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: Canadian Short Stories (Robert Weaver, 1960), and Doctor Thorne (Anthony Trollop), and Messing About in Earnest (Nick Burningham, 2003), and The Ante-Room (Lovat Dickson, 1959), and The Countryside Companion (Tom Stephenson), and The Factory Floor (Carolyn Polizzotto), and Vesper Flights (Anon).
To contact me, you can email me, find me on Matrix as '@samwilson:matrix.org', the fediverse as @samwilson@wikis.world, or Telegram as @freosam. If you want to leave a comment on this site (by creating an account), you need to know the secret code Tuart (it's not very secret, but seems to be confusing enough for most spammers).
Below are my recent blog posts.
Lunch on Oliver Hill
Rottnest
· Rottnest · Oliver Hill ·
I lunched overlooking "Hell's Gully":
According to the info on OSM (which probably doesn't really belong there) the spot I was sitting was just near the site of a generator building, "due to nature of typical doors and presence of derelict HV cabling and conduit":
Walking past the H2 gun emplacement, I noticed that one of the doors was built by B Makutz & Co. (with a hinge unlike the generator building's):
This side of Oliver Hill has a different heritage conservation policy to the main gun. Here (according to the sign) they aim to "do as much as necessary, but as little as possible", so that we can "gain an understanding of how quickly the army evactuated the Island, leaving a ghostly relic… challenging the visitor to acknowledge the past and the solitude experienced by soldiers". Elsewhere they say that there were up to 9,000 personnel stationed here in WW2, so I'm not quite sure about 'solitude', but I do like the fact that things are left to quietly disintegrate into the sandhills.
After lunch I walked along the spur line back towards where it joined the actual current railway:
Causeway
Rottnest
I wonder if this rebuilt-looking part is where UAM ran a EWP off the road c2010:
Calm morning
Fremantle
· Rottnest ·
Windless morning today, and few ships in the harbour. I'm off to Rottnest.
Al Kuwait (2016, IMO 9590931):
No more full-size files for free Flickr accounts
Fremantle
· Flickr ·
Service Update: Original & Large Size Download Limitations on Free Accounts, 15 April 2025:
Starting May 15, Flickr will restrict downloads of original and large-size images (larger than 1024px) owned by free accounts. If you use a free account, this update applies to both your own content and to content shared by other free members.
We’re addressing the misuse of free accounts as cloud storage for original files—a practice that violates our Terms of Service and negatively impacts the performance and experience for Pro members. By limiting access to original and large-size downloads from free accounts, we can help preserve the integrity of the platform and continue delivering high-quality service to our Pro community.
It's hardly surprising that they're making this change. I do wonder about what dodgy stuff people have been getting up to — is this a matter of tricky steganographic bulk distribution of data in JPEGs?
Anyway, I still like the idea of paying for a service like Flickr. I pay for email, backups, and I think third most important on a list list that would be photos (although of course, I have a complete mess of self-hosted weird photo hosting as well… I just wouldn't recommend that to anyone else, whereas I can reasonably suggest that people use Flickr and the downsides of it are fewer than most other services).
Start a website
Fremantle
· websites · software · installing ·
What we see in our websites (and why I am so excited about the web), jamesg.blog, 13 April 2025:
My excitement is cautiously placed. There are undoubtably challenge presents both today and ahead, among them: how do we keep the principles behind the web alive in all generations? Here, “generations” may refer to a period even as much as five years. The web is so new and changing so fast. Trends change.
There is no one answer to the question of keeping the principles behind the web alive, and, more broadly, encouraging more people to start websites. It’s a hard question. But, amid all of this, I cannot help but be encouraged by how many people I have seen start websites.
Everyone should start a website! It's fun. It's as easy as it has been for twenty years, I think, which means either completely complicated and confusing and expensive, or pretty straight-forward and achievable by anyone who understands what a computer file is. Depends on who you ask.
I'm interested at the moment in how web apps (like WordPress or MediaWiki or whatever) are installed, and how easy we make that. It does seem that the "copy a zip file to a server, unzip it, and edit a config file" paradigm is still alive and well and really quite accessible to lots of people. Doing it 'properly' discounts that workflow, I think, and that's a bit of a shame.
Re: Using “Re:” in blog titles
Using “Re:” in blog titles by Ruben Schade, 11 April 2025:
These are worth reading, but I wanted specifically to call out the syntactic choice Brandon made in his post responding to Jason:
It’s simple, but it hit me just how succinct it is, and how much information it conveys. It’s treating blogging more like a conversation, not unlike an email. I love this.
I think I've said it before, but I do like the blogosphere or indieweb tradition of replying to other people's posts by writing a post of your own. Adding 'Re:' to the post title just makes it even clearer, and looks good in feed readers.
Phone battery level blogging
Fremantle
· blogging · tracking ·
My phone's battery has been blogging for 7 years by Dries Buytaert, 13 April 2025:
Every 20 minutes or so, my phone sends its battery level and charging state to a REST endpoint on my Drupal site. Timing depends on iOS background scheduling, which has a mind of its own.
[…]
It's a little goofy. But that's the fun of having a personal website–you get to make it yours.
This reminds me of my experiments with recording my GPS position automatically on my website. Ultimately I found it less useful than I'd thought it would be, mainly because it's often the times that I most want tracks that the thing failed to maintain a GPS fix. It was fun though, to have everything together in one database.
I don't think I'd bother tracking battery level, but I guess there are other sensors on the phone. Would a database of acceleration events be interesting?
Asbestos removal around Victoria Quay
Fremantle
There are a couple of buildings wrapped in scaffolding on Victoria Quay at the moment. The first I walked past is the winch shed for the 2000 tonne slipway, with various piles of rotten weather boards lying around, and an intriguing sight through the studs to the machinery and out the other side to HMAS Ovens.
The second building is one whose name I can't remember but I think it's part of the boom defence buildings, certainly it backs on to the smaller brick one of the same. It's all now of course part of Tafe.
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