Hello world, and welcome to my corner of the web. This is where I write words about what I'm working on, and post photographs of things I've seen.
I'm a Software Engineer at the Wikimedia Foundation, and so of course my personal website is a wiki (running on MediaWiki). In my spare time I volunteer with WikiClubWest to work on Wikimedia projects, mostly around my family's genealogy and local Western Australian history (especially to do with Fremantle). I try to keep up with issues on all the things I maintain (but usually fail), as well as listing the software that I use.
I try to find time to work in my workshop on various woodworking projects. Recently, that's been focused on building a metalworking bench, and will soon be about a set campaign-style drawers that's in the works. I've a good-sized workshop because I don't have a car.
Travel features in my life, not because I really hugely want to go elsewhere but because I just do — and also because then I can do some interesting mapping on OpenStreetMap, and take photos for Wikimedia Commons. Sometimes I ride my bike to get there, or walk, but more often it's planes, trains and ferries.
I'm currently reading the following books: Arrowsmith (Anon), and Canadian Short Stories (Robert Weaver, 1960), and Doctor Thorne (Anthony Trollop), and Messing About in Earnest (Nick Burningham, 2003), and The Countryside Companion (Tom Stephenson).
To contact me, you can email me, find me on Matrix as '@samwilson:matrix.org', the fediverse as @samwilson@wikis.world, or Telegram as @freosam. If you want to leave a comment on this site (by creating an account), you need to know the secret code Tuart (it's not very secret, but seems to be confusing enough for most spammers).
Below are my recent blog posts.
Archival storage with mixed access controls
Fremantle
· archiving · catalogues · access control ·
I've been working on cataloguing a bunch of (physical) archival records recently, working through various boxes without really knowing beforehand what is to come. 90% are public, but now and then there are documents that need to be kept private. That's fine, there is a private place to catalogue those — but the system being what it is, the public catalogue is online and the private one is not. Which makes for good security, but it's a split in identifiers and an open question about how to represent the gaps that appear in the public catalogue.
The current way to approach it looks like it'll be duplicating the private identifiers on the public catalogue but not putting in any info about them. Then, all their info gets added to the private catalogue (but vice versa is not done: there's no need to represent all public items in the private catalogue, I guess the idea being that anyone with access to that also has access to the public side).
The goal is that for each long-term storage box it's possible to get an ordered list of what's in it. That list will actually have to be multiple, but it seems like it's all going to work.
The other aspect that's come up is how to add in — sometimes much later on — things like missing pages of documents that have already been accessioned. So far, this has been done pretty sneakily, with them being catalogued (and their scans uploaded to) the older catalogue record, but then the wayward pages being stored in whatever box is currently being appended to. This is not great, as although the entire original document is recorded together (that's nice) it means that there's no record in the per-box list of the missing pages! Not nice.
The fix to that seems to be to create records for each of the separated parts of the document. Then they're just like separate items, albeit ones that have a very close relationship. That feels most solid and just means that each needs to point to the other (and that's something that happens with different items all the time anyway).
So, in summary:
- The public catalogue gets 'shadow' items that point to the private catalogue.
- Each storage box gets its (multiple) lists of contents.
- Any parts of a document that are separate (either in the original order, or where they're now stored) result in multiple catalogue items.
Archiving organisations' material
Fremantle
· archiving ·
Vanishing Culture: Digital Library of Amateur Radio and Communications, 14 January 2025 :
Another challenge to preservation and access is membership organizations that keep their material behind paywalls. They sometimes prevent any of their information from being lent in an online library, which it is their right to do. However while they actively thwart efforts at preservation, it remains unclear whether those groups are adequately preserving their own history.
Some material is preserved intentionally, but a good amount was saved purely by accident. The material we recover and digitize has come from attics and basements, from libraries discarding obsolete material, from long-forgotten FTP sites, from scratched CD-ROMs, and from the estates of people who have passed.
Static and images
Fremantle
· websites · photos ·
Static, dynamic, by James G., 15 January 2025:
Last year, I spent a lot of time iterating on Publish, the publishing interface for my website. This interface is a static HTML page that generates a markdown file. This markdown file can then be published to my website. The Publish page is public, but you cannot publish a blog post unless you have access to my Git repository.
This paradigm works well with my static website. I have a user interface that lets me prepare a post for publishing, and a button I can click that takes me to GitHub where I can publish the page. Having posts in static files and version control is significant to me. Static files are easy for me to reason with. I can see my data without having to use a database.
With that said, I see opportunities to improve the Publish tool that can only be done with a dynamic page.
The main improvement I would like to make is to streamline image publishing.
I've mentioned it before, but the storage and display of images (and other files) are the main things that keep me from switching fully to a static site. I am slowly working on some ideas for making those better, but really I'm not sure it'll ever be fully solved. It's too annoying to have to manually create derivative versions of every file, and (unlike what is described in the above post) I'm not sure I want to add content images to a Git repository.
Being able to drag and drop photos onto a blog post while editing is convenient, but that's not necessarily the workflow I'm aiming for — I generally want to upload things to Commons if possible, and add as much metadata as I can. So there's a certain laboriousness to adding images anyway, and reducing the time at upload mightn't matter too much.
Unpleasant boating
Messing About in Earnest, page 149:
At 0750, on the morning of 1st March, we landed at East Fremantle boat ramp, rather cold, tired and blistered, but on the whole it had been an interesting and not-too-unpleasant trip.
"Not-too-unpleasant" is about what I remember of sailing on the Swan river as a boy. Not quite enjoyable — although I don't know how much of that was due to the other sea scouts being just so much more capable and confident than me.
Linking to Freo photos
Fremantle
· URLs · Fremantle · libraries · identifiers ·
The Fremantle History Centre (who have dropped the 'Local' from their name) have a fine home page at
https://www.fremantle.wa.gov.au/fremantle-history-centre
(a sensible URL). Their image database is at
https://fremantle.spydus.com/cgi-bin/spydus.exe/MSGTRN/WPAC/BSEARCH_ARC?HOMEPRMS=ARCPARAMS
(a silly URL), and search results take you to items' pages at URLs such as
https://fremantle.spydus.com/cgi-bin/spydus.exe/FULL/WPAC/ARCENQ/10765420/1876703,1
where they proclaim their 'bookmark link' to be
https://fremantle.spydus.com/cgi-bin/spydus.exe/ENQ/WPAC/ARCENQ?SETLVL=&RNI=72417
(again, silly) where that RNI is the 'record number' of the item. There is also a 'reference number' that is not present in the URL but which is the far more common ID for these photos because it's often present in the actual scan.
(Books on the other hand have a BRN, and URLs like
https://fremantle.spydus.com/cgi-bin/spydus.exe/ENQ/WPAC/BIBENQ?SETLVL=&BRN=53356
but that's a task for another day.)
There doesn't seem to be any way to link to a record by the reference number, unfortunately. The advanced search doesn't have anything.
So it looks like we'll do best to record both the reference and record numbers, and hope that whatever new database system they're going to move to next will work with one of those.
S1121
Fremantle
· social media · indieweb ·
Sanding off friction from indie web connection, by Tracy Durnell, 9 January 2025:
There are a lot of harmful and toxic dynamics to social media that we don’t want to recreate in the indie web… but people do want connection online, and if it feels like there’s no way to connect with others via the indie web, they’ll simply continue to migrate from silo to silo. A little friction can be helpful as a protective measure against harassment and abuse, but right now I suspect there’s too much friction to encourage the types of connection we want more of.
Simple interactions are too hard
Problem statement: simple interactions that are easy on social media, such as likes or short comments like “nice!” or “lol,” are socially awkward / unsuited to use with webmentions
Social photos
Fremantle
Meta is getting rid of factchecking. Should you leave Instagram – and what are the alternatives? by Catie McLeod, 9 January 2025:
But with Instagram, she says, there’s “no easy alternative” – TikTok “has its own issues” and other platforms with similar reach just aren’t there.
“[For] people who live in the country or in remote areas or minority groups or [who have] small businesses, that is a really good way for them to communicate and reach other people,” she says.
“It’s just not possible to set up an alternative at this point in time. So, to put it bluntly, we’re in a bit of deep shit, to be honest.”
There are old-school photo-sharing platforms including Flickr, Tumblr and Hipstamatic but they don’t have the reach of Instagram.
While social media companies have based their business model on trying to keep users engaged to collect more data and use it to curate advertising, she says, places such as Australia could slow this extraction down with restrictions– such as those in Europe – on how much information they collect.
I guess I'm just not very social, because I don't really understand the whole idea of wanting 'reach'. I like putting stuff on the internet and keeping it organised, and over time it can be seen and used by whoever. I view it a bit like putting a book in a library — I don't feel like it's failed if it's not been borrowed seven hundred times in the first month.
But yeah, I'm not social. I'm not media either.
(PS: And as far as alternatives to Instagram go, I should probably mention Pixelfed! Not that I use it.)
Making Japanese whetstones
Fremantle
· woodworking · videos ·
This is an interesting video about the production of Naniwa whetstones in Japan. I can't actually remember what brand I have (the labels have worn off), but they're pretty similar I think. I have some natural stones too, but the artificial ones are good (as far as I can tell!) and are easily flattened with each other (I have two 800s and a 1200 and they're similar enough to work together, and then any one of them is used to do the 5000).
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