Welcome

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.

Fremantle Fenians offline

Fremantle
2024 April 28 (Sunday), 2:33PM
· Planet Freo · Fremantle ·

I've been trying to resurrect Planet Freo in recent weeks, and it's nearly working. Today it seems that the Fremantle Fenians feed at https://fremantlefenians.com.au/feed/ has gone — or rather, their whole site is offline, including the festival site at https://feniansfestival.com.au.

Arthurs Battery

Fremantle
2024 April 27 (Saturday), 6:00PM
· Fremantle · military ·

I wandered down to Bathers Beach on the way to get lunch at Chalkies, because there didn't seem to be any photos on Commons of the old bits of Arthurs Battery that are lying there in the waves. They were mentioned in this month's Fremantle History Society talk.

Seen from the top of the cliff.
A bit closer.
The outer one; I didn't get a pic of the inner one because there was a chap pondering the waves and I didn't want to disturb him.

I also added a 1947 aerial photo to commons:Category:Arthurs Battery.

Goodbye to Mr Harper's building

Fremantle
2024 April 27 (Saturday), 10:13AM
· Fremantle · offices ·

Today is my last day working from our office in Pakenham Street. It's been pretty great here, although it does feel a bit like things are drawing to a natural close (the wifi less reliable, the sink backing up, the general demise of the air conditioners). The building will be gutted and renovated before too much longer, and I'm off to Europe for a few weeks, so it's time to leave.

FHS April 2024

Walyalup Civic Centre
2024 April 23 (Tuesday), 7:00PM
· Fremantle History Society · Fremantle · military ·

This month's Fremantle History Society talk was by Shane Burke, a senior lecturer in archaeology and history at Notre Dame. The talk was entitled *Defence of Fremantle: Then and Now*, and was an overview of some of the important sites of military defence in this area.

Starting with a fort marked in an early surveyor's notebook, on the corner of Pakenham and High streets, and then jumping to WW2 with the Arthur and Buckland batteries. He showed this interesting photo of Arthur Head taken from the top of the power station chimney in the '20s:

(Ignore the red 'copyright applies' watermark; this is in the public domain.)

The two gun emplacements seen there were demolished (along with most of the limestone headland), and all dumped into Bathers Bay. He was saying that it was all cleaned up in the 1980s for the America's Cup defence (hmm there's another defence, but he didn't make the pun), with the concrete remnants being intentionally left as reminders. I'd always thought they were inadvertently left there.

Buckland Hill Battery was the next topic, especially about a chunk of concrete that remains on the western side of Stirling Highway, that's been mostly destroyed by a modern cable being laid through it. And the remnants of writing in the concrete structures there and on the hill.

Lastly, he talked about the anti-submarine boom in the harbour entrance, and the South Mole gun emplacement (part of Authurs Battery). All up, a good evening.

Tourists in Fremantle

Fremantle
2024 April 22 (Monday), 11:28AM

It looks like there's some sort of luggage enthusiasts' gathering in Fremantle this morning, judging by the number of people getting off the train.

Oh, nope: it's just that a cruise ship is in town, the Pacific Explorer.

Metalworking vice

Fremantle
2024 April 20 (Saturday), 6:34PM
· woodworking · metalworking · metalworking bench · vices ·

I finally got around to bolting down the new (old) vice. It's a swivelling one, so I stuck it at the corner of the bench and it can be used on either side (although a spanner does need to be kept on hand). I've been meaning to get it cleaned and greased and fixed down for years, but my dad took pity on me and recently machined a terrific new clamping bar for it so I could actually get it done (the original clamping mechanism was a couple of too-small washers that ended up just spinning in place, quite useless).

Looking back through Borg archives

Fremantle
2024 March 27 (Wednesday), 10:55AM
· backups ·

I've run about three different^[1] sorts of snapshop backups I think, in the last 15 years or so. Firstly a dd-based script that hardlinked date directories on a series of (failure-prone) USB hard drives. That was reasonably simple, and I learnt a bit about some useful things, but in about 2015 I thought I'd better not rely on myself for something so critical and switched to SpiderOak. They were all the rage after Edward Snowden recommended (or just mentioned? I can't remember) them as a good encrypted and deduplicating backup system. They were good, for ages. But then a couple of years ago I got sick of their weird client's UI and opaque bugginess — and the fact that they no longer were actually promoting their backup product on their own homepage. So I switched to Borg.

Borg is good, and I do love the fact that the basic configuration is about setting it up how you want it to work. In my case, it's a manually-run thing because I realised that the rate of change on my local machine is not great enough to justify the continual scanning of all changes (for some parts where I do want that, I use NextCloud). But the part of Borg that I do not have working as I want it to is the spelunking side of things: when I want to retrieve a file or directory from an archive, I have to do my own bisecting of where the version I want can be found. That's partly unavoidable, because of the nature of restores like that — it's not really the business of the backup software to know what you want. But it could be quicker: mounting archives to date-named directories currently requires me to copy and paste the name of the archive. I'd rather have some sort of menu thing.

Mapping QEII

Nedlands
2024 March 16 (Saturday), 2:55PM

Another Geogeeks' OpenStreetMap mapping party today. Only three of us (a fourth signed up but couldn't make it). We met at the café under the carpark, with the intention of spending a few hours mapping Queen Elizabeth II Medical Centre, around -31.96837/115.81595.