Another early morning bike ride

 Today was promising to be another hot day, so I was up and off before the sun came up for a ride round my little circuit.

Again I had my lights on, and in the process discovered what the little red led on my front light meant - that the battery was getting low.

I've never been a serious after dark rider, the one time I regularly rode after dark was when we first moved to Canberra, and tried to be both environmental and economical by only having one car between us.

Being Canberra, most of my ride in to work was along unlit and not particularly well maintained bike paths, and when riding after dark it was more a case of needing a heavy duty lamp to see the track and scare wildlife, rather than alert cars and trucks to your existence.

I didn't ride all the time, fortunately the number 217 direct bus (as was) to the CBD used to run past our house, meaning I could wimp out if it was wet, cold, or if it was a day when I needed business attire.

In those days LED lights were not a thing and the best choice for trail riding was a halogen light and you lived with it chewing batteries for breakfast.

In the event my front light dying on me didn't matter, the sun had come up sufficiently by the time my front light gave up the ghost, and anyway,  amazingly the old halogen Cat Eye light that I used when I used to ride home from work in Canberra, and had never got around to taking off my bike, still had some charge left in the battery despite not having been used for nearly twenty years.

However, I had an excellent ride, shaving five minutes off my recent average, swooshing along under trees and being rewarded with a wonderful orange red sunrise.

Everything was dry as the proverbial dead dingo, and later, I went down to OfficeWorks in Wangarratta to collect a new printer I was amazed just how dry, tawny dry, everything was. Not a spot of green to be seen.

It's obvious why we've been having continual fire ban warnings, one spark and these paddocks would catch light.

Basically, we need a day or two of soaking rain...

No cataloguing this week

 Well, this week I didn't go the Athenaeum to catalogue some more of the books, instead I did something much less interesting, I spent the day in Albury for a dental checkup and my annual-ish eye test.

All good, but fairly tedious, with the eye test seeming to take forever.

Earlier on this week, before it turned stinking hot again, I managed an early morning bike ride.

Otherwise the weather's been against me. While we havn't had the forty plus days of the previous week, most afternoons have been in the mid thirties, too hot to do any serious gardening.

We had been promised rain this weekend, but in the end, all we got was a pathetic dribble. Even some of the fairly indestructible plants in the garden are  beginning to look stressed - hopefully we might get some real rain later this week.

But it's been a strange summer.

The pomegranate bush we have on the back deck has only just deigned to flower

and the ginger plants which I grow principally for their foliage (we're too far south for them to flower) have only just started producing leaves after spending most of the summer sulking in their pots.

Elsewise, I blogged about Aubrey Herbert, the Englishman who might have become King of Albania in the run up to world war one, and ruminated about the role of data storage in digital sovereignty.

Otherwise, I've basically been fiddling about and getting on with life...

Bike ride this morning

 And this morning I finally got a bike ride after the heatwave hiatus.

Nothing special, just my usual route down Bridge Road to Mellish street, and then along the bike path to Alma Road as far as Kibell Lane and then doubling back via Balaclava Road and home..

It was a bit warmer than yesterday, just over 10C when I set out a little before sunrise (the first time this year I've had to use lights on my bike).

Pleasant ride with a large pale almost full moon in the purplish dawn light - strange to think we're almost half way to the equinox already...

Socks and hoodie

 

a pair of Roman socks from Egypt - David Jackson, CC BY-SA 2.0 UK vis Wikimedia commons

Last week we had a run of 40C plus days.

Today, I'm sitting typing this wearing socks and a hoodie (and pants, I hasten to add), and we have the heating on - it was a tropical 7C this morning when we woke up, and the cats have remained welded to the sofa all morning, refusing to put a paw outside...

Heat and cataloguing

 

We have had a week of debilitating heat - over 40C most afternoons. Not pleasant at all.

I decided to let our lawn tough it out and only watered the plants in pots and those in a couple of beds that we had planted with heritage plants and paid real money for. This of course has encouraged the weeds, so I reckon, now the heat's broken, I'm going to have a relatively full dance card weeding for the next few days.

Still we managed quite well. 

Until yesterday, the power had stayed on, without even a blip.

However, yesterday the power blipped but came back in the morning, but the evening was a different story.

We had finished dinner, and being Saturday night, had settled down with an extra glass of wine to watch a show about property conservation at the English National Trust. Completely geeky, but I admit that I am hopelessly addicted to the show.

And then the power went out.

It was still hot - over 30C outside, so we swung into action, breaking out our LED storm lanterns, and basically following our plan for dealing with power outages.

We'd eaten, so that wasn't a problem. 

As is usually the case we had a couple of unhelpful canned messages from Ausnet, saying they'd detected a problem, so we broke out our emergency radio to listen to the news headlines at nine pm, to see if it was just the town or half the state.

Our local ABC station turned out to be broadcasting the women's tennis final from the Australian Open in Melbourne. Nine pm came and went and no local news or emergency updates, just grunts and thwacks from the tennis.

We decided that since they hadn't bothered interrupting the tennis, nothing serious had happened, and most likely it was damage to the power line feeding Beechworth - there are times when it seems we're connected to the grid by a piece of wet string.

So we sat and read for a bit before going to bed.

The power came back shortly before one in the morning, and unusually, the tv came back on and annoyed the cats who were peacefully sleeping on the sofa by showing some German language aga saga - the perils of watching SBS I suppose.

This morning it's a lot cooler and we've had some rain.

Unfortunately no more rain is forecast for the rest of the week, and the daytime temperatures look to be over 30C some days, but at least the temperatures round about dawn look to be cool enough to let me get an early morning bike ride in.

Last week it was too hot, even in the early morning, to get a bike ride in and basically I did very little but read. I did do a bit of blogging about bicycle infantry, and a bit of work chasing down Palmerston railway station on the old Bright Railway line. Unusually it turned out not to have a Wikipedia stub so I had a go at writing one.

I havn't written anything for Wikipedia for over twenty years, so needless to say the whole procedure was completely different from what I remembered, with a little bit more in the way of a formal review process, not to mention that the editing tools were very different, but I put something together based loosely on my blog post and submitted it for review.

I did manage a hot sweaty morning up at the Athenaeum cataloguing the books. No spectacular finds and I havn't got to the bottom of exactly what was the intent behind Indian and Colonial editions, but I'm making  progress with nearly ten percent of the collection catalogued, or more accurately what we think is ten percent, the last catalogue spreadsheet from sometime in the early 2000's has problems with duplications and missing entries, but I'm kind of assuming the duplications cancel out the missing entries...

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!