The recycled workbench in use

 

Back at the start of winter, I put together a recycled workbench in the outside studio.

It's been incredibly valuable, allowing me a place to set up light boxes, photograph artefacts and do a bit of documentation - the only real problem is the transparent tempered glass top - its transparency makes it a bit difficult to photograph items on the bench top - not a problem when I'm using a light box, but a bit of a problem when dealing with larger items, not to mention that mice don't work that well on it and you need to use mousepads.

I actually had to buy a couple, I've finally come to the end of my little stockpile I've acquired as freebies from various vendors over years...

Rain and windows users

 Yesterday started off better than expected.

Rain had been forecast from around breakfast time, so I was up just after sunrise for a cool early morning bike ride before the weather came in.

I managed my usual ten or so kilometre circuit in around 35 minutes which was about what it was taking me last year, so there's some hope there as regards building fitness levels.

And the rain held off until mid morning allowing me to get a few things done outside, earthing up my potatoes. checking my broad beans, little things like that.

And then the day kind of went downhill.

A couple of weeks ago I'd bought J a refurbished Acer Spin as a lighter weight, less bulky alternative to her 15" HP laptop.

It cost me less than two hundred bucks, but while I was setting it up for her I thought that it, or something similar, would make a decent alternative to my Windows 10 based Thinkpad that I used to document both Dow's and Chiltern, not to mention my using it up at the Athenaeum - after all most of the resources are online and most of the work is done via a browser, so it's not as if I needed anything particularly meaty.

Well, after two weeks with the Spin, J came to the conclusion that it wasn't viable as an alternative to taking her big laptop to the art classes and workshops she runs - the weight wasn't that different, and she wasn't that keen on the spacing of the keys, preferring a chiclet style keyboard with space between the keys.

Ok, no great loss, it hadn't cost us that much money, and anyway I could see a use for it, so I decided to change the default user account, as you would do if you were giving the computer to some one else.

On Linux, it's easy, just a brute force wipe and reinstall - with most distros it takes about forty minutes. Yes, you can be a bit more sophisticated, but the brute force approach works well. On a Macs it's easy and relatively straightforward - just follow the bouncing ball and you'll be right, no technical knowledge required.

Windows, well it's windows.

It looks straight forward but it isn't.

Basically what you do is a system reset that wipes the computer and does a vanilla reinstall. Being windows it gives you a choice - use the local recovery partition or download a fresh copy from Microsoft.

Some advice on the web says use the local copy, it's usually faster, others do a fresh download.

So I tossed a coin and went local. It sat for about fifty minutes saying something  like ' preparing files 1%' and then suddenly burst into life, rebooted, started installing windows, bombed out, and restored itself back to the original state with a singularly unhelpful error message.

So I tried again, doing a cloud based reinstall this time.

Despite the fact we have a pretty zippy connection these days, it took a couple of hours. Some of it might have been due to latency on the part of Microsoft's download servers, but most of this seems to be due to Microsoft's reset and reinstall process taking for ever - the messages detailing progress (or not) were as unhelpful as ever, so at one point I actually ran up task manager to see if it had hung, but no, it was rattling away.

Anyway. it eventually rebooted, and then did a reinstall, which again seemed to take forever - I am not by nature a patient person, and this was by now severely trying what little what little patience I do have - but eventually I got a fresh copy of Windows 11 and went through the normal set up dialogue.

Including my false start with a local reinstall it took over four hours to get a working machine.

It didn't help that the messages regarding progress were utterly unhelpful and gnomic - it almost made me long for the verbosity of the old style debian install script.

My advice is that, if you plan on doing this, be prepared to lose most of a day doing it, and if you have the bandwidth go for a cloud based reset - it will download about 4GB of data, and the actual reset process is so slow I don't think the speed of your connection matters overmuch, a standard 50MB/s link should be good enough.

It is however genuinely unattended, meaning that providing you can resist the temptation to take a peek, it could be left going overnight, leaving the actual windows setup to the following morning...

Facebook, cataloguing and dos commands

 After a period of procrastination up at the Athenaeum, I've had a burst of activity. 

Today I finally got started on cataloguing the heritage book collection - I can see that this is going to be a long slow exercise, but one that's definitely going to bring benefits as regards our understanding of the collection.

Mind you not all the procrastination was really procrastination, I would have started on the heritage book collection last week, if it were not for us needing to invent a process for accessioning removable media, not to mention a standard way of describing and recording the contents of the removable media we were accessioning. 

Tedious, uninteresting, but necessary, and hopefully developing these procedures will stand is in good stead when someone next drops a USB stick or a CD on us.

And I've decided to bite the bullet and rejoin Facebook.

I'm not a fan, but given that so many local history groups use Facebook there's really no way of opting out...

More Rosella news

 

Well, the pair of rosellas spent a bit of time working on the hole in one of the elms outside of our house, but now seem to have abandoned it.

Possibly too much disturbance from people walking along the footpath, dogs, not too mention possums and the postie on his moped - still a petrol one, no electric delivery bikes yet.

A bit sad, I was looking forward to seeing the chicks emerge, but we still have our bower bird chirping away and stealing anything blue he can lay his beak on…

Doctors, bicycles and computers

 A couple of weeks ago I had a health checkup - after all I'll be seventy early next year, and at an age when doctors start to worry about your prostate and your overall health.

I don't have a regular GP, as I'm hardly ever sick, and usually end up being allocated to a locum, which is fine if all you need is some antibiotics to shift a stubborn chest infection, but for this it would have been better to have a regular GP for a bit of continuity with the test results.

The first locum was a little bit worried by my cholesterol levels - everything else looked fine - and by the time I could get another appointment he had moved on and I saw a different locum, who wasn't quite so concerned but was all keyed up to give me the 'healthy lifestyle' talk, which he promptly abandoned once he realised that I wasn't a drunken burger eating slob.

My blood pressure is a little bit high, so I did two things - since summer's coming, I got my bike serviced ready for some summer morning bike rides - while it's still a bit chilly in the morning, the sun's now up early enough to get a ride in before having to deal with morning commuter traffic.

We've also still got an old cross trainer which we used to use over summer to keep us fit for cross country skiing in winter. 

Well we havn't skied for fifteen years so the cross trainer's been gathering dust, so I decided that, along with bike riding, I'd start using it again some mornings before breakfast.

Certainly, when I rode my bike to the bike shop to be serviced I noticed that my heart rate shot up and took some time to recover, so earlier this week, equipped with some nice new bluetooth headphones to listen to ABC Classic FM, I had a little work out - and it was a little workout - despite swimming and snorkeling in FNQ at the end of August, I wasn't as fit as I thought.

Hopefully, between biking and working out on the cross trainer I'll get my blood pressure and cholesterol levels down before I go back for a  follow up set of tests early next year.

Up at the Athenaeum, I've not really got started on my guerilla cataloguing exercise, for some reason the local health centre only does some tests of Friday mornings which clashes beautifully with my Friday morning sessions at the Athenaeum, however I did draft a procedure for handling removable media - increasingly when people donate the results of their family and local history research to us for safe keeping,  it comes on a USB stick, and we need a reproducible methodology for keeping it safe until it can be deposited somewhere more permanent.

I've also done a little bit of detective work on a pair of 1905 postal covers, and also blogged about the use of letter cards in late Victorian and Edwardian times, as well as reading 'The Other Trench', the diary of a German officer that tells the story of all three fronts (the Western, the Eastern, and the Italian Alpine front) from the German perspective.

J had been complaining that her 15" laptop was a little bit bulky to take to meetings - she's still running art classes and has got involved again in the theatre group, so I picked up a refurbished Acer Travelmate for her.

Not the most powerful, but a pretty tidy little machine, and it runs windows 11.

I went outside, checked, and the sky hasn't fallen, but obviously with the end of Windows 10 support, both the old Thinkpad I use for my work for the Athenaeum and also used for my work with the national trust, and the refurbished lightweight laptop I bought to take with us on road trips are  on borrowed time - while they both work well, feature creep will inevitably kill them, and while I have several perfectly adequate Linux machines, you do need to sometimes fit in with other people and what they use, especially when working on shared projects.

I've personally never really cleaved to Acer as a manufacturer, but I was quite impressed by the little Acer laptop with its robust gorilla glass screen while I was configuring it for J, so perhaps the long term answer for the Athenaeum/road trip problem is something similar to the refurbished Acer Travelmate I bought J.

However, I can wait a bit, we've no substantial travel planned until March, and for the moment, both machines are doing their job...

A nice pair of postal covers from 1905

 

A nice pair of postal covers from 1905 posted in New Zealand and addressed to the Commercial Bank in Hobart, Tasmania. 

Note the postmarks on the rear of the envelopes to show when the letters were received in Hobart. It's slightly galling to realise that mail from Wellington to Hobart took about a week, if anything rather faster than today!

One of the envelopes has two red one penny stamps and the other only one.

If you look closely at the stamps you can see the phrase 'Universal Postage' under the allegorical figure of Zealandia

This is because in 1901 New Zealand introduced the universal penny post, where by a letter could be sent anywhere in the world for a penny (roughly A$0.80 today).

A lot of countries, including Australia, refused to participate in the universal penny post scheme for fear of bankrupting their postal systems, and insisted that the cost of sending mail to and from New Zealand should remain at two pence (roughly A$1.60 today, or a little more than half the actual cost of sending a letter from Australia to New Zealand today).

Who did, and who didn't participate in the universal penny post scheme caused great confusion, and I'm guessing that someone just got it wrong, and didn't remember that two one penny stamps were needed for Australia. 

In any case the postal authorities have waived the penalty on this occasion as there's no postage due stamp on the underpaid envelope

There is also a little bit more of historical interest.

Each envelope has had a hole punched through it - it was common practice in offices of the time for correspondence or invoices once dealt with to be placed on a spike before filing, as in this rather bent example from the dispensary in Dow's pharmacy in Chiltern

The Commercial Bank was founded in Melbourne in 1866 and operated until 1982 when it merged with the Bank of New South Wales to form Westpac.

The Commercial Bank did not operate in New Zealand until 1912, but as can be seen, it had business dealings in New Zealand before then.

Where's the time gone

 At the start of this year I made a sort of resolution to try and post something diary-like roughly every fortnight.

Well, this month there's been a bit of a hiatus. Not that I haven't been busy, but it has all been bits and pieces - for example up at the Athenaeum it's been itsy bitsy bits of administrivia around funding, and getting purchases approved by funders.

There's been no real progress with recataloguing the collection - I'm increasingly minded to do some of the work myself as part of a 'pilot study' that sort of turns into a guerilla recataloguing exercise and gradually drag other people into the process, rather than continuing to work on a formal project plan that will probably go nowhere and seems likely to become mired in endless discussions about funding etc.

Certainly, the idea of getting volunteers to help with the work seems a non-starter. One of the problems of living in a rural area is that we actually have a very small talent pool to draw on. 

While we have hordes of tree changers in the area, they are on the whole more interested in dying fabrics and making pots from local clays than recataloguing a few thousand books. Nice people, who would undoubtedly bring great enthusiasm to the project, but who are lacking the basic skills required, and who, less face it, are not that interested in what will be a rather boring and repetitive task.

At the same time we went down to Melbourne for a couple of days.

You may remember we had had a trip in July which turned into an endless set of public transport cock ups which included a medical appointment for J.

Well J had to go back for some tests, so we decided to drive, especially as she might be a bit wobbly after the tests.

Personally, I loathe driving in Melbourne, but sometimes you just have to suck it up and get on with it.

As it was, it turned out to be one of our better decisions as the hospital rescheduled the tests from the afternoon to the morning at the last moment, so we drove down the night before accepting that we would be donating several of our less essential body parts to cover the cost of overnight parking in the city.

We rationalised this to ourselves by saying we might go to Ikea on the way back to pick up some bits and pieces.

As it was, J was a bit wobbly, so we skipped Ikea, and after a quick stop in Doncaster to pick up something for dinner headed straight back home.

Otherwise, it's not all been bad. Spring, having spent well over a month teasing us over its imminent arrival, seems finally to have got its act together arrived properly, and I've been busy in the garden, planting, pruning and weeding, something that is good for the soul, scrabbling around in the dirt...