And we've bought a dvd player...

 A day or so ago I tooted a link to an article from the NYT about rediscovering a DVD player and its advantages over streaming.

Well, we’ve been on a similar journey, and have just bought a DVD player to replace our broken fifteen year old unit. (Actually, we bought one twice - we'd forgotten about needing a multi-region player to watch overseas dvds - so we've now got a second dvd player connected to our old tv in the studio)

Now, we are not luddites. We have a fibre optic NBN connection and watch most of our tv as on demand tv - not that we watch a lot of tv, basically the evening news and an hour or two of recreational tv most nights - foreign language crime dramas and BBC classic dramas mostly. 

But, we live in a rural area. A trip to the cinema or the theatre involves an eighty kilometre round trip, and to be honest, the local cinemas are not known for their art house films, and we only get a touring Shakespeare performance once a year.

The content we tend to watch, classic movies, adaptations of classic novels, foreign language art house films and the like tend to spread fairly thinly over the various streaming services available.

And it was a friend who was volunteering at a community op shop that put us on to the fact that there’s a robust trade through op shops as well as ebay and other online trading sites on second hand dvd’s, mostly sitting around $10 - cheap enough to turn into a coaster if it’s a dud disk - making the cost of a multi region dvd player and few second hand dvd’s competitive with the cost of a streaming subscription, where basically you pay for content you don’t watch.

And of course, we can share dvd’s once we’ve watched them with friends...

 

 

Another day at the cataloguing coalface

 Earlier this year we had a problem that none of the insect traps in the historic book collection had been checked since who knows when.

Well we cleaned up, replaced the moth traps with new ones, and waited.

Well today's been three months since we replaced the traps. The moth attractant still smells when you open up the traps to check but there's no evidence of insect intrusion.

Now it has been winter here in the southern hemisphere, which meant fewer flying beasties, but it's now well into spring and there are definitely bugs about.

But the lack of evidence of insect intrusion is a good sign and suggests that we did not have a developing infestation during the period when the traps were not being checked regularly.

We've decided to leave the traps as is until the end of January and do a second check, at which point we'll replace the traps again.

Otherwise the mix has been much as before with Victorian era sensation novels, some sourced second hand from Mullens, golden age mystery novels, and the odd romance, but also a new trend

with the development of the cold war in the 1950s, spy and espionage novels start to make their appearance.

The actual cataloguing process using LibraryThing is working well, but I've moved from using their aggregated Overcat catalogue to using the National Library of Scotland catalogue.

The NLS catalogue has pretty good coverage of the period that the historic book collection covers although some of the entries are quite sparse and sometimes require to be cross checked with the British Library catalogue and the National Library of Wales catalogues.

One slight source of annoyance with the NLS catalogue is that where and author uses a pseudonym, the catalogue 'corrects' it to the author's true name - for example if you catalogue  The silence of Dean Maitland by Maxwell Gray, the catalogue will correct the author's name to Mary Gleed Tuttiet.

Other library catalogues do not do this - it's obviously been a perfectly justifiable design decision by the NLS.

However as the book is filed under G, the author name on the spine, I usually correct the author's name back to the pseudonym and add a comment about the use of a pseudonym and point to a suitable source, usually wikipedia.

Otherwise it's been a pretty productive week. It's been surprisingly cold for October after last weekend's rain, so I havn't done a lot of gardening although I did cut the grass one day. 

My seedlings are going well and my tomatoes will soon need to be potted on for a second time, although the possums have totally decimated my broadbeans.

However, the potatoes are doing well and so far, touch wood, they've left the runner beans alone. I've started a second lot of broad bean plants in pots with the aim of growing them to a possum proof size before planting them out.

I also did a little bit of blogging this week - first about Holderness - and then by a strange but totally explicable link, zeppelin raids on the UK during world war one.

The link is the little town of Howden, that lies to the west of Hull on the north bank of the Humber, and while it's not in Holderness as such the landscape share the same flat open countryside as seen further east, and came to mind while researching both Holderness and zeppelin bases.

I can't say that I ever stopped in Howden, but when we lived in a village to the east of York, the easiest way to get to either the M62 or M18/M1 freeway was to drive south to Howden rather than drive towards Leeds and jiggle about in usually heavy traffic.

Howden was the site of the major British airship base during world war one and later the site of Britain's ill fated attempt to build an airship to match Germany's expertise in the field.

In Holderness

 

A few days ago I tooted a link about ghostly goings on in Holderness, the wild windswept flatlands to the east of Hull in England.

At the time of my toot, I was interested in the fact that  Martinmas coincided with the time around Halloween, and that many of the features of traditional Martinmas celebrations in Germany – turnip lanterns for one – are the same as I remember as part of Halloween, when I was a child on the east coast Scotland, and before Halloween became the homogenised Americanised thing it is today.

Today, Martinmas is celebrated on 11 November, which is of course Remembrance day, something that seems strangely appropriate with its associations with the dead and with ghostly goings on.

Not the cartoon ghosts going ‘woo-woo’, but ghosts as the Romans understood them, those who had died an unquiet death and still walked the earth.

Holderness is itself a strange lonely place, and somewhere I vaguely know.

When I was doing research at Hull University in the very early nineteen eighties, I would sometimes ride my bicycle east from the city to a landscape of windswept fields running down to small coastal villages and old medieval churches hidden away in country lanes and the ruins of abandoned monasteries, left behind after the English Reformation.

At other times, I would get a bus to somewhere on the coast (at that time country buses were still cheap and plentiful, even on a Sunday) and walk along the cliff top path to somewhere else before catching the bus back to Hull.

Marvellous for clearing the mind.

Later on when we lived in York, we would tend to drive to Flamborough and Whitby rather than Holderness for our coast walks, but sometimes we would drive south towards Withernsea, notable for having a lighthouse in the middle of the town – not as daft as it sounds, at the time the lighthouse was built it was surrounded by sand dunes, and the lighthouse was built set back from the coast to protect it from the risk of erosion.

Later, the development of tourism meant that the town crept east to the new promenade, with its railings strangely reminiscent in design of those used at Bondi Beach, leaving the lighthouse in the middle of the town.

Withernsea Lighthouse - geograph.co.uk via wikimedia commons

The other thing, and the reason why we would make the detour to Withernsea was that Withernsea had an excellent fish and chip shop which then, twenty five years ago, bizarrely had a NSW Maritime Services fish identification chart on the wall.

In winter, when the clouds scudded and the wind blew it was a wild and atmospheric place, somehow still strangely isolated

Eve, by S Baring Gould

 Sabine Baring Gould was a priest, a collector of folk songs and a prolific late nineteenth century novelist.

His books are mostly forgotten now, but one of his books was undoubtedly the star of today's cataloguing session up at the Athenaeum

simply because it was published and printed by George  Robertson and company in Australia in 1888.

Quite a few of S Baring Gould's novels were published by Chatto and Windus in London, and I've previously found evidence that George Robertson was producing yellowbacks in Australia using the stereogrphs of the Chatto and Windus yellowback editions - the stereograph being a papier mache squeeze of the plates for the original book from which new plates could be made. (incidentally Rawlinson used the same squeeze method to copy monumental cuneiform inscriptions carved into cliffs in Iran).

Unfortunately our edition of Eve has been rebound, so it is impossible to tell what the original binding was, but the paper is reasonably good quality suggesting that while it might have been reprinted via a squeeze, it was something more than a yellowback.

Other than that it was mosly 1950's romance novels today, along with one or two nineteen thirties crime and mystery novels, but we have even more proof that hygenic libraries were still a thing in the nineteen fifties

The Melbourne Mudies...

 

I was quite intrigued by the use of the phrase The Melbourne Mudie's.

Half an hour searching through Trove not only revealed that Mullen's used the phrase in their own advertising, but that it had entered common parlance. A number of articles used the phrase in contexts such as groups of ladies outside the Melbourne Mudies, suggesting that it was in common use and used as an alternative to Mullen's...

Friday at the Athenaeum...

 

Well it's been an interesting morning up at the Athenaeum.

As I've established, the Athenaeum was buying books second hand from Mullen's circulating library in Melbourne.

Mostly the circulating library labels look like this

and cover the top third of the book. However, this book was different with the label covering most of the front of the book, and the text was different, and said it came from Mullen's Select library.

I need to do a little more digging but it looks like Mullen's, as well as a circulating business were sending out pre selected boxes of books to subscribers to the Select Library living in the country far from any bookseller or circulating library

Also note that in this advert Mullen's was styling itself "The Melbourne Mudie's". Nothing like trading on brand recognition.

The other real find of the day was not part of the historic book collection.

Someone clearing out their father's old shed walked in with some old handwritten ledgers and an 1874 copy of Philips Handy General Atlas of the World, complete with the original coloured maps produced by John Bartholemew, the well known Edinburgh map publishers.

That would be interesting enough in itself, but on the backs of some of the maps there are various notes in longhand.

Now, I have not really looked at the notes, but it looks as if they could be tracking a journey from the UK to Australia, which would be rather interesting, especially if there was a connection with someone's family migration story.

At the moment this is all hand waving, and until we photograph and transcribe the notes we won't really know.

Short term, our major concern has been to find a mylar bag big enough for it - the atlas is a bit bigger than B4, and then enough space in a freezer somewhere to store it for a couple of weeks to make sure that any lurking bugs or other nasties have been killed off...

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...