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', 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.
Removing paper colour from a scanned illustration
Fremantle
· Wikisource · archiving ·
I quite often find myself extracting engravings and ink sketches from scanned works. Wikisource has some info about how to do it, but this is roughly how I do it in Gimp:
- Use the Mono Mixer tool (the
Colors>Components>Mono Mixermenu item), and twiddle the colours till it looks good. - Adjust the levels (the
Colors>Levels…menu item). - Posterize down to two colours.
-
Original
-
After Mono Mixer
-
After Levels
-
After Posterize
Then a bit of clean up of the wayward bits.
OpenLibrary lists all gone
Fremantle
· Internet Archive · OpenLibrary · backups · self-hosting ·
When the Internet Archive deleted my user account earlier this year, I didn't quite take in that it meant that all my reading lists on the OpenLibrary were deleted as well. I've got a new account now, and no way to retrieve my lists! So I think I'll just have to get back to cataloguing my books here on my own site (with metadata pulled from OL and Wikidata). I guess I wasn't really using them that much, if I didn't notice for four months.
Cupolas on Fremantle buildings
Fremantle
· Fremantle · Western Australia · history ·
Roel is calling for a 2029 Bicentenary Cupola Project to reinstate the little cupolas that used to be on the corners of quite a few buildings in Freo.
I wonder what the bicentenary celebrations will be in Fremantle. Hopefully nothing too serious, maybe just some daggy dress-ups, and perhaps some community limestone rubble wall building. A spot of sand-blindness and lack of good drinking water, for better historical accuracy.
This is what my grandmother got up to for the 1929 centenary (in Carnarvon):
S1065
Fremantle
· Wikimedia · photowalks · Wikimedia Commons ·
Making new direction through supporting Wikimedia activities for Neurodivergents, 15 December 2024 by Youngjin:
We also organized a photo walk event for neurodivergent people in November in Chuncheon, South Korea. The concept of a photo walk is still new in Korea, and participants were not sure how it would work before the event, but after participating, they realized that uploading photos to Wikimedia Commons is not difficult.
"I enjoyed the photowalk today because of the weather and scenery, and it wasn’t too difficult to post photos once I actually did it a few times. It was also nice to talk to people and learn about things I didn’t know. I’d like to do it again next time."
How to save the internet
Fremantle
· archiving · websites · bookmarks ·
Ruben Schade, 16 December 2024:
My philosophy in life has always been “if you liked it, keep it”. The Web is an ephemeral place, and we’re learned recently even the Internet Archive is not immune from overzealous lawyers and bad-faith actors. I have backup copies of entire blogs, podcasts, YouTube channels, and books that no longer exist anywhere else, and where copyright would preclude me from resurfacing any of it.
I like posts like this, about how to save the things we like. To make a bookmark, quote a bit, and link to it, might be enough. I have the IA'S Firefox adding that makes it quick to ask the Wayback Machine to Archive a page.
The copyright issue is sort of annoying, making it (tautologically) illegal to republish things that you're not allowed to republish. But the social expectations seem even more to be swinging to "don't save my stuff without asking me". Which does make sense, but it's also been making me nervous about archiving a whole bunch of things that I used to gather (read: hoard).
[I haven't stored the above post.]
PhpFlickr updates
Fremantle
· PhpFlickr · Flickr · programming ·
I am not a very good maintainer of PhpFlickr, mainly because there are too many things in life. But today, thanks to the patient prodding of Tac Tacelosky, I got a new release out. It's 6.0.0! (Up from 5.1.0.) The main thing that makes it a major release is that it drops support for PHP earlier than 8.2. This makes a bunch of things easier, and future updates will be able to make even more improvements I hope. (Thus far, there's not much to see, but it does install without complaint in newer Symfony projects).
PhpFlickr is a bit of an odd model of API wrapper library, although also quite common I think. It tries to replicate everything that you can do with the API as classes and methods (basically each API endpoint group is a class, and the methods are the endpoints). These often feel like nothing more than a slightly maintenance-heavy way to get autocompletion on API calls! But there are a few things that PhpFlickr does that do make it easier than directly calling the API: mainly around authentication, and file uploading. Those things feel very much worth having a package for, and I use them in a few projects.
Out of the Woods Exhibition
Midland
· Midland · furniture · woodworking · railways ·
The Fine Woodworking Association of WA had an exhibition today in the old pattern-making workshop at the Midland Railway Workshops. Interesting pieces, quite a few from high school students, and lots of foreign timbers (especially from the US).
The CWA share premises in the next building over (next to the powerhouse) with the Hand Tool Preservation Society, and the Machinery Preservation Society — and I think a couple of other organisations, like the people restoring the powerhouse machinery. Morning tea and lunch for two cost only $20, and was taken sitting at some nice old jarrah cafeteria tables.
We walked down to look at the remains of the Coal Dam, where there's extensive steel boardwalk but very little in the way of explanation about the remaining structures or their place in the area's history. The urinals of the railway workshops are given much more.
[todo – Upload photos]
Adding photos to a wiki
Fremantle
I've been attempting to do a few things lately that involve adding a whole bunch of photos to a wiki, with the aim being that there will be more information added about them at a later date.
The idea is to make it as easy as possible, so that the photography can continue. This sometimes depends on access to a decent internet connection, so it's not a synchronisation process (although I've experimented with that as well). The usual approach is to create a new wiki page, and use the MsUpload extension to dump 25 files at a time into a gallery, creating subpages that list 100 files each. The files are given names that we know are unique on the wiki, so there's no need to use the annoying interface to rename them (so that saves a fair bit of time). The slow parts are the uploading, as well as after saving the page when all the thumbnails are generated. But it mostly all works well enough.
The trouble comes after the files have been uploaded. MediaWiki's gallery syntax isn't the most flexible, it basically lets you have a thumbnail with a caption, and optionally a link that can go to somewhere other than the file's own page. Additionally, editing large galleries like these via VisualEditor is really not fun. So how best to quickly add notes about each photo (or sometimes, groups of photos), when those notes actually properly belong on per-photo description pages? We don't have time at the point of uploading to create those other pages (the idea is that all the extra metadata can be derived from the photos, and it's only the 'special' metadata that we want to capture right away). It looks like it's going to be some sort of custom 'gallery-like' template, a bit like how the G template on Commons does it, with weird custom parsing of pipes and newlines.
Then each photo can be rendered with an accession number that links (along with linking the thumbnail) to either the record page after it exists — but more usefully, before that exists, to a preloaded edit link at which the caption and other info can be added.
(I'd planned to put the actual template here… but there's other stuff going on today, so it'll have to wait….)
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