Hello world, and welcome to my corner of the web. This is where I write words about what I'm working on, and post photographs of things I've seen.
I'm a Software Engineer at the Wikimedia Foundation, and so of course my personal website is a wiki (running on MediaWiki). In my spare time I volunteer with WikiClubWest to work on Wikimedia projects, mostly around my family's genealogy and local Western Australian history (especially to do with Fremantle). I try to keep up with issues on all the things I maintain (but usually fail), as well as listing the software that I use.
I try to find time to work in my workshop on various woodworking projects. Recently, that's been focused on building a metalworking bench, and will soon be about a set campaign-style drawers that's in the works. I've a good-sized workshop because I don't have a car.
Travel features in my life, not because I really hugely want to go elsewhere but because I just do — and also because then I can do some interesting mapping on OpenStreetMap, and take photos for Wikimedia Commons. Sometimes I ride my bike to get there, or walk, but more often it's planes, trains and ferries.
I'm currently reading the following books: A Puritan Bohemia (Margaret Sherwood, 1896), and Arrowsmith (Anon), and Doctor Thorne (Anthony Trollop), and The Countryside Companion (Tom Stephenson).
To contact me, you can email me, find me on Matrix as '@samwilson:matrix.org', or the fediverse as @samwilson@wikis.world. 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.
Changi airport
SIN
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.
Outdoors at the airport
PER
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.The speed of editing wikis
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.)UAM leaving
On not hosting everything yourself
Fremantle
· photography · archiving ·
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).
Spearwood Alternative celebrates 40 years
Fremantle
· schools · Spearwood Alternative · Spearwood · 1980s ·
Why we need nostalgia
Fremantle
That yearning feeling: why we need nostalgia by Agnes Arnold-Forster, 28 April 2024:
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.
Fremantle Fenians offline
Fremantle
· Planet Freo · Fremantle ·
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