End game at Dow's

 Just before the pandemic struck, I applied for a reader's ticket for the State Library of NSW - I was planning a research trip to search for material relating to some nineteenth century pharmaceutical manufacturers.

Didn't happen - Covid and border closures meant it was a non starter.

But I kept the message at the bottom of my mailbox as a reminder.

Today I deleted the email. 

Covid aside, I reckon that in six or eight weeks I'll be done and have handed over my data before the cold weather makes it unpleasant to work.

I'm not sure what I'll do after but I do know that I don't want to do another big multi-year project ...

Buffer does mastodon !

 Just a quick note to day that Buffer (https://buffer.com/), which I've used for years to schedule posts on twitter, now works with Mastodon to schedule posts and share web pages.

I've tested it (twice) and it does what it says on the tin ...

Some more thoughts on Chat-GPT

I've played some more with it, and it's certainly very impressive.

It's remarkably good at producing formulaic text and you can, if you're prepared to put in some effort, get it to produce something clever and amusing.

But that's not the point.

It's simply (a bit of a misnomer here) a very clever text generation engine with a remarkably rich dataset from which to draw it's information. As with all such software, it gives the appearance of intelligence due to the complexity and richness of its responses.

If, for example, I made my living writing real estate advertisements, or some of the formulaic advertorial that goes on real estate sites, I'd be worried - tools like Chat-GPT are admirably suited to that sort of task, but none of its output is so good that it doesn't need to be reviewed by a human.

And that brings me to my second point. 

Chat-GPT's rise to prominence has been accompanied by a wave of  education departments and universities banning its use in essays.

Too late, the horse has bolted.

It's out in the wild, and so it, or some competitor, will inevitably get used. 

So it's time to embrace it.

For example, on my little Chat-GPT exercise on wet plate photography, give the class the example and ask them to critique and expand on it.

I would expect that students would immediately run off and raid wikipedia and camerapedia for information and use that as the basis for an answer. But we're after more than the facts here, we need some critical analysis as well.

Doing so successfully will show that they understand the topic, and it doesn't matter if they use an AI tool to generate the final text - it's the requirement to critique the answer that's important.

Playing with Chat-gpt

 There’s been a lot of talk about Chat-gpt and its capabilities. Out of curiosity I tried Chat-gpt with the phrase describe wet plate collodion photography. This what I got

Wet plate collodion photography is a photographic process that was popular in the mid to late 19th century. It involves coating a glass or metal plate with a mixture of collodion (a viscous solution of cellulose nitrate in ether and alcohol) and silver nitrate. The plate is then sensitized in a darkroom and inserted into the camera while still wet. The exposure time is typically several seconds to a minute. After exposure, the plate is developed, fixed, and washed to produce a negative image. The process is considered to be one of the first true photographic techniques. It was widely used for portrait and landscape photography and was especially popular for making cartes-de-visite and tintype photographs.

It might not be the best or most detailed answer out there, but it’s not wrong either (apart from the bit about tintypes - similar but different process), but I liked the mention of cartes-de-visite...

1890's photographic developing chemicals

 Yesterday I posted the following on Mastodon, which I'd turned up in a drawer while documenting the contents of Dow's pharmacy

and which garnered a fair degree of interest. 

It's not the whole story - in fact we've got two slightly different packages from the same period

the second one being labelled tank developing powders. 

Both boxes are cardboard, approximately 75x75x20mm and are black with a white design. Amazingly enough both appear to have their contents intact, which gives us a problem

My project is simply to document the contents of the old pharmacy - we don't have a conservation lab on site or any specialist facilities to handle potentially hazardous material. In fact it's just me, so there are limits as to what can be done.

In cases like this it's simply a case of a visual check to confirm the contents are present and then carefully repack them and return them to their location after photographing the box and contents.

Stylistically I'm dating the boxes to the 1890's - but,  as designs didn't change much they could be Edwardian in date. Crucially neither of the boxes have the post 1907 Eastman Kodak logo

Illustration (c) DesignHill

which suggests that the boxes pre-date its introduction.

Of course, these boxes were produced by Kodak Australasia and the chronology of their packaging may differ from that of the US and Europe.

The Wodonga historical society has a tin in their collection which holds some photographic powder packages that appear similar to those in our cardboard packages that they date to the late 1800s early 1900s which fits with my dating hypothesis, but Museums Victoria hold a box that looks similar to the Dow's tank developer box that they date to the 1930's.

One crucial difference is that the Dows box is priced at 1s and the Museums Victoria box priced at 1s6d, suggesting that the Dows box may predate the Museums Victoria box

Twitter and Mastodon two months on

 Well, it's around two months since the Twitter became a Musk enterpise, and I, like a lot of other people decamped to Mastodon.

At the time of the Musk takeover, I fully intended to abandon Twitter and stop posting.

Well, I havn't. Inertia and convenience and all these other things have kept me engaged.

I don't like a lot of the changes to Twitter and one day, I might simply stop using it, but when? Who knows.

At the same time Mastodon is an interesting experience. 

At the moment I'm basically lurking, but there's some interesting material and stimulating posts there. It's definitely much more of an online community than twitter, but I don't find it a replacement, more a complimentary service to Twitter.

Now this could simply be because I'm an anti social introvert and don't really feel comfortable with throwing myself into online social interactions, much in the same way that I'm not good at small talk but I don't think so.

This of course is a weird time - we've just had the holiday season - Christmas, Hannukah, New Year etc, and of course it's also the annual holiday time in the southern hemisphere when a lot of people go away and drop out of circulation for a week or three.

Rather more I think it's because I havn't yet found my tribe.

In a sense this is not surprising - it took me a couple of years to get comfortable with Twitter, so I don't see why Mastodon should be any different ...

Moving to FTTP (maybe)

 When the NBN came to Beechworth in 2018 we ended up with an FTTC (Fibre to the Curb) connection - which is exactly what it says - a fibre connection to a fan out unit down a hole at the end of the street and a connection to the fan out unit over the old copper network.

And it's been pretty reliable. We have a 50Gbit/s link and all the usual speed tests show that we get that most of the time.

Apart from some teething troubles in the early days and network congestion at the start of the pandemic it's been reliable and done what we wanted.

But it does glitch and drop out occasionally. These smart modems with a little failover 4G connection unit inside them are not an option as we are in a small 4G blackspot - our mobiles use wifi calling in preference to a 4G connection.

So far however my only worry has been the bit of the old copper phone wiring between us and the fan out unit. I'm not sure when it was installed but our connection box outside of the house still has the pre-1995 Telecom Australia logo

so we can probably guesstimate the wiring as being at least thirty years old.

So when I got a marketing email from NBNco saying that we may be eligible for an upgrade to FTTP I was immediately interested. 

Yes it would cost a bit more a month with a faster plan, but while a 50 gig plan was really fast a few years ago, having several smart devices and a stupid number of computers, not to mention the tv, it probably makes sense to upgrade.

Now, we're with iiNet, which is part of TPG/Vodafone. And the reason we're with them is because we have a Fetch box to let us watch (or actually these days stream) some of the less common news and doco channels - this gives us around 250 channels of which in reality we probably watch four. In fact it's mostly ABC iView and SBS OnDemand with a leavening of BBC First and BBC Earth, plus the occasional Netflix movie.

As a solution it works for us and we don't have a particular reason to change.

Why am I telling you this?

Well NBN has a web page about FTTP upgrades that asks you to nominate a provider, and I guess then takes you to the providers website. So, if you were with Optus and wanted to stay with Optus, you would click on the Optus logo, and follow the bouncing ball.

But if you look at the NBN providers web page you'll notice that the TPG/Vodafone brands are notable by their absence - most the non TPG companies are there but not TPG.

So, I emailed iiNet's support desk. The first time around they gave me the wrong answer - they told me about paying to have a custom private installation. but then when I pointed out it was the NBN Fibre connect program I was referring to, they  came back with the following:

In regards with your inquiry about the email your received from NBN regarding the change technology to NBN FTTP iiGroup will be participating in the NBN Fibre Connect Program soon but for now you can register your address here http://sms.tpg.com.au/coat_register and we notify you as soon as it's ready.

In other words, they're not quite there yet.

The actual form is pretty easy, but it does require you to tell them your NBN Location id, a magic number that NBNco use to identify your physical connection.

Perversely the NBN's own check my address page no longer gives you your location id, but if you use the check my address form on Aussie Broadband's new customer page it gives you your NBN location id.

Obviously there's no point filling in the form unless you're (a) a TPG group customer, and (b) have received a mailing from NBNco about potentially being eligible for an FTTP upgrade, but if you are, it might speed things up a little for you ...