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Quickly posting
Fremantle
· blogging ·
iOS Shortcuts for WordPress Bloggers, by Kris, 2 January 2025:
You may have noticed I’m posting a lot more lately. It’s partly because I’m not working, plus a bit of conscious effort… plus a couple effort-saving shortcuts I’ve set up.
In the past, I used to share images to Instagram and then had an IFTTT applet run to post those images to WordPress as blog posts. I wanted to flip that model and instead first post to my own site, and THEN have the option of sharing to Instagram or other social networks. The solution I’ve landed on is to use an iOS Shortcut as a Share Sheet action. That means I take a photo, click the Share button, and then click the Post with Pic shortcut.
It's a small thing perhaps, but I do think that making it quick to create a post is an important part of any blogging set-up — and can help with the feeling that blogging is "too hard" or that it's just quicker to use social media. (There was another post I saw recently about why it's good to host your own stuff, but weirdly I can't find it again now.)
Three walking paths in Fremantle
Fremantle
· Fremantle · trails · walking · OSM ·
I've noticed, thanks to Waymarked Trails, three new walking trails around Fishing Boat Harbour (new to OSM, that is). My first thought was that these are joining up the Americas Cup plaques that are spotted around the place, but I'm not really sure.
I think I'd better go for a walk.
Nineteen trail markers
Fremantle
· OSM · Fremantle · walking ·
So I went for a walk, and found nineteen pink crayfish trail markers.
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First up, I stopped at Bill Campbell's bookshop, and bought a copy of A Place of Consequence. He was telling me about when they replaced the floor in that building, twenty years ago, and the fact that there's no cellar there.
My search for the walking trail started at the shipwrecks galleries, where I found a Maritime Heritage Marker:
But then, not far away was the first pink crayfish (or orange lobster, I guess, if we're to follow the tourism guidelines).
After that I had to walk down towards Bathers Beach, but there were no markers to be found at all, and no indication of where to walk. I had to carry on, and around in front of the Fisherman's Coop and over the road before I found a second marker. Then it started to seem that this trail might actually exist (and that I was even following it in the right direction, if the direction of the pink antennae was anything to go by).
The third plaque was in much better condition, because it's mounted vertically on some wooden steps. It pointed to the right along the boardwalk, but the map said that there was meant to be a loop up around Bon Scott's statue. There was no sign of that though. This was the first plaque with a visible QR code, but it resolved to http://11631286 which didn't seem quite right.
Another one, this time in good condition and with a functioning QR code. It goes to https://www.transport.wa.gov.au/mediaFiles/marine/MAC_M_Fremantle_Boat_Harbour_Walking_Map.pdf (here's a local copy in case that disappears).
After the boardwalk, Little Creatures had a bunch of closely-spaced ones, and then on the other side of the road was the actual main sign board that explained the whole thing.
After that sign things were easy, although oddly one of the markers further along is marked "start/finish" and points across the road. There doesn't seem to be any on the other side of the road, so I guess it was just put in the wrong place. The last marker I could find was back where I started at the maritime museum (I walked past it to start with.
So all up, I think it's definitely a trail, although some fixes are needed in the OSM relation. The map says 12 minutes, but I took 45 (being a dawldling nerd with a camera).
No database of photos
Fremantle
I seem to be giving up (for now) on the idea of a database of photos that I've taken. A while ago it occurred to me that it's silly to keep all photos together just by virtue of the fact that I was the one to click them. Far more useful to sort and store them by usage and proximity to other data.
So I'm experimenting with a document-centric approach, where a wiki page serves as what in other systems might be a tag or album or category. Photos (and other files) can be embedded into that page, and gain their metadata from the page and their place within it. It's looser approach, more like a scrapbook or commonplace book, and I will probably also add at least some per-file metadata (e.g. time and coordinates) at some point. Most of what I want in a record-per-photo system I seem to now be getting from a combination of a calendar view and some manually created lines on a map.
Buffalo archive room sorting
Fremantle
· Buffalo Club · Fremantle ·
This evening we pulled all of the non-cupboard stuff out of the archive room at the Buffalo Club, and somewhat sorted it. At least, it's organised by size and fragility, and is ready for the next step. It's nice to get a bit of a handle on what's there and what needs to be done.
I'm taking an old frame home to refurbish and see if it can have new glass. Looks pretty solid, in the timber.
Arts Centre courtyard
Fremantle
· cafés ·
I thought today would be a nice day to work from the café courtyard at the Arts Centre. It's cool and shady and the coffee's… well, the coffee's fine, at least (it's not great). But the mosquitoes, they are not fine. They are eating every bit of me, buzzing in my ears, and trying to drown themselves in the coffee. Maybe if they could all drown themselves, that'd be okay. But yeah, shady places with good sprinklers on lawns do perhaps have their downsides.
SpinTel and ssh
Fremantle
My ISP Is Killing My Idle SSH Sessions. Yours Might Be Too. Posted on January 11, 2021 by Anders Trier:
So TCPKeepAlive enables keepalives handled by the TCP stack implementation (Linux in my case), whereas ServerAliveInterval enables protocol level keep-alives (handled by OpenSSH).
This explains the behavior we’re observing, but also raises new questions:
- Can I fix my problem by enabling the ssh protocol-level-keepalives? (ServerAliveInterval)
- Why are the TCP keepalives only sent after 2 hours?
- Why is my ISP dropping my TCP keepalive packages?
I verified that by setting ServerAliveInterval to 300 (5 min), my problems disappeared. We could stop now that I found a workaround, but let’s keep digging.
I documented my findings, and sent an email to my ISP. I quickly got a response back acknowledging that this is a bug on their side, and thanking me for my research. They still haven’t fixed the problem though.
I am experiencing similar things with my current (new) ISP, SpinTel. Haven't yet had any luck in solving it though. Borg keeps failing after ten minutes or so, and other ssh connections are (almost! but not quite) always failing after some amount of idle time. I've tried setting ServerAliveInterval 10 and ServerAliveCountMax 30 as suggested, but it's no good.
I guess I'll keep digging
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).
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.)
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Reasonably Good Things
Fremantle
· Fremantle · exploring · walking ·
I'm at Good Things café, which I will probably always think of as the Attic. Being here reminds me that there is much more work to be done in documenting Brian Klopper's work around Freo. I've probably posted this before, but there's no point in being a wiki nerd on the internet if you can't get trains into everything:
That's the floor that's below me, as I type this. Bricks supported on what must be quite a number of tonnes of steel.
Anyway, I wasn't planning on working on that bit of Freopedia today; I wanted to get down to the harbour and walk another of DoT's marked trails, the Challenger Cray Trail. What a pun that is, how clever of a government department to try their hand at some word play! No, I'm teasing them. But there is actually an interesting part to the trail, and that the fact that they send people down Molfetta Quays. I'd not thought that it was particularly encouraged for tourists to go there, but I shall take it as license to explore today I think.
After last week's wiki meetup in Ellenbrook I'm feeling rather disappointed in my phone's camera's ability in harsh summer sunlight, and am going to try to keep the aperture small and the ISO down today and probably end up with things that are too dark but which at least have nicer detail.
Thirteen trail markers
Fremantle
· walking · exploring · Fremantle · OpenStreetMap ·
This morning's walk was a success I think, although I'm growing more disappointed in the Department of Transport's ability to a) put markers where they need to be, and b) use materials that don't degrade to nothing in the sun. Those things don't matter though, because this is really more about ambling around looking at things than it is a necessity to follow the actual trail. I found thirteen trail markers, but only twelve are on this map because two are in the same location.
This is the second of these that I've followed, after the Boardwalks and Brewery Loop a couple of weeks ago. This one goes out to the end of a couple of groynes and so is nicer I think. There's always something totally calming about sitting on the rocks at the water's edge, looking out to sea.
I started at the main sign, but actually it says that the start is in front of Kalis' fish and chip shop, so I headed over there — where there was the lovely sight of a pod of dolphins right in close in the harbour, herding a school of fish up against the wharf. They were being watched by a few excited tourists and some crew on the Marine Rescue boat Resolute. I tried to get a photo of them, but of course that sort of pic never works out (and one should not even try, and just enjoy the moment).
Most of the trail was as boring as expected:
But a few of things stood out:
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Firstly this cor-ten obelisk thing.
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"
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And the seafood factory near it, with it's large flow of water.
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The entrance to what was Quest Apartments, but which now has the sillily-punctuated name of "Be. Fremantle".
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And the cruising yacht club's 'club house' (such as it is; more masts and less pomposity than the nearby Royal Perth Annex I think).
But most useful, and leading to hopefully another Sunday outing for me, is this map of the America's Cup Walk, which shows the locations of all (or some?) of the competitors in 1987:
