Clare Davies
24 April – 12 May 2013
opening 6 – 8pm, 24 April
c3 Contemporary Art Space
Abbotsford Convent Foundation
1 St Heliers St. Abbotsford VIC 3067 Australia

1. A nice cosy cafe, without overly-loud music, tables a good height and not rocking, and nothing at all to do for a good few hours. Espresso.
2. The office coffee machine, or ‘coffee printer’ — as it really does behave more like a noisy dot-matrix printer.
3. Mocca-pot, or (secondly) frech press, at home with just-ground beans and a clean kitchen in which to make it. The choice of cup is far more satisfying here.
4. A ”coffee bag” can be surprisingly good if all else fails.

Note that the muck they call instant coffee does not appear in this list.

It was my last meeting as minute-taker (I’m off the Committee now) and I’m looking forward to getting stuck in to things like scanning the 1978 photographic survey prints and getting them online, and helping Fremantle in whatever other geeky way I might. :-)

Now then, who’s up for a coffee-powered occupation of that debacle of a scaffold that’s been dumped on the lazing ground of the World’s End Cafe?

Flippin’ ridiculous.

Anyway, my mind is full of ideas of how to effectively be an ‘e-volunteer’ for the Local History Collection (or something along those lines), and I’ve got a bunch of things that I want to do on the FS sites, so I’m going to ignore my blog for today.

Sorry for a pointless post (although, I don’t suppose anyone’s actually reading this, for me to be appologising to).

A wonderful weekend. I’m just posting a few photos here now, because otherwise I know I’ll never get around to it. I am far too tired to think about writing anything meaningful about any of it!

Goodnight.

Long live the Coop!!

Hurrah!

I suggested ImageMagick’s convert and pdftk.

1. Combine all the images into one PDF:

    $ convert *.jpg photos.pdf 

2. Put the two PDFs together:

    $ pdftk report.pdf photos.pdf cat output report_with_photos.pdf 

And that’s it.

(Of course, when one suggests this sort of thing to someone who wants to use Word, one invariable ends up doing it for them. Which is why I’ve posted this here, so in six months when I’m asked again, I’ll remember how to do it.)

External links:

Skala, M. 2008. How to concatenate PDFs without pain.

And two comments on my last post, in as many days — I actually had no idea that anyone read this blog, at all, ever. So thank you! I shall blather on, at least for the Nablopomo duration (so I’d better catch up with my one-post-per-day quota).

I was in tech-free mode yesterday, and the day before, for no better reason than what I sometimes perceive to be the utter fragility of computing technology. I don’t mean the physical fragility of the hardware involved — although that, when one is contemplating writing in the salty wind sitting on the rocks of South Mole, for example — can be annoying enough. I mean more the vast, unimaginably complex, worldwide systems that keep everything going so that I can sit at this latop and type this — I just shudder, sometimes, and want to run from it (screaming) as fast as I can. No single word would be going from my brain to this page, if it were not for some system of manufacture and distribution that allows me to have this computer, and use the power supplied to this house, and everything else required. And I have no idea, absolutely no idea, of anything but the vaguest idea of that system (and even that is probably wrong).

That’s the fragility I see in I.T., and it scares me I guess, or at least prompts me to think that writing on paper with ink is somehow less dependent upon all this massive, modern, world.

And that’s the answer I find: that, actually, however a chap like me lives (short of subsistence farming) is inextricably tied up with, forever dependent upon, how everyone else lives. (Oh, sorry about the cliché, I didn’t mean to arrive at such a twee conclusion!)

* * *

After which contemplation of where the electrons flow, I shall go now to where the wind flows through the heath, on a stroll that I’ve meaning to take since getting back to W.A. nearly six months ago:

Five years have past; five summers with the length
Of five long winters! and again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs
With a soft inland murmur.—Once again
Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,
That on a wild secluded scene impress
Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect
The landscape with the quiet of the sky.
The day is come when I again repose
Here, under this dark sycamore, and view
These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard tufts,
…

—Mr. Wordsworth’s Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey

Free culture: how big media uses technology and the law to lock down culture and control creativity by Lawrence Lessig. Penguin Press 2004.

If content is otherwise not available — old music, books, newspapers, whatever — then what harm is done in making it available? But that’s not the point. My interest is in the making it available, and not the legalality: Building these great, free, open, public libraries of content — the Internet Archive, Wikimedia Foundation projects, etc. — is a Good Thing. Doing so in a collaborative, communal, progressive way is good too. I find it satisfying to work on (building and organising) these sorts of libraries, and that I think it is a very worthwhile pastime. That’s all.

(Hardly worth writing here, I guess, but then I had to have something to say today, didn’t I? And sitting in Tropicana on High Street (as I was when I wrote the above) is probably likely to make one ramble on about nothing. They don’t seem to ‘have the internet’ here (as the phrase goes), so I’m wondering about the usefullness of blogging, and interacting on the net, given that one must be online to do these things…)

I am attracted to the ‘document’ model (I don’t mean the DOM, obviously), in which the basic unit of content transfer is a single, complete, file — generally a PDF. This contrasts with web-based content, in which there are many files involved, they are interdependent, and they usually deal with navigation and content all in one. For example, my blog is not a document, it is a complicated piece of software that presents the posts and the navigation (etc.) to the user, from one place (the server). It cannot be copied, not wholly and easily, and passed around. I don’t really like this.

The other way, the document-based way, would be to do something like the Australia Institute and other places do with their press-releases: make each post a PDF, self-contained and simple, easily downloadable and keepable — in fact, making it necessary to download a local copy to view it. This approach loses a lot in terms of the flexibility and creativity (and speed in access and navigation) of hypertext, but that may be an advantage. It’s an old-fashioned approach, to think about content in book- or document-form, things that can be passed around and duplicated. It’s good for preservation: most blogs exist in one place only, and although they might be backed-up regularly, if the maintainer takes the blog down, it is gone and no one can access it anymore.

Duplication of content is good. It is good for access, for preservation, and even for reading (in that one can take a blog post and read it later, offline and maybe on a different device).

(Hmm… I appologise for this post; it is not very well thought-out. But I have to go to work, and this will have to do for today. I’d rather have written something about my ideas for Addressbook and importing from hcards and microformats… ho hum.)

So please n.b. that I do not think that anyone out there should be reading this, and that I am writing it in public only because I don’t mind if anyone does read it, and so it’s easier than sorting out the security necessary to keep it private. If that makes sense? It is convenient for me to write online, where my words will reside somewhat safer than they would be in this little laptop in my leak-prone shed, and the fact that these words are available to you is really of little concern.

But back to the point (or not): NaBloPoMo, a term coined in 1984 for people who don’t like to have oral sex with post-modernists. Or so, I think, Mr. Tim Brook-Taylor may have said on ISIHAC. Or not.

* * *

On a more community-oriented note, I intend to get back to developing the Addressbook plugin, mainly because of all of the nice emails and comments I’ve had about it, and so … oh, but I think I ought to make up for my late start in Nablopomo (bugger the silly camel-capitalisation) by making this another post. Hang on.