It's not very early on New Year's Day, and I'm back at the same place I was last year I think: Milkmaid Coffee Bar on High Street. It's busy! I assume because not many places are open. There's a gang of teenagers looking tired and complaining that there's no alcohol in the fridge behind me. A small wet dog, white but not fluffy, is under someone's chair outside on the footpath. Is there any sense of a new year? Not really. But the breeze isn't too hot, which is enough to be glad about, and the wifi seems to work.
I'm excited about exploring with a camera and notebook. There's not much around here to be added to OSM, but that's good because now it's time to focus on improving the details and getting everything more thoroughly photographed on Commons, and to make sure that all the heritage buildings have their metadata in good form. I'm trying to make sure that toolforge:wdlocator is useful, so am using it quite often to find things to photograph. There are lots of categories that only contain a few photos, and with buildings it's often just the exterior. Of course, it's hard to get shots of the interior — but sometimes the side alleys are visible as well as other interesting details like windows and doors. Especially where there's modern signage and other things that are usually not preserved when places are redeveloped, it seems worthwhile to get some piccies for the wikis.
I hope Ron Doig, Sr. liked air conditioners, because his memorial building is encrusted with them:
I cycled through the hospital on my way home, and realised that the second heritage-listed building on the site did not yet have its own category. It does now (although I might try to get some more photos with more care next time).
Before they built this, the outpatient arrangements were "totally inadaquate to deal with the large number of suffering humanity seeking medical relief."[1] Not to put too strong a word on it or anything.
Meysenburg also suggested using an encrypted-messaging platform, Signal, to share images with a close group of friends, rather than posting on social media. “The Signal group has at least scratched the itch of having an audience of people to give you likes and comments, which is what you really want,” he said. He’s right – that itch is the core of my Posting Disease. I want other people to coo over my future son; I can’t help it.
I think that not getting likes and comments is one of the good things about the indieweb. Here, we can just chatter away into the void, and not worry about the responses. It's harder for people to respond, but this is good: they have to respond on their own site, which means that they're less likely to bother if they don't actually have anything to say, and they're more likely to be nice about it because it's on their own site and they'll have a greater feeling of ownership.
That said, I do think the idea of having a family Signal group is a good idea.
My team at the WMF is responsible for running and working on the wishes in the annual Community Wishlist Survey.
The survey is a system for gathering prioritising ideas from the editing communities,
and it's worked pretty well for many years.
But there are a bunch of problems with it, largely around the size and number of the wishes and the size of the team working on them.
I've always felt that a survey that feeds into more teams' (and maybe even more organisations, i.e. hubs) workflows would be good.
It's nothing absolutely ground-breaking or different really, because I think everyone's wary of plans that involve massive upheaval and reinvention of things.
The key next steps are:
Creating a new, continuous intake system for community technical requests.
The new intake system will be part of our annual planning.
The Community Tech team will work on wishes from the backlog until this new system is in place.
Technology-wise, all webmentions do is send a message of 'I linked to your page'. There is nothing in technology to say that you need to do anything with this - either displaying or checking it.
I think the MediaWiki system of being able to view "what links here" for any given page is great, and have often wondered about extending it to include external sites. In doing that would probably make sense to use webmentions.
I've been stuffing around, yet again, with my website. I know I should just settle down and stick with something, but what's the point when there's more fun ideas to figure out? Today's fun idea seems to be "how to break my RSS feeds, and fail to figure out Apache's mod rewrite even after more than a decade of using it for basically exactly this."
Another trip to the Railway Museum today. Last time I went it was very busy and it was hard to really explore and concentrate. This time it was 37° and there was hardly anyone there! It was a bit warm, but not too bad, at least for the exhibits in the shade under the main roof.
I tried to get a few photos to add to Commons, where the categorization really could do with some improvement.
I happened to glance at the picture of Alice and Edward Culley hanging gracefully on the wall. Although I had seen the picture a few times in my visits, this day I took more notice than usual. Who were Edward and Alice Culley besides the original owners of Culley's I thought to myself. Over the next few weeks, the Culley's kept randomly popping into my mind and I found myself smiling when thinking of them. Without putting too much thought into it, I made a decision to write a book!
It sounds like they're looking for people to contact them with stories and history about Culley's.
The BOM is giving warnings again, even pushing them at me via their app. They like to give warnings, I feel like it's since the great hailstorm of 2010 — they're very keen not to leave people unalarmed when perhaps there's going to be something to worry about.
This weekend it's a heatwave that they're warning about. And to be fair, it is a bit hot. Was still 37° at my house yesterday at 5PM. It's somewhat better today.
(Sorry, I'm not sure why I'm recording this here. There's nothing to say other than it's hot.) My laptop fan is running. The beer goes warm faster than is good. The buses thankfully are being mostly good (other than the driver just now who decided to leave us all sitting without aircon and with the doors open while he headed off for a break).
Big weather things are worth recording, I think. Hailstorms and floods are good for taking photos of — headwaves are less photogenic, and rely on melty things and parched grass to convey it. I'm not even bothering to try (and anyway I left my camera at home).
I'm in a café called Café Café. I saw it on OSM and figured it must be a typo, but it's correct. It looks like it used to be a Dôme, judging by the wooden floor, green tiles, and a few bits of the furniture like the display fridges and water dispenser. It has, however, thrown off the corporate-design feeling of a Dôme and is going for a "squeeze in as many tables as possible" and "expose the back of the fridges and their dust" sort of look. Not really a trendy place, I guess, and at 9AM on a Monday it's mostly empty with the only customers being old blokes with newspapers and sandals.
Today I went to look at how Subi celebrates it’s history on the planter boxes on the median strip all along Rokeby Road. It looks great!
And I envy Subi for the tree-lined shopping street. If only Fremantle had trees in the centre of the Cappuccino Strip and on both sides of High Street. It makes so much sense to create shade, and it enhances the streetscape.
Rogerson Buildings on the corner of Rokeby and Roberts roads
I wondered up Rokeby Road myself today, thinking similar things about the trees (although the preponderance of plane trees is a bit worrying, as the summers heat up and they can't cope).
I headed to the library, but it's closed for renovations:
OpenStreetMap strives to be open & accessible to as many as possible, and remain independent.
In 2020, the OSMF made a commitment that essential communications will always be accessible through an open, preferably self-hosted platform, i.e. accessible through open-source software and open protocols, and do not require an account at a third-party service to access.
Stare at a problem for two hours over two days, and be confused.
Give up and sleep for 17 minutes.
Spend 6 minutes solving it.
The worst thing about insomnia for me is that it makes my brain generally unable to actually know that it's tired. I might sometimes say that I feel tired, but it's far less often that I actually manage to follow that up with a rest — and so often that's actually all that's required to return things to some form of calm. It's like they say (well, to actual workers, not shinybums like me): if you're wondering if you're thirsty then you're already past the point of needing to drink water.
I was walking to the bus just now and saw the sun on the verandah of the Metropolis, so thought I'd see how many shots of the building there were on Commons. Turns out, none of the front (lots inside, of concerts).
The AlphabeticalZürich project is a pretty ambitious project: I want to take at least one picture in every street of Zürich, in alphabetical order.
I want to capture the interesting, the whimsy, the pretty for every street of Zürich
I do not aim for exhaustivity in every street. I may not even walk the whole street. For instance, Badenerstrasse is spanning 5km: that’s a project in itself!
I have no idea when I’m going to give up 😉 It’s an ambitious project, and life may happen before its end, or I may lose interest. We’ll start, and see where we go from here!
So, here we go, from Aargauerstrasse to Zypressenstrasse!
It makes me wonder about the Fremantle streets project that I seem to be engaged in, where I'm currently definitely lacking in guidelines or rules to keep me focussed.
The Freo streets list started just as a way to give more context to the Fremantle Society Photographic Survey, but there's lots more that can be done with it I think. One of the troubles with it is that there's no solid rule about how to handle historical vs current places/buildings/etc. — if a building has been demolished and another build, or a large block subdivided into smaller ones, does that mean the website should have one page that explains the location through time or separate pages for each incarnation of the place? This is really one of the great strengths of the Wikipedia model, I think: that ambiguities and confusion can be handled really well, because you just write it out in words, and link to everything.
I sat at the airport last night and finished fixing a bug with Basildon. I'm not quite sure why I'm persisting with that project, because I think I'm not going to continue using it for the HMW archives (which currently has the messy setup of being simultaneously on two websites). The bug occurred when an inline shortcode was used within an inline Markdown construct. For example, a linebreak in emphasis such as this:
Lorem *ipsum{br}sic amet*.
That should be fine now, although I did make an intermediate mistake of making it necessary for the shortcode callbacks to receive either a ShortcodeInline or ShortcodeBlock object. I quickly followed up with a return to just giving them a Shortcode object (if they need to know which is which they can look at $sc->getBody() I think, although maybe it'd be worth adding $sc->isInline()), so there's no need to change anything. The shortcode package is still pre-release so I don't feel too bad breaking things quickly like this — and of course I'm absolutely the only person who's using it or even knows it exists.
Anyway, it's the next morning now and I've got a while before my next flight, so I might see what photos are needed on Commons. Although I dare say this airport sees enough bored and camera-equipped Wikimedians that there's not that much left to do.
For us at Wikimedia Sverige, the most interesting geodata was that of protected natural areas, as it would make it possible for us to run our very first edition of Wiki Loves Earth. While we have been organizing Wiki Loves Monuments since 2011. WLE was not possible due to the lack of a freely available, comprehensive list of protected natural areas in Sweden. Did you know that Sweden has over 5,000 nature reserves? A good number of them – far from all – had Wikipedia articles and Wikidata items, but without an official data source, it was hard to know which ones were missing. Most of our nature reserves are under the administration of local county administrative boards, so in order for the community to assemble a comprehensive list on their own, they would have to check the websites of each and every county administrative board. Furthermore, a small number of nature reserves are under municipal administration.
Fortunately, complete datasets of Swedish nature reserves, national parks and natural monuments are available from Naturvårdsverket under a CC0 license!
Recently I've been getting annoying intermittent errors about invalid magic words, but usually only after updating MediaWiki core:
UnexpectedValueException: Error: invalid magic word 'if'
"" is not a valid magic word for "if"
(In this case the {{#if:}} parser function comes from the ParserFunctions extension, but the errors happen usually with whichever magic-word-using extension is loaded first in LocalSettings.php.)
It seems that these stem from the $wgLocalisationCacheConf['store'] = 'array' in DevelopmentSettings.php, which means that the localisation cache is stored serialized in text files in the cache directory.
The problem is that DevelopmentSettings.php also defines $wgCacheDirectory as follows:
Which uses the wiki ID in the directory name. This would be fine, but for the fact that I have a weird set-up and define the wiki ID myself (based on various things that I'll go into in a separate post).
So the fix is to make sure I define $wgCacheDirectory after including DevelopmentSettings.php:
The tram at the Albion Hotel in Cottesloe has what I think is a new sign inside it, detailing its history and vital statistics. However, the information appears to be for a different tram! They say it's a Y1 class, number 611, but that tram is in active (heritage) service in Sydney. It looks like they should've searched for number 118 (of some other class).
I've sat in this window many times before, but not often in recent years since this place turned into a burger joint. It used to be Old Papas, and was then the Merchant. It seems that sometime recently they added the bars.
It seems like five people have recommended Discord to me in recent weeks, so
so I'm giving it another go. There's active severs for MediaWiki, Wikipedia, (but not it seems, Wikimedia in general), and other things I'm sort of active in like OpenStreetMap and WikiTree. So I guess I'll give it a go again, alongside Telegram, Slack, Matrix, and WhatsApp.
1895 receipt for goods purchased from Galbraith & Co.
I headed down to Officeworks this afternoon to get some more foolscap manilla folders. I'm working through a box of documents like the one at left and need to separate them better while they're put through the (year-long) flattening process. They'll not stay in these; for long-term storage I have buffered white ones, but for this it's nice to have cheaper and larger ones that can get dirty.
On my way hom I stopped to rest in the shade near the Women's Auxiliary Services' Memorial and noticed that it's one of the few bits of Monument Hill that doesn't have it's own Commons category. It does now! Although I'll try to go back when the sun's in the east to get a good illustrative shot of the arch.
It's Love Data Week this week! Not data about love, but about how we all love data. Wikidata, mainly.
The thing I'm excited about this week with Wikidata is a project that I'm working on that involves adding sources to various statements, and I'm then building a bibliography list directly from that. Of course it's possible to do this with a single Sparql query but I'm finding that I keep hitting the timeout and so am doing it a bit hacky: looping through my items (which are cached and updated weekly) and looking for the references to the statements that I want to include, and manually excluding duplicates. Then it's reasonably easy (well… I've not actually finished yet so I might be wrong about that) to do a sort of CiteQ type of thing to output the bibliography.
This has the advantages of both not having to maintain a separate list of references, and also it means that I discover references that other people have added or ones that I've added but forgotten about. The formatting of the bibliography is useful too because it requires all the bits of the reference to be there and so I have to go back and fix up references that are lacking (slightly tedious but usually worthwhile because there's other stuff that can be added to those items).
This evening's Geogeeks hacknight was good. Not a huge group, but big enough. Big enough for beer and pizza (thanks OSGeo Oceania!). I mainly worked on some small parts of wdlocator, fixing up a few styling errors and submitting the project to be included in TranslateWiki.net so that the UI strings can be translated. Also had a good discussion about how to improve it's behaviour with map features that belong to multiple relations (e.g. buildings in a university campus).
Other than that I just continued editing OSM around Fremantle.
Demolition of the old UAM office in Beaconsfield has started. The office I worked in for seven years is now exposed and smashed up, and it's a bit weird to see!
The office and hardstand is heritage-listed as the site of a former Transperth bus depot (which I think might be wrong anyway because surely it was MTT?). The entry says that it's "DEMOLISHED — retained on MHI database for historical information purposes only." Which will be true soon enough.
"Fundamental to the reso tours was that the passengers would sleep on the train rather than a hotel or other accommodation."
A few trains are still operating, the Prospector to Kalgoorlie and the Australind to Bunbury, but there are no more sleeper cars and no more reso tours.
It seems reso tours were a thing elsewhere in the country too.
I see lots of personal websites and personal blogs both of which I enjoy. But I don’t see as many expert websites like existed in the old Geocities days: these are sites, created by an individual, where he/she shows their expertise on some subject, and I’d like to see these comeback.
People would create a site about whatever they were passionate about and had some knowledge about. There was no Wikipedia, so if you had knowledge about a topic you created a website about it and shared with others. For example, there was no end to: Star Trek sites, TV show episode, character and shooting location guides, fan sites, hobby sites, how to sites, history sites, cooking sites and sites about so many subjects it’s hard to count them all. These websites were more than just animated GIF’s, these sites were the stuff and substance of the Web. They were also the “street fair” of the web as they enlightened and entertained us.
It looks like there's a new coworking space in Quarry Street, called Hybrid Warehouse. Seems cheaper than some, although like others I do wonder how that big tin shed will fare in the heat of summer. It does provide wifi, coffee, electricity, spring water, kitchen facilities, and cleaning. Presumably toilets too, so all the essentials really. I'll go and visit it I think, and at least add it to OSM.
Having a good pair of headphones (Sennheiser 450 BT, currently) and a cup of coffee, in a quiet office, and without the summer heat baking the windows, is today making me happy. The ABC has a new(-ish) classical radio station, and the work I've been doing on SVG Translate is going well (or at least not breaking).
It's Wednesday morning, coffee is made, and SVG Translate is being upgraded to 2.0.0. I think that bumping major version numbers for underlying platform upgrades is slightly controversial, but I do it. My reasoning is that a major version primarily indicates that "something" must be done when you upgrade, and that's definitely true when dropping support for old versions of PHP.
A few of the tools that use the ToolforgeBundle for Symfony display their current version number in the footer, and they do so by running git describe to get the current tag. This is proving to be silly when the filesystem is slow, and is timing out. It'd be better to have the current version number within the codebase somewhere — the trouble with that is remembering to keep it in sync. Ideally, I think, it'd be in a VERSION file, and would get updated every time a change is made so that there's only ever one commit with a given version (other than -dev ones; i.e. the next commit after a release would add that).
Every Mastodon instance has a URL like: [domain]/share?text=
Does Micro.blog have a share URL? How about WordPress installations? Ghost? Bluesky? And platforms like Lemmy, etc?
I’m on a mission to collect them all.
I've been wondering about adding an easier way to quote web pages in MediaWiki, perhaps by importing with the PandocUltimateConverter extension; I've opened a task about that. Then the share URL would be something like [domain]/Special:PandocUltimateConverter/import?url=.
Another Geogeeks' OpenStreetMap mapping party today. Only three of us (a fourth signed up but couldn't make it). We met at the café under the carpark, with the intention of spending a few hours mapping Queen Elizabeth II Medical Centre, around -31.96837/115.81595.
I've run about three different[2] sorts of snapshop backups I think, in the last 15 years or so. Firstly a dd-based script that hardlinked date directories on a series of (failure-prone) USB hard drives. That was reasonably simple, and I learnt a bit about some useful things, but in about 2015 I thought I'd better not rely on myself for something so critical and switched to SpiderOak. They were all the rage after Edward Snowden recommended (or just mentioned? I can't remember) them as a good encrypted and deduplicating backup system. They were good, for ages. But then a couple of years ago I got sick of their weird client's UI and opaque bugginess — and the fact that they no longer were actually promoting their backup product on their own homepage. So I switched to Borg.
Borg is good, and I do love the fact that the basic configuration is about setting it up how you want it to work. In my case, it's a manually-run thing because I realised that the rate of change on my local machine is not great enough to justify the continual scanning of all changes (for some parts where I do want that, I use NextCloud). But the part of Borg that I do not have working as I want it to is the spelunking side of things: when I want to retrieve a file or directory from an archive, I have to do my own bisecting of where the version I want can be found. That's partly unavoidable, because of the nature of restores like that — it's not really the business of the backup software to know what you want. But it could be quicker: mounting archives to date-named directories currently requires me to copy and paste the name of the archive. I'd rather have some sort of menu thing.
(Update, July 2024: I think Vorta is what I was looking for.)
I finally got around to bolting down the new (old) vice. It's a swivelling one, so I stuck it at the corner of the bench and it can be used on either side (although a spanner does need to be kept on hand). I've been meaning to get it cleaned and greased and fixed down for years, but my dad took pity on me and recently machined a terrific new clamping bar for it so I could actually get it done (the original clamping mechanism was a couple of too-small washers that ended up just spinning in place, quite useless).
This month's Fremantle History Society talk was by Shane Burke, a senior lecturer in archaeology and history at Notre Dame. The talk was entitled *Defence of Fremantle: Then and Now*, and was an overview of some of the important sites of military defence in this area.
Starting with a fort marked in an early surveyor's notebook, on the corner of Pakenham and High streets, and then jumping to WW2 with the Arthur and Buckland batteries. He showed this interesting photo of Arthur Head taken from the top of the power station chimney in the '20s:
(Ignore the red 'copyright applies' watermark; this is in the public domain.)
The two gun emplacements seen there were demolished (along with most of the limestone headland), and all dumped into Bathers Bay. He was saying that it was all cleaned up in the 1980s for the America's Cup defence (hmm there's another defence, but he didn't make the pun), with the concrete remnants being intentionally left as reminders. I'd always thought they were inadvertently left there.
Buckland Hill Battery was the next topic, especially about a chunk of concrete that remains on the western side of Stirling Highway, that's been mostly destroyed by a modern cable being laid through it. And the remnants of writing in the concrete structures there and on the hill.
Lastly, he talked about the anti-submarine boom in the harbour entrance, and the South Mole gun emplacement (part of Authurs Battery). All up, a good evening.
Today is my last day working from our office in Pakenham Street. It's been pretty great here, although it does feel a bit like things are drawing to a natural close (the wifi less reliable, the sink backing up, the general demise of the air conditioners). The building will be gutted and renovated before too much longer, and I'm off to Europe for a few weeks, so it's time to leave.
I wandered down to Bathers Beach on the way to get lunch at Chalkies,
because there didn't seem to be any photos on Commons of the old bits of Arthurs Battery that are lying there in the waves.
They were mentioned in this month's Fremantle History Society talk.
Seen from the top of the cliff.
A bit closer.
The outer one; I didn't get a pic of the inner one because there was a chap pondering the waves and I didn't want to disturb him.
Nostalgia could do with a makeover – it needs rescuing from its associations with the sick, the stupid and the sentimental.
Because the emotion is everywhere, a source of both pain and pleasure, and it explains so much about modern life. Expressions of nostalgia are one way we communicate a desire for the past, dissatisfaction about the present, and, perhaps paradoxically, our visions for the future.
Spearwood Alternative School was set up by a bunch of parents — including my own! — in 1984 as part of the Choice and Diversity in Education project. It's a state school, but different. They're having a celebration next weekend of reaching 40 years.
I went to the school for year one (I think), and I don't remember much about it. Mostly just how great it was to have some bushland to explore. And various run-ins with the market gardener next door who for some reason didn't see the fun of us crawling through the fence. There was definitely yoga, as well as dancing to Pressure Down (which suggests perhaps I was there in year two as well).
I've been attempting to get things straight with my system of storing and sharing photos:
Let go and stop thinking of my photos as all of one set; they're no more a set than all text files should be stored together.
Upload everything possible to Wikimedia Commons, and download a backup of all of those. For this I have an mwcli script.
Create annual manually-curated printable private photo albums of the best ones (of mine and anyone else's). This is LaTeX and although slightly annoying to produce it ends up being far better than any programmatically generated thing.
Use Flickr for sharing with family and friends, and public photos that don't belong on Wikimedia Commons.
Digikam is the local marshalling ground for tweaking/describing/uploading, and then is also used to index the Commons and Flickr backups (actually, it has four collections: a local working temp directory; the two local backup directories; and the photo album directory).
So I think all this gives me a system that works well for everyday sharing etc. and which also can be pretty much given up on at any time and ignored for months on end with zero maintenance. There are some things, such as monitoring Wikimedia Commons for deletion nominations, that cause a bit of bother, but my main goal is to not have to think much and still have a system that's resilient and doesn't rely on me not stuffing it up.
I'm off to Europe tomorrow for the Wikimedia Hackathon, and this morning went to the gym down on Clontarf Road next door to where I used to work at UAM. I left there in 2016, and headed to Europe for Wikimania at Esino Lario; that was a bit of a turning point in my life, because I ended up getting a job at the WMF after that trip. This time, I'm heading off to Europe again, and the UAM building is now being demolished. I stood for a while this morning watching the big tin shed being crunched up, and it was strangely moving! It feels like it's taken me this long to have that place out of my life.
I wonder a lot about the wisdom of running one's own wikis, when the current fashion is to not have your own server and not run LAMP stack web applications at all. All the cool kids have static pre-rendered sites, with active stuff handled by edge functions or single-purpose services or more usually other people's commercial bollocks. All of which is sort of fun, and I definitely do like the feeling of having all of a site's content in a Git repo and leaving the active parts of it (searching, commenting, image derivations, etc. in the case of this blog) to external systems. That seems resilient in a way that my LAMP stack isn't, and has the added quality of being (almost) something I can recommend to people when they ask about setting up their own website (i.e. point them to GitHub Pages, basically).
But there's something pretty great about a wiki, and it's in the name (if you speak Hawaiian): wiki sites are quick to work on! That was the great revolution c.2001. A webpage that you're reading could have an edit link with which you could edit the whole page text right there and then, with the page being updated immediately upon being saved. More than that: you go from viewing it as it's published, to editing it in its entirety, and back to the published view. That's still revolutionary. It's not how blogs work, usually, nor many other sorts of content management system where you have an 'admin' view of things, where you're likely to go from some sort of listing of content to editing it, and back to the listing. The front-of-house view is for readers, not editors.
So for now, despite my attempts to ditch it, I seem to be sticking with MediaWiki for a few different sites, and it's primarily because I can just click edit wherever I am. (Not even click, really: it's more often alt+shift+e to edit and alt+shift+s to save.)
There's an "international outdoors terrace" at the Qantas terminal in Perth, and annoyingly it doesn't have a view of anything at all. It does mean you can breath a bit of air, which is nice, or get rained on if you're lucky.
We're flying an A332 (VH-EBL) today, called Whitsundays. I was confused about the plural, but it turns out the islands (there's multiple) are collectively called that and that Whitsunday is just one of them.
I'm whiling away some time in Changi Airport this evening. It's lovely and warm here compared to Perth. I've been occupying myself with trips from terminal to terminal on the skytrain, and beer in (strangly) empty bars.
Arrived a bit late into Helsinki, just before 7AM. It was a nice time to be at the airport as it turned out, because there weren't many people around. Although, it seems that everyone agrees that Helsinki is a pretty calm place, and that's certainly my impression. There's waterfall sounds and birdsong playing in the terminal when you arrive (even in the loos) and a general grey quiet calm to everything. Getting on the train (down and down a concrete chasm to the metro station) was simple, with an integrated system meaning that a €4.10 three-zone ticket got me from the airport to central and out on a tram to the ferry terminal.
But rather than go on the tram the whole way, I jumped off early and walked along the quay. It was so sunny and not at all cold.
Predictably, the jetlag had me awake before 4 this morning, but well slept. So I've been up for a while trying to plot out my hacking activities for the next three days (and gain some order to the photos I've been taking).
The sun was up about the same time as me, but it seems to move slowly here and was still rising at quarter to six:
I'm on an LNER Azuma from Newcastle to Edinburth. Earlier today was a couple of local clanking trundling diesel 156s (I think they were), so this swooshy smooth train is pretty great. The seats and tables are not nearly as comfortable as the German ICEs but I'm not complaining. The countryside slides past in just as satisfying a fashion.
This was my fourth Wikimedia Hackathon after Vienna, Barcelona, and Prague (and a Covid gap of four years).
It was held in Tallinn, Estonia, on 3–5 May 2024.
Day 0
I arrived from Helsinki on the ferry, with couple of other hackathonarians,
and we walked up from the port to the hotel
(with OSM of course leading the way with a route that perhaps involved too many residents-only pathways past apartment buildings, but we figured they were student accommodation so we could be forgiven).
Later, I went for a short walk around the nearby streets, before returning to my room to warm up and get ready for the opening dinner.
Disembarking in Tallinn
Hilton sign
New tram tracks
Building on F.R. Kreutzwaldi street
Ditto
New Hilton hotel, with large cantilever structure
Hilton entrance
Weatherboard building in Tallinn (not many timber buildings it seems)
Hilton from the back, and reflected sunshine
Shiny hanging things
Pudding
Day 1
The opening session on Friday morning was inspiring (despite me being awake a bit before 4AM).
Estonia has largest number of Wikimedians per capita of any country in the world,
and they welcomed us very warmly.
About a hundred people filed up to the stage over the course of an hour,
pitching their projects within 60 seconds each.
I tried to take notes about the ones I was interested in,
with with the exceptions of an idea to fork WikiShootMe
and something about improving documentation
I failed to actually remember much.
After the opening I spent a while talking to people about the work we're doing on redesigning the Wishlist Survey, and then got stuck into firstly some Wikisource code review and then some ideas about what to do next with UnlinkedWikibase.
Day 2
Woke up only slightly hungover (maybe I should just call it jetlag).
An early breakfast (although they don't like anyone to turn up in the dining-room before 7AM)
and a coffee to take down to the hacking ballroom.
The first session was about the recent years' efforts to treat MediaWiki as a product in its own right,
and what that means for developers and what areas of it are being focussed on.
It's all great stuff to hear.
Day 3
Sunrise saw me awake and not hungover. I often find that the first thing I see of a morning becomes the code I work on for the first hours of the day, and this Sunday it was a backwards-compatibility bug in the Diagrams extension. I made a PR for that (including getting 1.35 running again locally because I've not touched it for a while and had deleted things), and heading down to do some more hacking while waiting for breakfast to open. Released version 0.13.2 of Diagrams, with that fix.
Wikidata is full of hotels, which is sometimes annoying because it makes it seem like there are places to photograph when actually they're just boring Mercure places like this!
I'm trying out Obsidian again. Seems fine. At least it has quite date/time insertion buttons. But it doesn't have great sync abilities it sounds like, without paying $4 USD/month. So probably I'll stick with Nextcloud Notes.
A short cycle from the Techno_Z (the underscore is definitely part of the name, they make sure to put it on all the signs, even the municipal street sign ones) to the Heart of Joy café on Franz-Josef-Straße.
Techno Z
Massive crab boulder sculpture in the Techno Z courtyard
On the way to the river
Some ducks near a weir, trying to escape the whirlpool of the water inlet
I stopped briefly this morning on platform 2 of Salzburg central station, under the older cast-iron canopy, and watched a train being combined. It's nice sitting on empty platforms.
Multi-directional movement control in the pillar supports
Open social graph tech largely withered on the vine with the promulgation of walled gardens, but the IndieWeb and Fediverse have brought them back into focus. This is fantastic! But it leads me to think whether my links would be more functional and useful as expressed on a plain HTML page with XFN data
Running your own wiki web server is great: it's cheap, gives you lots of control over the software you run and how it stores data, and pretty much makes you completely independent of how the big platforms think you should manage your stuff. The big drawback is that if you're doing it on your own then it's not a very resilient way of doing things: if you stop paying the bills, don't keep the software up to date, or poke around with a bit too much enthusiasm then things might break and your websites might go offline, never to be seen again.
So I want to make sure sites that I host are safe from those things. Mainly I do this by giving data dumps to various people (if the dumps contain sensitive information), and putting them on the Internet Archive (where they don't). Is that enough? If I found a reference to a site that was interesting, and all that was left of it was a MediaWiki XML page dump and zip file of uploaded files, would that be enough to get it back online? I think it probably would be (with the usual caveats of it not containing any user account info), and I guess I trust the WMF and the MediaWiki community to not lose track of the importance of maintaining the backwards compatibility of the XML. Of course, the wikitext used might contain things that require certain extensions, but that's probably okay. So perhaps this is a sufficient protection against future failure.
The main alternative seems to be Markdown in a Git repository, and that does have a lot of charm of resilience, simplicity, and portability. The main troubles are that it's hard to store large files and that the editing experience is pretty poor. The latter can be overlooked if a site has a dedicated nerdy editor who can help other people (and that's a good thing for sites to have), but the file storage issue can't.
It's possible to divvy up your files to Wikimedia Commons, Flickr, Internet Archive, imgur, etc. but it starts to get messy with not having everything together in one place, and there are still things that don't really belong on those other sites (for example, where would you put photos taken in the 1970s by someone you have no way of getting copyright release from?).
So I think sticking to MediaWiki on a VPS is the best way to go for now, because editing is so quick and easy and all the other issues are solved. It's just a matter of making sure the backups and dumps (those are different things, remember) are safe and distributed as much as they can be. Which does feel like a worry.
It looks like the QuestyCaptcha extension is being broken more often now, after years and years of very simple registration questions sufficing to keep spammers out. Even asking people "what site are you trying to register on" was sufficient to block spammers but didn't seem to slow down real people who were actually aware of what site they were on. Now, I guess, it's Arseficial Intelligence that's borking things. Or if it's not, then I'll still blame it. I've changed the questions a couple of times in the last few days, but they kept coming, so I've turned off registration until I have time to figure out what's the best way forward.
(I'm writing this post under the freakin' ocean, by the way.)
now you can draw on the map! Saw an unmapped track road or a stream? Open the 4th mode in Every Door, unlock the scribble mode, choose the type and draw with your finger. This goes to a separate database, which you can then use in JOSM
Despite a rather snory room-mate, I slept very well, and awoke to a cool damp (but hopefully not too wet) day. There was a large group of children running all over the breakfast room, but it turned out I was in the wrong place and that was their room — I moved to the proper place and all was quiet.
Today I ended up getting an earlier train, so managed to get to the local history centre earlier than I'd thought I would — and in fact, they close at 5 and not 4 as advertised, so I would've had some time anyway.
I started with looking for any general material about woollen mills in Perth, and was quickly pointed to (the extended Culross 1986 edition of) Traditions of Perth by George Penny, first published in 1836. That's a bit earlier that I'm looking for, but it was useful (and interesting).
It turns out that George Penny's father (also called George Penny) was instrumental in the beginnings of cotton mills in Perth, after he introduced silesia linens. That was in 1766, with cotton starting in 1872. Wool came later.
Photos
t.b.a.
Notes
Separate index for PTOP. Also to look at the Kincarrathie estate, whose southern border is Annaty Burn.
PTOP:
p18. Many mills to the west of the town, driven by the River Almond 4 miles west.
p248 onwards. Summary of history of weaving in Perth.
p249. Weaving considered "honourable and lucrative calling".
p250. George Penny (father of the writer) introduced "selesia linens" in 1766. After that weaving became general in Perth. Cotton weaving (rather than flax) started in Perth in 1782, due to George Penny snr.
p252. 1800, mill built at the foot of Mill Street, spinning cotton and later converted to wool. The company employed many people, but at some point was not making a profit and the "building being found to be in a very crazy condition, was pulled down".
p252. Before 1810 there were nearly 3000 weavers in Perth.
p260. "woollen manufacture has not been attempted in Perth" "Situation could not be better", with wool and labour and water available. "Perth only wants a few men of spirit to set the linen and woollen manufactures agoing, to ensure its propsperity."
Microfilm of Perth Courier 1810 September 13, page 1, colum 5. "Annaty Oil Mill, Scone Road":
Situate about half a mile from Bridgend; the Buildings are extensive, substantial and convenient, the Water Wheel is an overshot 16½ feed diameter; ard 4 feet wide, which, with all the other parts of the Machinery that would admit of it, are made of Iron.
The Premises have been erected about 3 years, and are upon the latest and most approved principles.
The Business will in the meantime be continued. *Lintseed Oil and Cake* Sold, and *Lintseed* Bought, as usual.
Apply to the Proprietor, who may also treat for a Sale if preferred.
The Gawler History wiki looks interesting. It's 1700 pages about the history of Gawler, South Australia, built on MediaWiki (and SemanticMediaWiki). I should get around one day to making a list of all Australian history wikis (or rather, bringing WikiApiary update to date with the relevant sites and keywords).
It's operating system upgrade time for variousservers that I help run (Debian Buster is EOL). I'm not a sysadmin by any means, and while most of it I feel roughly comfortable with I usually get stressed because of all the things that I dimly know about, but which I know that I don't know at all. Mainly around the whole idea of orchestration and being able to nuke and recreate an instance without a care in the world… the servers I'm trying to upgrade this weekend are not like that at all.
They're individual bespoke configurations, I guess: mostly Apache web servers with a single PHP application, possibly needing a MariaDB database (which is sometimes on the same machine). The thing about upgrading these is that the OS upgrade generally includes changes to default Apache and PHP (and other) configuration and so my server-specific config files also need to be changed. This is usually good: things get simpler, and out-of-date config that I've added over the years gets reviewed and removed or improved. It also makes me glad that I haven't bothered with orchestration! (All the non-private server-specific config gets added to a Git repo and symlinked into place.)
My approach to building PHP applications is I think becoming old fashioned: it's the idea that you don't have control over the server environment in which the application is running, so installation should be as easy and robust as possible. This is sort of still how we tell people to install MediaWiki (e.g. "download a tarball and put it somewhere") but with the addition of various other semi-essential services and things it becomes tricker. Most people these days solve this by using Docker for the standard install process. This provides everything neatly in containers that the developers control, so your application no longer needs to care about things like PHP versions.
The old heterogenous target idea still exists though, so I feel like it's still necessary to make things as easy as they can be to install 'manually'. Mainly out of self-interest, so when it's time to nuke a VPS and move things to a newer one, it only takes a couple of hours of learning and tweaking.
I've been this evening to pick up the entire content dump of https://freotopia.org from Garry Gillard. He's donating it all to Wikimedia Australia so that we can incorporate it into https://freopedia.org (or rather, so Freopedia can expand to include a new wiki that will contain Freotopia and other material).
At first glance, there are 4,254 HTML files and 9,218 JPEGs (out of 28,476 all up).
Here's a random sample:
My plan of action is something along the lines of:
Upload an as-is zip file of the whole lot to the Internet Archive, as a point-in-time archive. (Edit: now done, see Freotopia_2024-06-17.)
Filter out all actual files that are part of Freotopia (e.g. there are lots of files, I think created by Dreamweaver, starting with ._ — and a few that don't relate to Fremantle at all).
Create a list of all the wanted files (HTML as well as images) on Freopedia, and map these to the page names that they'll end up with.
Use pandoc to convert the HTML to MediaWiki markup.
Upload all images.
Upload all pages, with a {{freotopia}} header that'll indicate their source and link to the project page.
Progressively go through all the pages, tidying things up and bringing it all up to date.
I was walking down South Street this morning and wondered if I could get some photos of streets for their Wikidata items and Freopedia articles. But I think it was too early and the shadows still too long.
I'm excited to see preparation for this year's WikiCon is starting to take shape. It'll be in November in Adelaide, and I had thought that perhaps I'd be able to get the Indian Pacific (for the first time since 2007), but no it's out of even my "I'll pay more because it's a train" budget. $2,600 one way?! I think last time I went it was more like $450 (sitting up for three days from Sydney).
It also said that there were ‘five pillars’ for Wikipedia to be a trusted free encyclopedia. Each of these had detailed explanations, which I also read carefully. Reading that far made me wonder if I needed to know a lot more before I could actually write, but there was no one to consult to see if that was really the case, so I had to be clumsy to get on. Much later I realized that there seem to be a lot of people who write articles without actually reading that much.
It's always good when people read the docs, and especially when they find issues that aren't explained enough.
There is an an interesting post on Diff about the 20th Century Press Archives that are being integrated into Wikidata. The bit that caught my eye was about how they're generating and hosting the archive website:
The project uses the Wikitech infrastructure to maintain code and the PM20 master database. In addition, it established a workflow to return dataset enhancements to ZBW, where they are integrated into the actual PM20 website in a largely automated process.
The collaboration has proven to be a win-win situation: the ZBW has been able to replace its previous highly sophisticated but hard-to-maintain web application with a much more sustainable site of static pages, interlinked with Wikidata and continually improved by volunteer community work.
The site is at pm20.zbw.eu, and it looks like it's being generated with Pandoc (it's got a generator metadata key), but I haven't find any code yet.
This makes me more keen to continue looking at moving Freotopia into a static site (currently, seeing what it'll take to combine it with github.com/samwilson/freo). There will be about ten thousand pages, so I think build time might be frustrating. But most of a website's life is lead not being worked on!
Resisting linkrot,
Web archiving starts at home,
22 Jun 2024, Claudine Chionh:
Having lived half my life on the internet, including the early, wild days of the web when only spooks, nerds, and weirdos early adopters were online and we had very different (or absent) notions of security, privacy, and anonymity, I face competing impulses to preserve everything I can, and to hide or disavow some of my past.
I can definitely relate to this!
Also linked in the above post is the idea of Robust Links, which I think I'll have to now try to add to my websites.
I've been having a nice time this afternoon setting up a couple of scripts to go through the Freotopia files, and uploading them into a MediaWiki wiki, in preparation for getting the new Freopedia wiki online. It's great working with a dataset that's really almost completely orderly and sensible. The only issues so far have been a single zero-byte icon file, a bunch of JPGs that were actually PNGs and other things, and one file not encoded with Unicode (which turned out to not be needed anyway).
I'm now waiting for the file (i.e. JPGs, PDFs, and PNGs) upload command to finish (there are 9,621 of them). While I'm waiting I'm sorting out the HTML to wikitext conversion: using Pandoc for the bulk, and then various bits of regex hackiness to sort out the last bits and pieces. Hopefully the text pages will be ready to upload later tonight.
The weirdly stuck glass stopper on the bottle of gin I bought in Perth is still stuck, but if I can get into it then I might leave the actual running of the last bit till the morning. Doesn't do to surf the Ballmer wave into the shallows. Or something.
The first meetup for about six months happened today, at the museum cafe in Perth. There were five of us there; a few regulars missing and no newcomers. We talked about Freotopia/Freopedia/FreoWiki a bit (and related things). It seems that the general feeling is that Freopedia was a project that's now finished, and that to resurrect the name and use it for a new website might not be the best idea. There's also some great ideas about how Wikimedia Australia might support people who use MediaWiki in Australia — I think that stuff is a bit exciting, so will try to do more with it.
The cafe is a reasonable place for meetups, big enough and not super noisy, although you do have to avoid the pigeons that are flying around indoors a bit. It's corporate enough for us to not feel bad about taking up space for too long.
So I'll carry on with preparing the Freotopia pages for import (the file import is running now, should be finished soon). Just a few more hacky regexes to sort out.
Thought I’d set up my blog to still allow me to edit ActivityPub comments, but I guess not. (I know some may consider it “cheating,” but I’m not trying to replicate a social media service here. If I wanna edit a reply for brevity, or fix a typo, I believe I should be able to do just that, much like for “regular” comments. Why have different rules?)
If commenters want to stop blog authors editing their comments, they can always post on their own sites.
It's a good idea to own your replies! (Which I guess is what I'm trying to do here… and in doing so figure out how to do it.)
I got the last batch of Freotopia pages imported this morning, having fixed the session timeout issue I was having yesterday, and with only a couple of dozen wayward files left to sort out manually. The main roadblocks for the page contents were the spam filter complaining about URL shorteners and things, all of which were easy to fix.
Now I think there are a few more small mechanical fixes that can be made, but the bulk of the work will be in renaming, sorting, and making sure everything's linking together correctly.
Oh, and I had to leave out the full text of Battye's Cyclopedia of Western Australia for now because each volume was a page of its own and that's too much for MediaWiki. The text hadn't been proofread or formatted, so it doesn't matter too much; I'll come back later and add it in, one page per chapter.
I also fixed up the main navigation menus, to mirror the structure of Freotopia's homepage (but with slightly different top-level divisions).
The lesson we should learn, but won't, is to not allow companies to enclose and control such spaces. But we keep doing that, again and again. It's a pity.
It's remarkable how much we come to rely on private companies' largesse in these matters. Free hosting, free services, free everything… until it isn't, or it's hobbled in very specific and carefully thought-out ways that will not quite make you annoyed enough to leave. It's really annoying, because the alternative is a community-centric approach that is messier and in some ways "less professional" and which is built around humans talking to humans and figuring things out. I know what I'd rather have more of in my life.
Two bits of transit infrastructure text from my journey home this evening:
There are new smartrider readers in the train stations now, called 'Flowbird'.This 'City of Subiaco' bus stop is not in Subiaco (and nor has it ever been; this bit of Broadway was I guess in the City of Nedlands before 2016 when it got shuffled into the City of Perth).
Another of the monthly Wikisource Community Meetings this afternoon. It was good, about 19 people there I think. Main news I think is that the conference has been moved to be in February next year — and it sounds like it's going to be really great. There was some discussion about the ratification (by the Wikisource User Group) of the Movement Charter, and about how CIS is going to be taking on more Wikisource organising and technical development.
Mostly it was making me keen to get on with buying a new camera flash! (Bit of a odd tangent, I know, but it's just that I want to be able to do more digitization of bound works.)
I've just been refactoring a MediaWiki wiki's usages of Cargo'stemplate result format into only using Lua — and I knew it'd be faster, but it's really amazing especially on pages with lots of results. No more format=template for me!
It's that time of the year again (or that time of the fiveyear, given that this is an LTS release) when I upgrade my laptop to the latest version of Kubuntu. This time it's to version 24.04 (from April this year, hence the version number). I try to take notes whenever I upgrade a machine, so this post is me doing that. I'll try to also update my uses page to reflect current reality.
Triple-checked my backups, both in the cloud via Borg and locally on a USB hard drive. The local one is a dump of my home directory, excluding whatever's listed in rsync-homedir-excludes, so it's full of vast amounts of rubbish (or, "files for my work" I guess). The cloud one is stuff I actually care about.
Downloaded the latest image, copied to a thumb drive with Startup Disk Creator, rebooted from that thumb drive, installed Kubuntu.
Logged in to the new system, and started rsync to restore the local backup. That takes a while, so other setup happens while it's going.
Banged my head against my Lenovo USB dock until the external monitor started working. As far as I can tell, this was a random process of rebooting a few times and smashing the input selector button on the monitor until there was some point of synchronicity between it all. I mean, it's not called xrandr for no reason!
Installed KeePassXC so I could access my passwords. My DR process for this is to have my password vault stored separately, and usually even when I don't need to I'd use that version of it just to confirm that it's all good. But I was lazy this time and just used the copy from the local hard drive.
Installed Floccus in Firefox, to sync my bookmarks back from Nextcloud. And the Nextcloud desktop client to sync a folder of phone-laptop sort of stuff.
Installed Thunderbird, Telegram, Slack, Discord, and Element.
Switch left alt and ctrl, and make capslock the Compose key.
Experienced a weird bug with Firefox. No typing, no cursor. Most annoying.
And a bunch of other things, mostly unrelated to actually getting up and running: MariaDB, PHP, and whatnot. Part of what I like about nuking things every year or two is that it makes me re-evaluate what I've got installed and read about updates and changes and things, lots of which means that the system I end up with is somewhat different to the one it replaced.
There's a new extension released just today: Extension:AuthRemoteUser (by Tobias Oetterer). It's always nice to see what people are working on and releasing, but even more interestingly this one is also available under the mediawiki namespace on Packagist — I didn't think anyone was allowed to add new packages there these days.
I was wandering home past the Tafe sandpit (South Metropolitan TAFE Beaconsfield campus) and noticed the light through the trees. These photos do not capture it, but oh well.
I've finally got my RSS feeds back up and running. The issue ended up being the fact that I'm running my wikis in the site root directory, i.e. without the /wiki/ in the URL like Wikimedia sites have. I've never liked the redundancy of it, and especially with .wiki domains it looks a bit silly (e.g. freo.wiki/wiki/…).
I thought for ages that it was because of the precedence of RewriteRules within Directory sections vs those within VirtualHost sections, but that was a red goose chase. It was actually that MediaWiki prioritises the title it finds in PATH_INFO over one supplied in the query string, so /Foo?title=Bar is seen as having a title of Foo instead of Bar.
To fix it, I turned off $wgUsePathInfo, set the $wgArticlePath to include the full domain name (bad, perhaps; this might come back to bite me), and then appended the path info as ?title= in a rewrite rule. So the Apache config looks like this:
I wouldn't usually bother taking photos of the Jay Dubs, but it seems the 'churches of Fremantle' list needs a few more pics. So here's the Kingdom Hall in Edmund Street:
Then I went over the hill, enjoying as always the view from the top of Monument Hill and the groves of peppermints on the north side.
New tree and old tree
The Samson House wall looked nice in the setting sun:
Then the Workers Club:
Remarkably, a named (pedestrian) street that isn't yet named on OSM! Richard Lane was only named a few years ago, but still!
Lastly, another named place that wasn't named on OSM and also whose namesake doesn't seem to have much written about them, a lecture theater building at Fremantle Hospital:
Documenting a manhole cover has become an essential part of the community’s trips and outings. Over the years, some members have developed an affinity for certain covers that they consider particularly representative. Mentxu Ramilo, for example, found a 1925 manhole cover in Vitoria-Gasteiz that she found fascinating. “I let myself be infected by the Wikimedian spirit and passions, and by everything that forms part of the graphic heritage and deserves to be documented,” explains Mentxu.
I think we of WikiClubWest are going to have to up our game of cataloguing of all the street things! :-)
The next Geogeeks hack night is this week. I've not been to one for a few months (because I've been away), but I'm looking forward to seeing everyone again, and hopefully doing some more work on OpenHistoricalMap and the tramways of Fremantle, or at least continuing to catalogue which maps will be useful to do that.
The Monument East development seems to maybe be getting started, with the buildings on Amherst Street being fenced off in preparation for demolition. And the water pipe boring machine is working away on Riverside Road (I'm not sure why I didn't try to get a closer shot; it'd have been interesting, because it seems that the machine is pointing west but boring north).
McCarthy's Engineering on Amherst Street
Riverside Road closed, directing traffic right into the Jetty Bar (where we had beer)
The Stations of Light exhibition (catalogue PDF), being the work of Eduardo Cossio, at the Naval Store. It was in the small western building, that has a strange little side room with a hole bashed through the bricks into the larger space.
Posters
The entrance
A chap watching Photo Score I, a 15-minute AV piece
Eduardo
Altars I and Altars, on the north wall
Inside
Next door in the main building was another exhibition:
A note from the Have-A-Go News, no 388. July 2024:
Mandurah started as a fishing village has been developed to a seaside resort with a difference. It's history of a great story.
The Halls family were pioneers. They were one of the first in the area in 1830 and have the name to Halls Head at the neck of the estuary.
Initially taking a back seat to the inland farming area of Pinjarrah, Mandurah has developed to be a major holiday desintation for the state.
Blessed with two rivers and many lakes, it was a natural for marinas which now border the water ways.
As it grew it needed more and better bridges. Once the main route to Bunbury it now has traffic james with local traffic.
Nicholas Reynolds the manager of Mandurah Museum will continue with the second half of his talk on the heritage of Mandurah titled The Halls of Mandurah at the July meeting of the Australian Independent Retirees at Halls Head Bowling Club, Erskine at 9.30am on July 22.
For more information contact Norm Hodgkinson on 9527 2383.
So much happens on WhatsApp, Telegram, and Discord (and other chat platforms), that I'm starting to feel like just giving up on fighting them, and even promoting the idea of ephemeral chat being the place to do everything. Mailing lists are silent, and forums work but only for fairly specific communities. Almost everyone seems to be completely happy with reams of discussion and history being locked up in proprietary websites, so why shouldn't I be too?
I don't like the fact that history is forgotten, that search is rubbish, that threads don't have subjects and can't be continued ad-hoc days or weeks or months later. That attached photos are down-scaled and have their metadata striped. And a dozen other features of these systems.
But I do like the fact that it's possible to talk to people! And that's really what it's all about. So my new approach, I think, is to focus on the ephemerality of chat — it's just like talking to pepole, there's no need or desire to record everything, and anything that's worth recording needs to be transferred to some other place. That last bit is a steep rule for most chat systems, especially those like Slack that try to make you believe that they're the long-term record of your community. But I think it works, especially if some people make it their business to copy relevant stuff to a wiki or other easily-updatable website.
So I'll give up on the mailing lists, and stop feeling worried about the personal and organisational history that's daily being put on the front of a conveyor belt to deletion. I'll not go as far as to join Facebook, but I'll stick with WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord, Slack, Matrix, and IRC groups that I'm part of, and try to free up that part of my brain that gets annoyed about all this stuff.
The new system for the Community Wishlist was launched yesterday. It replaces the old annual system of having a set period each year when people can propose wishes, with some weeks following of voting etc. In the new system, wishes get submitted whenever, and are gathered together into focus areas and those are what will be voted on (again at any time).
I think it's an improvement. The software for running it certainly is! We've built a data entry form, which reads and writes a wikitext table. There are also other parts that read all the wish templates into a (Toolforge) database and then write out various tables (all wishes, recent ones, etc.) into wiki pages.
I shifted IA Upload on to a new server today, where it's running on Debian 12 and PHP 8.2. So that means it's time to upgrade the tool's PHP dependencies, and as it's a Slimapp app, it seems that the first step is to get simplei18n working with a more modern version of Twig. So it's not going to get done today, it seems…
This morning I've been working on another round of flattening HMW232, which is a box full of letters, receipts, telegrams, price lists, cheques, product samples, and other documents mostly dating from around the 1880s and '90s and accumulated by my great-great-grandfather Shakespeare Hall. He (and his brother at times?) ran a general store in Cossack (in Western Australia, not the historical Ukranian state), and much of these papers appear to be related to that. I'm not really sure, because at the moment I'm just focussing getting them cleaned, flattened, and stored before starting the scanning process.
My approach at the moment is to clean them of any loose dirt, unfold and flatten them, and add them to manila folders with one to three pages per folder. It seems to work best when there are fewer, so their folds don't interfere with each other. These manila folders are then stacked up in piles of about a dozen, between melamine chipboard boards, in a stack eight boards high. This seems to be about the sensible limit to weight, as well as my patience with this process. It means I do it for a few hours every few months.
After a few months, the papers are taken out, grouped by type, and stored permanently in those white archival folders (I guess we don't call them 'manila' because they're the wrong colour?) and kept in polyprop archive boxes. The scans go on Commons and the archival descriptions on ArchivesWiki.
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