Guerilla cataloguing (part 93)

 Well, the guerilla cataloguing exercise is continuing to bear fruit.

I think I now have an understanding of the shoestring nature of the Athenaeum's library with books bought second hand from larger circulating libraries in the 1920's and 1930's

and earlier in the nineteenth century from Mullen's and from as yet unidentified importers of second hand books from the UK.

Likewise I think I now have a handle on that 1920's phenomenon, the hygenic library, 

And, working with the collection, one can start to see how the Australian publishing and printing industry developed from the 1880's onwards with locally produced reprints of books printed in England, sometimes under the British publisher's name, or sometimes by an Australian publisher in agreement with the original UK publisher.

The one thing I havn't quite got my head around yet are Imperial and Colonial editions. Often produced by UK publishers, and printed in England, they usually have a statement on the flyleaf something like 'This book is only for sale in India and the Colonies and must not be imported or sold in the United Kingdom'.

The wording varies from publisher to publisher, but the intent is clear - these editions were not for domestic (ie UK) use.

At first I thought they might have been printed cheaply in India, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

The books often seem to be produced using materials of similar quality to those of the UK editions, and are often printed in England. 

My current hypothesis is that they are editions of books published in the UK a few years earlier, which are being reprinted and sold in a cheaper edition, but to be honest, I don't really have enough evidence as yet.

So, I guess from here on in, the fiction collection will be more of the same, triple decker suspense novels and yellow backs from the Victorian era, murder mysteries and westerns from the 1920s and 30s, with the westerns being mostly replaced by romance and spy novels in the 1950s.

This isn't hard and fast - for example this morning I catalogued a Mills and Boon novel from the 1920s - but it is true that the classic murder mystery novels and western novels seem to appear after world war one, and it's not true to say that this is a reflection of growing American influence - most of the murder mysteries are English, and quite a few of the Western type novels are set in Canada, though I suspect the rise of silent movies might be behind the increasing popularity of Western novels.

But life is not all about cataloguing - I managed to get better network performance out of my old AMD Ryzen based machine by adding a wireless repeater into the equation, as well as spending my pocket money not on sweets, but on a refurbished Microsoft Surface in my quest to find an ideal lightweight machine to carry about.

Really what I'm trying to do, I realise, is to come up with something that had the performance of my old and now deceased 2012 Macbook Air, but which runs either Linux (preferably) or Windows.

I've come close, but I've never quite hit the sweet spot ...

(oh, and I did a blog post to mark the 125th anniversary of the death of Queen Victoria)

A wireless repeater

 My old AMD based laptop, the one I tried Bunsen Labs on, due to some quirk doesn't have terribly good network connectivity on my bench in the outside studio. Basically wifi is slow - and it's the machine, the old Ubuntu based iMac next to it manages a 40Mbit/s connection - good enough for web browsing and file uploads.

So I started hatching plans to improve performance, the more intricate one involving a pair of old powerline adapters and an old wifi access point.

However before I got round to hooking them up I remembered that I had an old Vonets unit somewhere that can be configured as a wireless repeater

USB powered and about half the size of a mobile phone, deploying it seemed a lot easier than playing games of hitech Lego with powerline adapters.

Installing it seems to have solved the problem

speed is not lightning (10Mbit/s ±2), but good enough for the basics, be it web browsing, email, or file uploads and downloads, after all in the late 1990s, a 10Mbit/s network was something special, and the university I worked at at the time had an amazing 2Mbit/s connection to the internet!

Normal service has resumed

 Well, we seem to have escaped the bushfires for now.

While I blithely tell people that the town hasn't burned since European settlement at the start of the gold rush, we are surrounded by pine forest and historic park reserves, and I'm well aware that one spark could start a serious incident.

As it was there were no grassfires or bushfires locally, and none of the fires in the hills came close, unlike in 2020.

Our major problem was smoke, and we found ourselves running the air purifier every day until Thursday evening when a storm brought a decent dump of rain. Fortunately the lightning didn't start a fire anywhere, or if it did, the rain was heavy enough to put it out.

As always we're well aware that we got off lightly compared to those affected by the Harcourt, Longwood and Walwa fires and our thoughts are with them.

Otherwise, now that the smoke has cleared, it's back to normal. The freeway south reopened a few days ago and the trains are running again.

We went over to Bright on the last day of smoke to have a look at the Bright Art show. J has some paintings in the show and as always we were curious to see how they have been hung, and to see what has sold.

Strangely, not a lot seemed to have been sold, perhaps because there was not a lot of 'fireplace art' in the show - large paintings to go on the chimney breast in your restored cottage or 1900's villa.

On the way back we stopped at the Moroccan themed cafe in Myrtleford for lunch and had a look at the attached architectural salvage and tile shop. 

We didn't buy anything, but we did find that they had a selection of little 20mm x20mm mosaic tiles as well as some clipped bits - ideal for our planned hall table restoration.

Otherwise, it's been much as before. No early morning bike rides because of the smoke, and I did feel my chest getting quite tight after I walked back after dropping off my (very) old green Subaru for a oil change and safety check. (Old enough that the garage asked if I was thinking of getting heritage plates for it.)

However, by Friday the air was clear again and we were back to normal when I drove up to Stanley for a bit of cataloguing at the Athenaeum. The project's going well, even if we're over the initial discovery phase of finding that they had been buying second hand books both from Mullen's in Melbourne, and an as yet unknown importer of second hand books from England.

It's also quite clear that during and immediately after the second world war a lot of British publishers were having separate Australian editions of books printed locally - something similar to what I found when documenting Dow's pharmacy for the National Trust - during the second world war when Australia was cut off from the UK, the traditional source of imported items, there was a lot of import substitution with local equivalent products being manufactured.

Besides this, not much, the smoke stopped any gardening so I've been reading Richard Holmes' Tommy, ostensibly a history of the ordinary British soldier's experience of the western front, but which actually has a marked bias towards officers drawn from the middle and upper classes, perhaps simply because they were simply more likely to leave material behind in the form of diaries and letters that the ordinary conscript.

And I also found time to blog about an Albanian 1 Lek coin I've acquired as part of my collection of ephemera connected with World War One and its aftermath ...

And today we have smoke...

 

Not surprisingly, after the fires, we have smoke, serious smoke haze this morning, bad enough that for the first time since the Black Summer fires, we're running the air purifier we bought back then. 

For the last six years it has sat in the lounge room taking up space. We never felt the need to run it during Covid, and while we've almost turned it on a couple of times when the Fire Management people have being doing back burning to reduce the fuel load in the Gorge and the old gold diggings, it's never been quite that bad.

Today's different.

All plans for bike rides, a swim in the lake and what have you are off. Currently showers are forecast for mid week - hopefully they will damp down the fire areas and clear the air a bit ...

And the power went out

Yesterday was a stinking hot day, and while cloud cover meant it didn't quite get to 40C, the wind was gusting, exactly the sort of weather in which a minor grass fire turns into a major bushfire in the blink of an eye.

While there have been some very bad bushfires around Victoria we were unaffected with no fire close enough to worry about.

So, after my morning at the Athenaeum, we stayed inside with the aircon running - we run ours at 26C, enough to keep the house comfortable rather than office temperatures - and kept the cats inside as, silly creatures, they will go and bake themselves stupid in the heat.

It was beginning to look as if we were going to get away without anything major, when, just before five o'clock in the afternoon, the power went out.

Where we live in rural north east Victoria, power outages are a fact of life. Late autumn and winter storms usually mean two or three outages a year, plus the occasional blip, wobble and drop out during bad weather.

We are all electric. When we moved here ten years ago we did have a bottled gas stove top, but we replaced it with an induction hob when we remodelled the kitchen.

But being all electric hasn't been a problem. The house is reasonably well insulated and if it starts to get cold we put on our cold weather gear from when we used to walk and ski in the Australian Alps in winter.

Likewise we still have our little gas camp stove, and we have a gas barbecue, meaning we can make hot drinks, heat up a can or two of soup, and even cook dinner providing the weather's being kind.

What we havn't had is a power outage in the middle of a heatwave.

At first, all we did is simply wait and see if the power came back. 

Ausnet, the company that maintains the poles and wires, didn't help by sending us a text message saying an assessment crew would be with us in 90 minutes time, it would have been better if they said that they had logged a fault in our area and would provide an update in an hour or so.

However, it's J's phone that gets the Ausnet text messages, and it was sitting on 25%. Not ideal, so I grabbed the powerbank I use to power my lightbox out of my work kit to charge it - fortunately it was about 90% charged despite not having been used for a month or two.

We of course had the usual problem of being in a location with crap mobile phone reception, meaning we couldn't use our phones to check what was going on and I could't use our 4G modem to get us a network connection over the cell phone network.

So, I grabbed the old transistor radio out of our emergency box. It's an old type unit, around twenty years old and has an old style rotary tuner.

I, of course, being used to smart speakers, and modern scanning radios had absolutely no clue what frequency our local ABC station was on.

I should probably make up an emergency notebook with key information like the local ABC emergency frequency, but I hadn't, but after a bit of fiddling I found our local ABC station.

The news was apocalyptic. Bushfires everywhere and 96,000 properties had lost power, which was getting on for half of country Victoria.

Clearly we weren't going to get power back anytime soon.

The first problem was dinner.

A total fire ban meant we couldn't use the barbecue or the camping stove, so we made up a salad from a tin of mixed beans, a can of tuna and some veggies. We grabbed a couple of bottles of no alcohol beer from the fridge in the outside studio - we are doing the dry January thing, and anyway it would better to be sober in case things went pearshaped.

By this time the light was beginning to go so we got out our emergency led storm lanterns, turned the radio off and sat in the garden with a couple of cokes and watched the unusually orange sun go down.

Then it was inside to read our kindles for an hour or so - glowing screens are a definite plus compared to earlier kindles with a passive e-ink screen that just used reflected light.

Then to bed after cold showers - the house was growing hotter and the night stickier to try and get some sleep.

It sounds like we were terribly well organised. 

We weren't - we hadn't checked the storm lanterns, the power banks or the emergency radio for ages, normally we only check them in the run up to winter. We were simply lucky that they were well enough charged from the last time I checked them at the end of winter. 

As it was a couple of our torches that we keep to find our way about ideally should have been recharged and our head torches from our walking and camping days could only manage a pathetic glow.

I guess the moral is that we should be a bit more proactive and check our emergency kit every couple of months.

As it was, we did manage to get to sleep and were woken at three in the morning by a great beeping and buzzing as the power came back on and we rejoined the twenty first century.

More important than it seems - while we normally use wifi calling from our phones, we do also have a pseudo landline connection connected into the back or our internet modem. Obviously both the fibre optic transceiver and our internet modem have to have power for it to work, but it does mean we can make an emergency call even if our mobiles are out of power.

So once we had power back, it was a case of turning the cooling back on to cool the house and go back to bed.

This morning it was a case of checking our internet connection, restarting a couple of computers that had become terribly confused, charging the storm lanterns and power banks.

The local supermarket had no fresh bread or orange juice this morning but they'd been able to keep the frozen and chilled cabinets cold with the help of a backup generator, so it was toasted packet bread and long life orange juice for breakfast this morning - very much a first world problem - and I should have picked up some fresh bread and juice yesterday - my bad.

We got off lightly because we'd planned for winter storms and knew what to do, but after the problem with the emergency torches and not knowing the emergency radio frequency I ordered an extra storm lantern and an AM/FM radio that you can pre program favourites - not that the emergency channel is anybody's idea of a fun listen.

The radio I've ordered has an internal battery and charges via USB meaning we can run it and recharge it from one of the powerbanks, or a at a pinch one of the storm lanterns.

But really, we should try and be a bit better prepared ...

Heat and smoke

 If Christmas had been unseasonably cold, the last few days most certainly have not, with 40C days, wind and the smell of bushfire smoke in the air.

Every since the bad bushfires at the end of 2019 we've been a little twitchy about bad fire days and today certainly could be one.

Yesterday it was 40C by 1130 in the morning

Fortunately we had a couple of showers in the evening and today it's not quite managed 40C, although the wind is blowing strongly - still risky and a total fire ban day, but just that little bit better than yesterday.

However, the show must go on - both last Friday and today I went up to the Athenaeum for a couple of hours cataloguing.

No spectacular finds, just further confirmation that they were buying books second hand from a variety of sources to fill the Athenaeum's shelves.

At the same time I read Ursula Bloom's memoir of her life as a young woman during world war one.

It is very much a personal memoir, but it does contain a lot of useful background information on what the civilian population thought as the war progressed, not to mention the impact of the Zeppelin raids on people's morale.

Christmas 2025

 Christmas this year was unseasonably cold. 

The temperature might have struggled to the low twenties but with a chilly wind from the south it didn't feel like it.

We were aiming for a relaxed Christmas, just us, no friends or family, or any parties - not quite true, the Athenaeum had lunch in the pub on a stinking hot day the previous Friday, and the theatre people had a windy barbecue a few days earlier, but basically it was just us and the cats.

As always, we cooked our dinner the day before, in the hope of being able to have a leisurely outdoor Christmas dinner on the deck.

But it was not to be.

On Christmas eve we rugged up and sat out with a drink to listen to the Christmas bells from the Anglican church - while neither of us are in the least religious we both enjoy the trappings and theatricality of a traditional Christmas - before retreating inside for our traditional Christmas eve prawns and potato salad.

Christmas day was even colder and again we sat inside, read, listed to jazz, ate more than we should and ended up watching something silly on iView - basically a pretty good, if uneventful Christmas.

Now I'd been silly enough to take advantage of the $500 discount and buy J a Surface Pro for Christmas - basically she needed a tablet like windows device for writing, and with the discount it seemed sensible to go for the base model Pro than an older refurbished device.

So, after watching the start of the Sydney Hobart race on Channel 9 - the only time of the year I ever watch Nine, I went to set it up for her, thinking it would only take twenty minutes, and leave me the afternoon to do something productive.

More fool me. My previous fun with changing windows configurations should have warned me that nothing with Microsoft is ever simple.

It started off well, zipping through the setup screens until it got to a point where the installation script decided to check for updates and download them. Which it did, at the speed of a snail on the aged pension. Given that we have a 500MBit fibre optic connection these days a complete download of windows would only take a few minutes rather than tediously going through each module, checking signatures and deciding which components to download and update.

It then proceeded to install the updates, which involved an hour's worth of gnomic electronic farting about, got to ninety eight percent, where the update failed, the machine restarted several times and then came right - basically about two hours to do what an iPad or decent Android tablet would do in quarter of the time.

Anyway, after numerous invocations of the deity the machine works and I have to say it's a very nice device, just a pity about the appalling installation and update routine...