A little story about technology

 

This is a Lenovo Essentials Smartclock, and it's part of the Google Home ecology.

It's a simple Linux powered device that tells the time, shows the current temperature at the nearest weather station and displays a little glyph to show if it's sunny, cloudy, rainy etc.

You can say 'hey Google' to it and issue voice commands like 'wake me tomorrow at 7am' or 'play ABC news radio'.

Basically it uses a slightly silly amount of software and compute to provide an updated experience of what you used to get from a clock radio,

We have three of these which I picked up cheap from Telstra when they were selling off unsold stock, and we have them in bedroom, the spare bedroom, and on J's desk in the study, and until about six weeks ago they have been utterly reliable, and just sat there doing their job, just as you would expect a well behaved IoT device to do - do one job and do it well.

Then, about six weeks ago, one by one, they stopped showing the weather glyph and the temperature - something which was strangely annoying.

Obviously the server that aggregated the weather data had died.

And it wasn't just us, a web search brought up a load of reddit posts from all over the planet complaining that the temperature and weather glyph had mysteriously stopped displaying.

Well we thought it would be back in a day or two.

It wasn't. It actually took six weeks for the temperature and weather glyphs to start re displaying.

I can't tell you exactly when they came back as we were down in Melbourne earlier this week, and they weren't displaying when we left, but were when we arrived home this afternoon.

Now, let's face it, displaying the weather glyph is not super important in itself. The fact it took six weeks to fix also shows that whoever provides the aggregation service is not deeply invested in maintaining a service for what is now a legacy device.

Software packages come and go. Look at Pocket. Incredibly useful and killed off as it no longer aligned with Mozilla's company plan, despite having zillions of active users, including yours truly. Or X (formerly Twitter) one the global conversation and now something slightly distasteful.

Hardware's different. You expect it to last for years.

I've owned three clock radios in my life - one a WH Smith branded generic device, and two quite slick Sony clock radios, and each of them lasted between ten and fifteen years.

So, similarly, I expect subconsciously, my little Lenovo smart clocks to stay working for ten or so years, just as I expect my smart TV to last as long as our previous TV that notched up fifteen years.

And I won't start about my car - it probably has more in the way of onboard computing power that Apollo 11...

And as our lives become more dependent on devices that themselves depend on external systems and services, we need to ask about life cycle and support expectations.

Sure, not displaying the weather glyph is no bid deal. But our car, our TV, our solar power system, well, that could be different...

Catching up

 Last week was one of the more absurd public holidays we have here in Victoria.

Not content with giving us a day off for the Melbourne Cup in November, the powers that be give us a day off for the AFL Grand Final - actually they don't, as the Grand Final is played on a Saturday, we get the Friday before off in lieu.

As the Athenaeum is technically a council facility, we were officially closed, which of course meant no cataloguing.

However, today we were open, on a morning when in rained with a capital 'R'.

And I can say that H. Rider Haggard was incredibly popular with the late Victorian and Edwardian readers of Stanley.

As well as early editions of the works he's best remembered for today, King Solomon's Mines, She, Ayesha, all of which have been almost read to death - in fact in a couple of cases we have newer editions as well as the old original editions, and editions of a lot of his less popular novels. Originally seen as boy's own tales of derring do, more modern critics take a more nuanced view with some suggesting that both She and Ayesha can be read as tales of female empowerment.

If you want to make your own mind up, almost all his books are available via Project Gutenberg as ebooks, or if you prefer a paper copy, second hand copies of his main novels can be picked up for a few dollars.

Otherwise it was a fairly standard day's cataloguing, though I did find a 1950's romance novel which the Athenaeum had clearly acquired second hand from a commercial circulating library that still had the date stamps from the previous owner inside, suggesting that hygenic circulating libraries that regularly fumigated their books persisted into the mid 1950's in Melbourne

However, it's not all been cataloguing - J has been helping put together the opening art exhibition of the newly formed Indigo Shire Creatives

and I've been doing some support role stuff - registering and labelling the artworks, fetching cases of wine for the opening night party,  and so on, and last night we had the opening night

which was incredibly well attended for a drizzly Thursday night ...

A little bit of Australian publishing history ...

 E W Cole was of the greats of the early Australian book trade.

As well as running Coles Book Arcade - possibly the largest bookstore in late Victorian and Edwardian Melbourne, he imported and resold second hand books from England, as well as new books, produced children's annuals and published cheap editions of popular books. 

Today, while working on the historic book collection at the Athenaeum, I came across this rather  nice example of one of EW Coles discount editions

A copy of Helen's Babies by the American author John Habberton.

Intended as a humourous novel and popular in its time, it tells the story of a confirmed bachelor, who is persuaded by his sister to come and look after her children while she goes off on holiday with her husband.

The book is printed as part of Coles Favourite Library.

Unfortunately the book is undated and I've been unable (so far) to trace when it was published, but I'd guess somewhere between 1890 and 1910. 

Neither the NLA or the SLV hold a copy, and while there is a copy in the NSW State Library's collection, it too is listed as undated.

The book is printed in England on good quality if thin paper and has a decent binding and an embossed cardboard and cloth cover. Perhaps not quite so well made as some of the books produced by mainstream publishers, but definitely better produced than the yellowbacks of the time.

I'd guess that Cole had discovered that he could get his cheap editions produced more cheaply in England than Australia, despite the cost of shipping, which may explain the slow growth of the Australian publishing industry in the early twentieth century...

And how's the cataloguing going?

Over the past year I've been posting updates about my little project to recatalogue the Athenaeum's historic book collection.

 I havn't done so for the last few weeks, not because I've become bored with the project, but because most of what I've found in the collection confirms my earlier suppositions about the Athenaeum buying second hand books, especially in the nineteenth century, to build up the collection as economically as possible.

So, same old, same old. But I do now understand why the original catalogue dating from the late nineteen nineties lists Marian Halcombe as the author of Wilkie Collins' Woman in White.

In the collection we have two very similar looking volumes which at some point have been rebound by the Beechworth Athenaeum - now the Burke Museum.

As books were expensive in colonial Australia, it was not uncommon for very popular books to be rebound locally to extend the life of the book if the original binding became worn out.

And the Woman in White was incredibly popular in its day - something you can see as even the replacement binding is distinctly worn, especially on the covers just where you would hold the book to read it sitting in an armchair.

Whoever did the rebinding stamped the spines with the title of the book  but not the author's name, and also stamped the spine of one volume with a '2' to show it was the second volume in a two volume set.

Now, both volumes have lost their title pages - when books get old and have been well read, the spines become loose and quite often they lose pages from the beginning and the end of the book.

In this case, the first page of the volume stamped '2', has a heading 'The story continued - as narrated by Marian Halcombe.'

Whoever did the original cataloguing was obviously not familiar with the book, and the way it is put together out of accounts by different narrators so the stories intertwine, and failed to spot that Marian Halcombe is a character in the novel, not the author, and then compounded the error by assuming that the unnumbered volume was volume one of the two volume set when in fact the books are from different editions (the typeface and the paper used is slightly different between the volumes).

I'm not quite sure how I'm going to document this but at least I now know how the error must have happened.

Otherwise, it's the usual mix of mysteries, crime novels, and romances, which shows that reading tastes have been pretty much the same over the last hundred and fifty plus years...

Digital disenfranchisement and the elderly

 There's an article today on the ABC's website about how older people, especially those in rural and regional Australia, are having increasing difficulty in accessing services as they move online.

Some of the reasons are predictable, lack of a decent internet connection, not owning a laptop, etc.

It's what in the 2000's we used to call digital disenfranchisement, and we used to worry about how students from poorer backgrounds would cope with an increasing move to online learning, and without having decent access to online resources.

Well, I suspect it's still a problem for some students, but at least we can now be reasonably confident that they have the basic skills to carry out a web search, access wikipedia, fill in an online form, or create and share a Google Docs document.

For older people, that's not the case.

They never learned to use a computer or acquire the bag of cultural skills that means that they can find their way round a windows manager, add a new wifi connection (one thing I've learned from being involved with the Athenaeum is that a lot of family history people, while they can download and annotate docments and do lots of clever things, connecting to wifi is something that they don't know how to do - someone set it up for them at home, so they never learned), deal with a different text editor, do markup, or indeed deal with a different note taking application.

They simply never learned. And remember these are overwhelmingly motivated intelligent individuals, but I do have to say that a lot of them are around my age, which I regret to admit is seventy.

Now I am different from a lot of people in my age group.

In the 1980s I did IT support for botanists and wildlife scientists at a field research station, and then later on more general IT support for a large research orientated university.

This was at a time when desktop computing was beginning to become common and a lot of researchers needed a little bit of help, be it choosing a laptop to take out into the field (literally in the case of botanists, archaeologists and geologists), setting up a device, installing software, or indeed just some basic text processing skills.

At the time there a lot of different applications and different computer systems, so I learned pretty rapidly to find my way round various bits of software.

Basically I'm a hack.

Most people in my age group are not.

A lot of what they have learned is by means of magic spells - want to pay a bill online? Well you click here, add the payee's account details here, click confirm, type in the amount here, set the payment date with this calendar widget, click confirm for a second time, review the details, and click OK.

And we don't make it easy for them. My bank has two different calendar widgets in their online banking system, and which one you get depends on whether it's a person to person transfer or a bill payment.

I'm going to guess that a lot of people don't understand that to the bank, a person to person transfer is different from a bill payment, so it's processed by different software system written and maintained by a different team who decided to use a different calendar widget. And why should they know this?

And I could go on. Want to report a hazard to my local council? Well, you fill in an online form that asks you a lot of questions, name, street address, phone number, email address, before asking you to select a hazard type from a pick list (tree down, flooded street drain, etc) and submit a trouble ticket.

It does at least have an 'Other' category with a 128 character free form text entry field - useful when the hazard is a dead fox lying in the middle of a residential street.

I could go on and on. Medicare, Vehicle registration, the Tax office, they're all online, and they all want information presented in a different way, and if you've only learned magic spells, you're lost.

Likewise showing people how to do things doesn't really help them, it's just another magic spell, it doesn't build the skills to navigate online systems.

What we really need is a set of common design guidelines, like the early Mac user interface design manuals, that mean that everything looks the same, the menus have the same names and the options are the same - this was really they key to the early success of Apple computers - everything just worked, and worked the same way. (I once helped a visiting Korean researcher install a printer on her Korean language Mac, not because of any Korean language skills on my part, but simply because the menu options were in the same order as in the English language version of the operating system).

Sure, information literacy training would help. But most training available for seniors is task oriented, that brings us back to the world of magic spells.

And remember, quite often it's our older citizens that need to access the pensions office, Medicare, book a doctor's appointment, or lodge an escript with a pharmacy, or even borrow ebooks from the library, something that needs quite a bit of skill, and I can't help feeling that better interface design would help.

And of course, if you can't do these things, and always have to get one of the grandkids to help you, you end up in a state of learned helplessness.

And it's happened to me.

Some time round about 1986 a girlfriend and I decided to take a train to the Spanish border from London.

At that time the only way you could only book an overseas train ticket for travel in the next day  or two was directly from a British Rail office in Victoria station in London. Amazingly, no other BR booking offices could process international bookings, and if you wanted an onward ticket from England, you had to get the train to London and then line up for a boat train ticket and a connecting SNCF ticket for onward travel in France.

It was almost as if, having understandably withdrawn the international booking service in 1940, they were yet to fully reinstate it.

Admittedly, some travel agents could book international tickets as well, but it took them days to do it.

Now, British Rail could book you a ticket on French Railways, but not on Spanish trains, that you had to do yourself at the station in Irun, if you wanted to go further into Spain or Portugal.

The other thing British Rail could not do was sell us a seat reservation, our tickets only allowed us to get on the train, but they airily assured us that SNCF could reserve a seat for us at the Gare d'Austerlitz up to an hour before departure, subject to availability of course.

Well that might well have been the case, but when we got to the Gare d'Austerlitz, after about four hours sleep on the overnight boat train from London, the booking office clerk told us 'C'est tout electronique, utilisez le minitel publique' and gestured at a row of terminals in the booking hall.

Well we tried. The terminals had AZERTY keyboards, and the system was only in French. After ten minutes swearing we gave up and decided to chance being able to get two unreserved seats together. We stood most of the way to Bordeaux...

Mary Beard: talking classics

 Recently, I finished Mary Beard's latest book, Talking Classics - the shock of the old.

I was disappointed.

Rather than a spirited anecdote laced defence of  'the classics' - the study of Greek and Roman culture - I found it read more as a defence of teaching classics.

Now the classics have a difficult history.

During the nineteenth century the study of the classics was the mark of an educated gentleman, and looking at Charles Dodgson's (aka Lewis Carroll) school timetable, one can see why. Apart from a bit of religion and a smattering of mathematics, they studied little but Latin and Greek, several hours a day, every day except Sunday.

And it was just Latin and Greek. No Roman history or archaeology, nothing quite so vulgar as a discussion of politics, corruption or what happens when some individuals become wealthy enough to buy control of the state, the res publica, the commonwealth, as one of Cromwell's men might have understood it.

And somehow a knowledge of Latin and Greek became required for getting into university, even to study sciences or medicine, and this of course meant that only those who had studied it at school could gain access to university, which of course produced a privileged elite.

By the time I went to university in the seventies, the specious requirement for competence in Latin and Greek, had gone, even though its ghost still howled in the darkness.

So why should one study classics? Or Russian? or anything else difficult and complex?

Let's take Russian, which I did study. Studying Russian was not simply to help you say 'я подчиняюсь' (I surrender) correctly, as the grim cold war joke went. Nor was it to read Dostoevsky or Tolstoy in the original - it was to try and gain some understanding of the opaque enigma of the Soviet Union and try and guess exactly what was happening, and this mean learning to assimilate a lot of complex and often obscure material and drawing sensible conclusions.

So with the classics, so with Egyptology, so with half a hundred other things.

The skills to learn, analyse and understand. If the history of the last fifty years teaches us anything it's that the future is unknowable,

And that's why the study of difficult things is important. To build understanding, not to be 'job ready'...

To ancient Rome via the Gertrude street tram

 

Earlier this year, J had a minor bit of surgery in one of the big city hospitals in Melbourne.

 Last week it was time for her post-surgical review, and that meant another trip to the city.

 The timing of her review was such that we would need to stay two nights in Melbourne, and since the hotel had a three nights midweek for the price of two deal, we decided to take the deal and have ourselves a day in the city.

 Doing so gave J an opportunity to visit a decent art store and pick up new paints and brushes, and let us do a bit of face to face rather than online shopping.

 We also did some fun things like a trip to a proper Japanese sushi restaurant where in true Tokyo style you picked your plates off a conveyor belt and stacked the colour coded plates on your table, and paid on the basis of the number of plates (two blue, one green, one yellow, etc)

As a fun twist the restaurant also had a range of specials, which you ordered via a touchscreen on your table and were delivered by a little delivery robot that ran along a track on top of the sushi conveyor belt.

 Silly, but fun.

 It also gave me an opportunity to visit the Ancient Rome exhibition at the Melbourne museum.

 This was a touring exhibition from Italy of mainly early imperial period sculpture, artefacts and frescos, and included something I had only read about – a removable marble hairpiece for a sculpture.

 

The Romans used these on statues of Imperial ladies so that they always had a fashionable hairstyle.

 There were other interesting items, a cute little pottery pig from a child’s grave, mass produced Samian ware and some Roman glassware.

 The exhibition is structured around various aspects of Roman life, such as the baths, formal dinners, death, religion and so on.

 The focus is on early Imperial artefacts, probably because that is the most materially rich period, but they do attempt to show the rise of Christian belief as the dominant religious belief in Rome and how it provided a degree of continuity with the period after the formal end of the empire in 476CE.

 Getting to the exhibition was fairly simple – we took the 96 tram from the city to the corner of Gertrude Street and walked past the exhibition building – which was hosting a graduation ceremony for the University of Melbourne that day – and into the museum.

 Unlike some visiting exhibitions this one was not particularly busy, giving you plenty of time to look at the artefacts. Obviously, your mileage may vary on this – when we visited, it was a typical cold damp Melbourne winter day, and the tram system was warning of disruption to trams running past Parliament House, as it was the day of the anti One Nation/Pauline Hanson school strike.

 As  it was, we didn’t see anything of the demo, and by the time we rode the tram back to Parliament station to change to a Metro train back to our hotel, the manifestation was most definitely over, and the greatest risk was crowds of newly minted graduates and their proud parents making their way home.