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).
I also try to find time to work in my workshop on various woodworking projects. Recently, that's been focused on restoring a chest of drawers and building a metalworking bench.
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 more interesting mapping on OpenStreetMap.
I'm currently reading the following: Fathers of Men (E. W. Hornung, 1912), and Perth (David Whish-Wilson, 2013), and The Nether World (George Gissing, 1889), and The Railway Adventures (Geoff Marshall; Vicki Pipe, 2018).
To contact me, you can email me or find me on the Freenode IRC network (as 'samwilson'). 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).
Recently, I've been doing this stuff:
I managed to fix my Lets Encrypt bug that's been pestering my logs for the last few weeks. Wasn't hard at all—I'd not realised that the Apache-detecting system of the letsencrypt tool is so clever these days!
#Oh M.G. I fixed
a problem with my scanner and suddenly I can scan and describe and upload and drink whisky, all at once!
#I'm attempting, for what seems like the 32nd time, to print an A5 PDF to bindable A3 signatures. Might be on to something this time though.
#When the code makes sense, the world makes sense. But bloody hell, when it doesn't — things really do feel shit.
#The internet is crazy and full of sad stuff at the moment. I'm just going to hide for a bit I think, and watch the ants climbing a piece of bark as the sun goes down. Time to breathe.
#I suspect posting on one's own site would be fine if we all did it and remembered what RSS was.
#We're heading to Mission Burrito.
#Why do so many photo storage systems not have a facility to store the
timezone in which a photo was taken?! Makes for annoying workarounds when trying to list photos in date order.
#I'm doing a little bit of geo-locating of
FSPS photos.
#I've been watching the sun set against the bay bridge. Nice to breath a bit and slow down.
#I think SVG Translate is nearly actually functional. All the bits are working, I just need to tidy up.
#I don't think I like working on software that isn't used by other people.
#Right, for about the 4th time in the last few years, I've nuked my WordPress site and replaced it with a peculiar MediaWiki install. We'll see how long it lasts this time (till I get bored).
# 
