eyeball, I've used J's old iMac, which now runs Linux, and Okular to give me a bigger image at a decent resolution to work with, and that's worked pretty well as a workflow.

Now, as I'm sure you're aware if you're an Acrobat user, Acrobat now behaves like an enthusiastic puppy, always asking if you want it to generate a summary of the document.

I've tended to ignore it, really because most of the PDF documents I look at on windows are boring things like credit card and electricity account statements, and there's usually only two important bits of information - how much we owe and when is payment due.

But instead of  doing the majority of my work on a linux machine as I usually do, I researched the Panjdeh incident on my Windows machine, and typed my notes into Geany on the old Chromebook I installed Linux on, really as a way of assessing the usefulness of the converted Chromebook.

(Answer, very useful, and good battery life to boot).

Anyway, as I was working on Windows, Acrobat came along wagging its little tail,  offering to generate a summary of every pdf document I opened.

So, for a number of longer documents, including some with poor quality OCR'd text, I did.

And they were surprisingly good, and the AI summary engine seemed to deal reasonably well with poorer quality scanned text, producing reasonable and good quality précis of the article texts.

Obviously you need to check the text yourself, but using AI text summaries turned out to be a useful way of assessing if the article was worth reading, it's not the first time I've slogged through a report of court proceedings to find that the report didn't add anything to what I already knew.

It's by no means a panacea, but it's certainly a valuable tool...

What happens to our photographs when we die?

 An interesting little question popped into my head - what happens to our digital photographs when we die?

Of course we've all wrung our hands about how letters and postcards have been replaced by email meaning that future generations have lost access to our correspondence, denying cultural historians access to sources that describe how people felt about things, but unless I'm very much mistaken, people's digital photographs have not really been thought about.

For example, and this shows the value of sometimes inconsequential seeming objects,I recently picked up a British World War One propaganda postcard from a postcard trading site. Transcribing it turned out to be interesting, with its hint of war weariness among the population as well as worries over the risk of German air raids.

Interesting, and something that one couldn't do about a contemporary conflict, such as that in Ukraine, because all the communication involved would be digital, and I don't see people collecting 100 year old WhatsApp messages they way they used to hang onto (and collect) old postcards.

Now obviously, one doesn't want to keep everything. Broadly speaking, there are two sorts of photographs in people's collections - the transitory and the significant.

The transitory are images like the cracked tail light on a rental car - you photograph it to show it was pre-existing damage, or the back of a wi-fi router to record the password.

Then there's the significant - examples being all my artefact photographs for the National Trust, photographs of old buildings, J's records of her artworks, and so on.

Once they would have been boxes of 35mm slides, and now they exist on a server somewhere.

And of course not everything physical survives - my geeky teenage photographs of closed railway stations in Scotland have gone to landfill in the course of various moves and relocations, along with pictures of former girlfriends, camping trips and the like.

Some of these may have had some value, some not.

And so with digital images, some have significance, for example some of my Trust photographs show the state of decay for some artefacts, and might be of value to future conservators, etc.

And obviously some work has been preserved - for example I know that some of my artefact photographs have been archived, but not all of them, and of course I don't know which ones.

And increasingly there is a problem.

People's collections of potentially archivable material are changing - emails have replaced paper, digital photographs have replaced analogue film, etc etc.

And of course, there's also the problem of obsolete media - recordings on cassette tape, video tapes and the rest, plus if they were digitised, where did  the digitised version end up, and how is it preserved?

Answers on a postcard?

Multi factor authentication and the outback

 Australia is a big, really big, sprawling country, and as a consequence there's a lot of places you don't get mobile coverage.

Sometimes you can get a wifi connection because the local pub has satellite wifi.

If it's Starlink, it's usually not too bad, and wifi calling and text messages can get through. 

If however, it's the NBN's aging SkyMuster, or some other solution it can be too slow for wifi calling, and guess what, text messages sometimes don't arrive.

I'm talking seriously slow, the sort of speeds that make you long for character mode email and text based web browsing.

Really frustrating.

And of course you can't then complete the authentication process.

And Google's 'check your other device' solution can be just as bad, especially when you don't actually have your other device to hand, like it's a couple of hundred kilometres away.

The solution, of course, is to do all your set up somewhere with white lines and traffic lights before you go bush and making sure you click the 'remember me' box if there is one.

Of course, you don't always remember... 

Bunsen labs ditched

 I said I'd try Bunsen Labs Linux in a real world situation to do real work.

So I did.

Using Libre Office to review a document I started to get an annoying intermittent flicker - it could have been a latent hardware fault or it could be that the Radeon screen driver shipped with Bunsen Labs wasn't optimal for my hardware.

Well, only my pride was affected, I had very little work on the machine, so I wiped it and installed Ubuntu, remembering to click the third party drivers box.

I deliberately chose Ubuntu as they have particularly good support for Lenovo machines.

Well, changing operating systems seems to have cured the flicker problem (maybe).

It's certainly better but it does come back occasionally. The only thing to do is try it for some time and see if it is just as bad with Ubuntu as it was with Bunsen Labs.

(AMD also provide Radeon drivers for Ubuntu, and if the flicker comes back, I might well give these a go. Unfortunately, they don’t provide generic Debian drivers, and Bunsen Labs is based on generic Debian but there is a wiki page on AMD Radeon on Linux).

Bit of a pity, because I quite liked Bunsen Labs, but to be fair they did warn you on install it was a hobbyist supported distro, and that there might be problems ahead.

While I'm obviously disappointed, it won't stop me from trying Bunsen Labs again on other hardware...

[update 09/09/2025]

Well, I was still getting an intermittent flicker with Ubuntu 24, so I did a little digging.

lspci was correctly showing the graphics card to be an AMD Radeon, but as I still occasionally got a flicker, so nothing ventured I downloaded the latest AMD driver for the hell of it

The lspci output after downloading didn't seem to be a lot different, so I tried doing what I had been doing on Bunsen Labs when I got the annoying flicker and started paging through the document with Libre Office.

Well, on the basis of a sixty second test I'm not getting the flicker.

I'll work some more with it to make sure it's really gone ...

Bunsen Labs in use

 I was impressed by by Bunsen Labs Linux running on a VM, so much so I decided to try it on a real machine.

The only machine I had to hand was my old desk laptop that had been gathering dust for about nine  months since I'd upgraded to Windows 11  - not by choice but sometimes you have to stay compatible with the world.

Anyway, long story short, it's an AMD Ryzen based Lenovo laptop, and even now after some six years of use, a pretty meaty machine.

Installation was easy, it just flew and it gave me a working system in around 45 minutes. I probably spent longer trying to get it to boot from install USB. (Just to be different AMD based laptop didn't use a magic function key combination to get into the boot menu. instead you needed to use a sim ejector (or a bent paperclip) to poke a special recessed magic button on the case when the machine was powered off. This caused the machine to boot into the boot menu - and yes I did have to track down the manual online to find this out)

In use, and I havn't used it seriously as yet, it's quite impressive, and pretty capable.

Memory and cpu use is minimal as is disk use, and the machine simply feels fast. My plan is to use it as an alternative to the Windows 11 laptop on my desk and see how it compares, as well as using for a couple of projects ...

Bunsen Labs Linux

 For the last twenty or so years I've been reusing old computer hardware for various of my projects, something that has invariably involved installing Linux as often software bloat on both Windows and OS X has reduced the usefulness of the hardware (and which is why I've been able to pick up some pretty good machines for not a lot from hardware recyclers and refurbishers.)

I've played with quite a few distributions over the years, but these days  the two I feel most comfortable with are Crunchbang++ and Ubuntu.

Crunchbang ++ I tend to install on resource limited hardware - which is why I used it when installing Linux on a Chromebook, and Ubuntu on anything else.

Crunchbang started out as a custom Linux distribution designed to use fewer resources than most mainstream distributions.

Development of the original project halted in 2015, but it spawned two successor projects, Crunchbang++ and BunsenLabs linux.

For a long time both projects were very similar as regards installation and the user experience and I did run BunsenLabs linux on an old netbook for a number of years, but for the last few years Crunchbang++ has been my go to lightweight distribution.

However, when I was working out what I could use in my Linux on Chromebook project I came across quite a few reviews that mentioned Boron, the latest Bunsenlabs distribution as being quite slick and resource efficient, though not quite as minimal in its disk usage as Crunchbang++.

So, I thought I'd take a look, and this morning I built a BunsenLabs VM using VirtualBox on my Dell Latitude.

Like CrunchBang++ installation was via the standard Debian installer and once booted and logged in you are presented with a customised OpenBox desktop not that different from the standard Crunchbang desktop, albeit in a nice blue green shade and with the time and connection status on the bottom left rather than on the top right

Like Crunchbang there is an option to install additional software

but unlike with Crunchbang++ AbiWord and Gnumeric are not installed and there's no option to skip the installation of LibreOffice, and to be fair, if you have LibreOffice there's no real need to install AbiWord and Gnumeric.

Now, when I installed Crunchbang++ on my old Chromebook, I deliberately went for AbiWord and Gnumeric rather than LibreOffice in the expectation that I would save a bit of disk space - remember that the Asus C202 Chromebook only had 16GB of eMMC storage - so what is the disk usage under Bunsen Labs?

and it's not that bad  - around 6GB, about the same Crunchbang++ without LibreOffice

making BunsenLabs a realistic option on resource constrained hardware.

Personally, I'm comfortable with CrunchBang++ and in no hurry to change, but I certainly would be happy to suggest BunsenLabs as an alternative to other lightweight distributions such as Lubuntu, especially in a situation where the user experience was important - the current BunsenLabs desktop feels a little more slick and modern that the current Lubuntu or Crunchbang++ desktops...