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This is the full archive for 2022
Sharing locations
New bar tape
Fremantle
· cycling ·
I put some new bar tape on my handlebars. It's stuff that doesn't have an adhesive backing, so can easily be removed and adjusted.
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Materials
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Done
Geogeeks, June 2022
Fremantle
Geogeeks evening in Fremantle.
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Door sign
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Plan of Robert Harper building
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Newly-printed map of Fremantle:
EIIR
Fremantle
· royal family ·
The Queen has died. Long live the king? The news coverage is massive of course, but there's quite a few of them with little to say yet. The BBC has just informed us that "Aberdeen airport is 45 miles from Balmoral", and there are many articles full of phrases like "traditionally x has happened" and "we can expect to see y".
Still, it's something of a meaningful moment, I think. Hopefully it's the start of the process for Australia to become a republic. Hopefully someone's hanging out with the corgis in their time of sadness. I don't think I'll extract her maj's portrait from its storage.Merredin
Merredin, Western Australia
· travel · genealogy · exploring ·
This week my dad and I went to Merredin on a FamilyHistoryWA excursion. It was a very interesting trip, and made me more keen to figure out better ways to link family history and Wikimedia.
Day One
We left East Perth just after 7AM on Thursday, which meant getting the first buses into Fremantle a bit before 6. It was almost drizzling, but not quite. We were both rather quiet and still waking up by the time we got to East Perth and sat down for a cup of tea in the café there — the worst cup of tea, possibly ever. It tasted as though it'd be infused with coal smoke!
The train journey was very comfortable, and I dozed because I'd barely slept the night before. The new wifi service worked well (when it had an outward signal), and I read the news on my phone ("never complain; never explain") because I couldn't be bothered fetching my book down from the luggage rack. Bringing a flask of fresh coffee was a terrific idea, and the sun came out after we'd passed Toodyay. The OSM maps on the Prospector showed their normal red dot which didn't quite keep up — and then failed to move at all after about Doodlakine. (I wonder if Leaflet has a "stick to line" plugin?) As well as wifi, the train has 240v sockets, but of course I managed to forget my USB adapter and so was reduced to relying on my external battery.
The buffet closes a bit before Merredin, and so despite the red dot on the map not moving for half an hour we knew we were close to Merredin. Upon arriving, we headed straight off to the motel to dump our bags and then head off to find firstly lunch and secondly the WAGS group. We walked around the place, unknowingly following in reverse pretty much the same route that the tour was to take later in the day. We peered at the theatre:
The old town hall:
The ('replica' of the) Bills water trough:
And a few other things around the place:
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Communications tower and satellite dish for tracking marine traffic.
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One of the two dog parks, replete with jumping-through hoops.
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Flags at half-mast.
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More flags.
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Interesting brick facade on a building in Queen Street.
The light wasn't great for photos, but I was in the mood for filing in blanks on the Commons and Wikidata maps. The place we ended up at for lunch was nice: a cafe in the old postmaster's residence, with tables on the verandah and built of much finer bricks than many we'd noticed around (pressed not wire cut; there seems to have been a brickworks in the wheatbelt when this place was built, but there was also lots imported from Midland). After lunch, it was off to the library (the regional library, in the old north-side primary school). Got there early, and so got to check out the memorabilia room.
The military historian Bob presented first, talking about his family history in Merredin and the districts (we met him again the following day at the military museum). Then Mal spoke about the natural history of the area — followed by a tour of the Merredin Wildflower Society's herbarium (also located in a classroom of the old primary school).
A knowledgeable local (with a terrific tour-guide voice that had no trouble carrying over the wind and traffic) took us on a tour of Bates Street and elsewhere.
Unfortunately, we were both rather kaput and so gave up after an hour or two and went back to check in to our room and relax for a while before dinner. The news of Patagonia being sold to a non-profit was all over the feeds. I was attempting to catch up on my diary by typing on my phone (in a Nextcloud app), and it was all rather frustrating — but still better than handing over data to the usual companies.
Dinner was at the Grandstand Bar at the sports ground. All fairly much as expected, but one nice thing was that the acoustics were actually not terrible, and so we could talk to each other. The WAGS membership is mostly rather older, and so there's an element of needing to speak clearly!
Sleeping was easy, and the motel was pretty comfortable. The train sounds were fine; the air-con of the next door room was less so.
Day Two
Things dawned quiet, cold, and reasonably satisfied by breakfast in the motel dining room. It's weird that decent toast is such a hard thing to come by while travelling, but I always find it very comforting when it is.
We ambled down the road, sticking to the sunny side of the street, to the military museum where the WAGS group was assembling in the car park. To get there we skirted the landscaping works happening around the base of the water tower.
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We explored the military museum for a while, and then got the call that it was morning tea time at the refreshments' room at the railway museum — so off we went (circumnavigating the old train station, because the eastern pedestrian crossing was closed for the landscaping works). A grand morning tea put on by (the vice-president? president? something like that) of the Heritage Society. Followed by a climb up into the signal cabin and a great explanation of much of its workings by an ex-WAGR technician.
After that, everyone explored that museum for a bit, and then dispersed to drive off to see wildflowers or head home, and we walked south to the old cemetery. That was a lovely place, full of flowers and bush that feels pretty untouched (no idea if that's the case).
Day Three
The motel dining room wasn't open when it said it would be, so we gave up on it and thought Saturday morning would be a good time to try one of the other cafes in town. However, none of the others were open so we ended up back at Dimensions. It had a lovely sunny courtyard, and was close to the railway station, so all was good. It did mean that we had to walk back to the motel to get our stuff though.
The train was half an hour late. It did come though, and it did take us back to Perth. The royal funeral was still top of the news: "…these processes that have been in place for a very long period of time. They began tragically on Friday morning…" — it it really 'tragic' though? Sad, sure, but hardly tragic.
Anyway, all up, Merredin is a lovely town, and there's still lots more that I want to explore!
Pumping stations of Fremantle
Fremantle
· Wikimedia Commons · photos ·
I clicked this photo the other day, thinking that it'd be added to an existing set of photos of this fairly prominent building in Fremantle. But there were no photos already on Commons! So I've created a new category and it's very bare so far — but I'll be sure to get back and take some more photos soon. When the rain goes away.
Deep sea research centre
Nedlands
I've been at a Wikimedia editathon all afternoon at the Deep Sea Research Centre at UWA. Such interesting stuff and so far outside anything that I know! We showed them a few bits of how to get going editing Wikipedia and Commons and they all seemed to just get it. Most satisfying.
Hopefully they'll go on and upload lots of photos and improve lots of articles.Wikispore meeting
Fremantle
· Wikispore · Wikimedia · MediaWiki · system administration ·
On Friday evening I attended an online meeting about Wikispore, the new-ish project that's aiming to find a place in the wikiverse for content that isn't suitable for existing Wikimedia projects. I really like the idea, although I know it's hardly a new one and that people have been working on various things like this for decades now. Like any nascent project, the important parts of it aren't really the technical ones (although they're crucial too in lots of ways) but rather it's the people involved and the communication that's most interesting. I feel like the community around Wikispore is friendly, knowledgeable, and sensible — and so I'm hopeful that it can be a success.
My main involvement so far as been to try to help upgrade the test instance at wikispore-test.wmflabs.org, to help get some new extensions installed (including my own new one, UnlinkedWikibase). Thus far, I've been a bit of a failure at the upgrade! The system is on a Cloud Services VPS, and runs the wiki via Vagrant. I know it outs me as a deviant WMF developer (perhaps less so these days now that all the cool kids are moving to Docker), but I've never used Vagrant very much for development or deployment. So I don't really know what I'm doing. The current issue is that Vagrant is still on PHP 7.3 and needs to be updated to 7.4.
For the time being I think I'll retreat to trying to get my own wiki back up and running in the way I want it (it's looking likely that I'll dump Twyne, sadly).Commons app failure
White Gum Valley
Cameras vs phones
Fremantle
· photography ·
Interesting post this morning on r/photography about the demoralising effect of smartphone photo-processing:
The comments seem to boil down to: shoot in raw, process stuff yourself, buy a prime lens, and (sometimes) give up and just use a phone.To make a long story short, I'm feeling a little frustrated with my experience with my DSLR camera. It is just an entry-level Nikon D3200, an older camera (though from what I understand quite capable for an amateur) with the original kit lens. Thing is, I have taken a lot of time over the last year to get to know the camera and how to make use of the F stops, ISO settings and exposure times, I got myself a tripod and learned about a lot of fundamentals of taking photos and yet.. its still usually outclassed by a google Pixel 2 smartphone with HDR+ enabled. The phone can generally eek out more detail and clarity and does better with avoiding over and under exposing. I don't get it - it's a basic camera but the APS-C sensor is much larger, the optics (even though entry level) should be better than whats on an old smartphone, I'm making sure not to over or underexpose, I'm dialing in my focus as much as I can. Is this an optics thing, a user skill problem, or just.. how good modern image processing has become and is it making cameras a bad deal for beginners? Kinda sad that I've invested time and energy and interest into learning how to use these functions only to be easily out-shot by myself using auto / photo on an old smartphone :(
New painting in the Robert Harper stairwell
Fremantle
Organising templates in MediaWiki
Fremantle
I think Scribunto makes template editing completely different, redundant even. All things can happen in proper code, and we no longer need to worry about weird workarounds for finnicky whitespace. We do have frustrations with creating wikitext/HTML with Lua but I feel like that's less of a drama and often actually much easier.
I'm trying out an idea of making every template:
- nothing but a call to a matching module,
- have a
/docsubpage, - a
/style.cssstyles heat, and - storing (almost) all its info in TemplateData.
The module architecture will be equally simple, with modules either being for a single template (with the same name), or designed for use by other modules.
It's probably all too simple—but if it gets me away from wrapping newlines in HTML comments, and deeply nested triples of braces, then I'm happy enough.Being a lone volunteer sysadmin
Fremantle
· mastodon · fediverse · system administration ·
mastodon.technology is shutting down:
This is why I only host things for myself and friends and family! Anything that's depended upon by a wider group needs to have a bigger group running it, I think. It's one of the strange things about open source software — it is easy to get things running, and so easy to end up running things in all too fragile a way.I am exhausted.
This made me realize how little joy I’ve been getting from being an admin. How I’ve come to resent the work I have volunteered to do. I’ve donated countless hours to running the instance, solving both technical and moderation problems, and I’ve always put the instance above my own needs. But I can’t put the instance above the needs of my family.
The server has also gotten too large and too complex for me to administer. I’ve always been keen to learn the next new skill I need to be an effective admin. But I just don’t have it in me anymore. The monitoring that I have in place is insufficient to solve the current problems and I have zero bandwidth to invest in learning the skills to diagnose and fix the issue.
Wikidata's tenth birthday
Fremantle
· Wikimedia Commons · Wikidata · birthdays ·
A nice little gathering this morning in Freo, for Wikidata's 10th birthday. We had cake, a fascinating presentation from Margaret about how to sort out taxa authors in Wikidata, and even people dialling in from interstate. I didn't get many photos, but I think a few others did and hopefully they'll all end up together in the category on Commons.
Ninthfloor is closing
Fremantle
The shared hosting service NinthFloor is closing at the end of the year:
I first noticed it in 2012, but never actually signed up in the end.We have been considering Ninthfloor somewhat in deep maintenance mode, but the reality is that the project is unmantained and it has been for a long time.
Thirteen years is a long time and what Ninthfloor offers was way more useful, interesting and challenging back then: there were no cheap VPSs, no Letsencrypt, GitHub was one(!) year old. As of today there are better and more reliable ways to do basically everything Ninthfloor provides.
The Black Swan, July 1969
Fremantle
· scanning ·
I've just uploaded a 1969 edition of The Black Swan, the Swan Brewery's magazine. The main reason is that it has an article about Cossack. It also has this article about Anzac Day in Bermuda, showing off the terrific knees that come with a case of Swan Larger.
Grave plots in Wikidata
Fremantle
· cemeteries · Wikidata ·
I've been looking at places of burial in Wikidata. It's easy to look at a single cemetery, and who's buried there and whether there's a photo of the grave and details of its location and plot-reference. It's not so useful though, because there isn't enough data yet (at least for Western Australian cemeteries).
The results look like this, for Fremantle Cemetery: https://w.wiki/5oQuAutomattic is a great model
Fremantle
· Automattic · WordPress · hosting ·
Very interesting thread this morning from Chris Trottier about why Automattic (the company that makes WordPress) is such an interesting model to look at when thinking about financial sustainability of social media.
Read the rest of the thread…Most questions about the Fediverse's long term sustainability and survivability can be answered by looking at Automattic.
1. Does it scale? Yes. 2. Can it be extended and customized? Yes. 3. Can the non-technical average Joe be comfortable enough to self-host? Yes. 4. Can institutions embrace it? Yes. 5. Can an ecosystem be built around it? Yes.
The operating model has already been built and been proven long ago.