Welcome

My coffee mug

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), and Vesper Flights (Anon).

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.




RSS instead of newsletters

Fremantle

· RSS ·

Love newsletters? You’re gonna love RSS by Andy Bell, 8 February 2025:

I love newsletters. They feel intimate, focused and I love reading them, especially on a weekend like today.

The problem with newsletters is they can clog up your inbox. Your inbox is often a source of stress too. That’s certainly true for me.

There is another option though: RSS. It’s been around forever and a lot of newsletters offer an RSS feed along with the ability to subscribe by email.

How can I use RSS feeds?

You’re gonna need to get yourself an RSS reader: a bit of software that takes those feeds and shows you new content to read.


Rogue Scholar

Mosman Park

The Rogue Scholar science blog archive improves science blogs in important ways, including full-text search, long-term archiving, DOIs and metadata, and communities.


St Pats eaves

Fremantle

So the scaffolding the went up last week seems to be so they can remove the eaves from the southern wall, perhaps in preparation for a new building on the boundary? [todo]


Timezones

Fremantle

· timezones · MediaWiki · Wikimedia ·

I made the mistake yesterday of looking at how to determine a user's timezone in MediaWiki. I thought it'd be simple! Of course it's not. It does make sense, mostly, eventually. I'm giving up for now because I have other things to do and because I got to the point of reading the Wikipedia article about time zones and now I don't even know what one of these things is.

Some areas in a time zone may use a different offset for part of the year, typically one hour ahead during spring and summer, a practice known as daylight saving time (DST).

An "area in a time zone"?! That's a different time zone! That's what defines time zones, the fact that they have the same time. Or does it? Time zones all have nice unique names, like "Australia/Perth" where I am now (although note that they don't have nice standard or unique abbreviations — but at least the solid fact that 'EDT' doesn't refer reliably to either Australian Eastern Daylight Time (UTC+11) or Eastern Daylight Time (UTC−4) is actually a comforting piece of knowledge in this sea of confusion).

So they do have names, but what do those names mean? Are they time zones? Is "Australia/Melbourne" a time zone, or is it an umbrella term for AEST (UTC+10) and AEDT (UTC+11)? Are those the actual timezones? And for those, it's perfectly acceptable to define them as offsets (in minutes) from UTC.

And is it "time zone" or "timezone". Hurrumph.

(Which reminds me, I still need to switch my {{post}} template to accept time zone names rather than integer hour offsets, because those are the useful things, when combined with a date…)


Hand writing

Fremantle

· writing · linkblog ·

Hand writing, 5 February 2025:

While I find computers effective for writing longer prose, hand writing in a notebook affords me more space to think and note. I can stop and notice things around me without wondering what else there is to check on my computer. I can sit still and look around without obligation to write or to write full prose. If I think of something, I can note it down; otherwise, I can, as I wrote in my notebook, let my mind wander.


S1143

Fremantle

I'm happy high on High Street hearing the honk of the cruise ship horn, the Buffalo beer and the breeze bearing the cooling afternoon.


Gawler History map

Fremantle

Today we added a map to to the Gawler history wiki, using Cargo. So far it's been a good way to find places that have been given quite incorrect coordinates (usually from dodgy address geocoding I think).


Flickr tag search

Fremantle

· Flickr · photos ·

A big thing that keeps me from enjoying Flickr more is the inability to find duplicate files. The API doesn't support any sort of checksum, so for years people have tried to get around it by adding 'machine tags' of the form checksum:md5=1ed002a1483f4ae019470e3c3ffbfc7e. This sort of works, but there's no telling how long the tag search index takes to update — so if you upload a new file, it may or may not appear in search results for days, so any search for it will fail.


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