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: A Puritan Bohemia (Margaret Sherwood, 1896), and Arrowsmith (Anon), and Canadian Short Stories (Robert Weaver, 1960), and Doctor Thorne (Anthony Trollop), 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.
Dead Merch day
Fremantle
· Buffalo Club · Fremantle ·
I'm on my way to the Dead Merch Fair at the Buffalo Club, pausing for a coffee in the slight breeze at the front of Elske in the mall. I'm trying to get the last few Freopedia pages sorted for the archive items that are in the history exhibit, but somewhat getting sidetracked in adding info about Legacy in the 1960s. (It's not completely unrelated: I'd made a note of a bunch of documents that might be of interest for the exhibit, and not all of them are going to be used but it seems silly to chuck them back into the backlog without making notes of what's in them — insect-eaten corners, useful lists of names, etc.)
The forecast for today is 38°, and I don't know what the aircon situation is on the upper floor of the Buff.
Coffee at Kokomo's
Fremantle
· coffee ·
Removing paper colour from a scanned illustration
Fremantle
· Wikisource · archiving ·
I quite often find myself extracting engravings and ink sketches from scanned works. Wikisource has some info about how to do it, but this is roughly how I do it in Gimp:
- Use the Mono Mixer tool (the
Colors>Components>Mono Mixermenu item), and twiddle the colours till it looks good. - Adjust the levels (the
Colors>Levels…menu item). - Posterize down to two colours.
-
Original
-
After Mono Mixer
-
After Levels
-
After Posterize
Then a bit of clean up of the wayward bits.
OpenLibrary lists all gone
Fremantle
· Internet Archive · OpenLibrary · backups · self-hosting ·
When the Internet Archive deleted my user account earlier this year, I didn't quite take in that it meant that all my reading lists on the OpenLibrary were deleted as well. I've got a new account now, and no way to retrieve my lists! So I think I'll just have to get back to cataloguing my books here on my own site (with metadata pulled from OL and Wikidata). I guess I wasn't really using them that much, if I didn't notice for four months.
Cupolas on Fremantle buildings
Fremantle
· Fremantle · Western Australia · history ·
Roel is calling for a 2029 Bicentenary Cupola Project to reinstate the little cupolas that used to be on the corners of quite a few buildings in Freo.
I wonder what the bicentenary celebrations will be in Fremantle. Hopefully nothing too serious, maybe just some daggy dress-ups, and perhaps some community limestone rubble wall building. A spot of sand-blindness and lack of good drinking water, for better historical accuracy.
This is what my grandmother got up to for the 1929 centenary (in Carnarvon):
S1065
Fremantle
· Wikimedia · photowalks · Wikimedia Commons ·
Making new direction through supporting Wikimedia activities for Neurodivergents, 15 December 2024 by Youngjin:
We also organized a photo walk event for neurodivergent people in November in Chuncheon, South Korea. The concept of a photo walk is still new in Korea, and participants were not sure how it would work before the event, but after participating, they realized that uploading photos to Wikimedia Commons is not difficult.
"I enjoyed the photowalk today because of the weather and scenery, and it wasn’t too difficult to post photos once I actually did it a few times. It was also nice to talk to people and learn about things I didn’t know. I’d like to do it again next time."
How to save the internet
Fremantle
· archiving · websites · bookmarks ·
Ruben Schade, 16 December 2024:
My philosophy in life has always been “if you liked it, keep it”. The Web is an ephemeral place, and we’re learned recently even the Internet Archive is not immune from overzealous lawyers and bad-faith actors. I have backup copies of entire blogs, podcasts, YouTube channels, and books that no longer exist anywhere else, and where copyright would preclude me from resurfacing any of it.
I like posts like this, about how to save the things we like. To make a bookmark, quote a bit, and link to it, might be enough. I have the IA'S Firefox adding that makes it quick to ask the Wayback Machine to Archive a page.
The copyright issue is sort of annoying, making it (tautologically) illegal to republish things that you're not allowed to republish. But the social expectations seem even more to be swinging to "don't save my stuff without asking me". Which does make sense, but it's also been making me nervous about archiving a whole bunch of things that I used to gather (read: hoard).
[I haven't stored the above post.]
PhpFlickr updates
Fremantle
· PhpFlickr · Flickr · programming ·
I am not a very good maintainer of PhpFlickr, mainly because there are too many things in life. But today, thanks to the patient prodding of Tac Tacelosky, I got a new release out. It's 6.0.0! (Up from 5.1.0.) The main thing that makes it a major release is that it drops support for PHP earlier than 8.2. This makes a bunch of things easier, and future updates will be able to make even more improvements I hope. (Thus far, there's not much to see, but it does install without complaint in newer Symfony projects).
PhpFlickr is a bit of an odd model of API wrapper library, although also quite common I think. It tries to replicate everything that you can do with the API as classes and methods (basically each API endpoint group is a class, and the methods are the endpoints). These often feel like nothing more than a slightly maintenance-heavy way to get autocompletion on API calls! But there are a few things that PhpFlickr does that do make it easier than directly calling the API: mainly around authentication, and file uploading. Those things feel very much worth having a package for, and I use them in a few projects.
View older posts: ·1998 · 1999 · 2000 · 2001 · 2002 · 2003 · 2004 · 2005 · 2006 · 2007 · 2008 · 2009 · 2010 · 2011 · 2012 · 2013 · 2014 · 2015 · 2016 · 2017 · 2018 · 2019 · 2020 · 2021 · 2022 · 2023 · 2024 ·