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 just do — and also because then I can do some more interesting mapping on OpenStreetMap. Sometimes I ride my bike to get there.
I'm currently reading the following: A Puritan Bohemia (Margaret Sherwood, 1896), and Arrowsmith (Anon), and Doctor Thorne (Anthony Trollop), and Perth (David Whish-Wilson, 2013), and The Railway Adventures (Geoff Marshall; Vicki Pipe, 2018).
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).
Fremantle History Society meeting, Deborah Hindley
Fremantle
Dr Deborah Hindley presented at the Fremantle History Society meeting last night on the topic of A Fremantle family: love, loss and locality, about her grandmother Maggie Hicks who ran the shop at the corner of Quarry and Barnett Streets (as well as other family members). Maggie Hicks was included in the 1978 compilation Reflections: Profiles of 150 Women who Helped Make Western Australia's History.
The full list is:
- Ellen Stirling (née Mangles)
- Eleanor Edwards
- Georgiana Molloy
- Helen Scott
- Louisa Eliot
- Ann Carson
- Ellen Bussell
- Charlotte Muir
- Jane Adams
- Friederike Waldeck
- Emma Withnell
- Mary Cuper
- Eliza Cronin
- Martha Hillard
- Wilhelmina Sloss
- Margaret Forrest
- Fanny Hunt
- Clara Sunders
- Mildred Fairclough
- Alicia Pell
- Louisa Glasgow
- Evelyn Wells-Taylor
- Frederica Cooke
- Elizabeth Dodd
- Mary Nicolay
- Madeleine Onslow
- Polly Daw
- Maggie Hicks
- Roberta Jull
- Elizabeth Halford
- Winefrede Bellanger
- Blanche McCaffrey (mother of M. Joseph McCaffrey)
- Jean Beadle
- Mary Driver
- Katherine Clutterbuck (Sister Kate)
- Sorato Keegan
- Edith Dicksey Cowan
- Mary Jane Counsel
- Lily Hannah Brown
- Amelia Macdonald
- Frances Ruffy Hill
- Eva Edmeades
- Christina Sewell
- Alice Kinston
- Agnes Walsh
- Mabel Nicholas (Sister Rosalie)
- Isabella Johnston
- Helen Cole
- Eleanor Burbidge
- Beryl Mills
- Marjorie Burton
- Elizabeth Cunningham
- Edith Tonkin
- Olivia Walker
- Florence Cardell-Oliver
- Betsy Rice
- May Holman
- Mrs Chesters
- Mollie Skinner
- Susan Casson
- Margaret Graham
- Ellen Jones
- Margaret Wylie
- Daisy Bates
- Amy Pretoria Brown
- Mary Bennett
- Rosetta Kelly
- Elsie Curtin
- Jessie Grimshaw
- Katharine Susannah Prichard
- Agnes Robertson
- Mary McKinlay
- Bessie Rischbieth
- Frances Craig
- Ivy Kent
- Edna Brophy
- Ethel Scott
- Mary Addison Hamilton
- Lucy Davies
- Mabel O'Brien
- Dorothy Forsaith
- Gloria Butcher
- Mildred Walshaw
- Henrietta Drake-Brockman
- Florence Hummerston
- Esme Fletcher
- Ruth Wright
- Fannie Rose Rudeforth (Sister Alice)
- Margaret Edis
- Belle Gladstone
- Amy Crocker
- Edwyna Ross
- Lucie Howell
- Eleen Joyce
- Honoria Lyons
- Dorothy Genders (Sister Dorothy)
- Maud Foxton
- Pauline Riley
- Rita Barlett
Evening at Gage Roads
Fremantle
The rain came in on us, but the harbour view is always pretty great:
Backing up Digital Ocean Spaces with rclone
Fremantle
I have a few wikis that use the AWS extension for storing their files. This means I can use Digital Ocean's Spaces object storage (which is S3 compatible). It's worked pretty well for a few years now.
I use Rclone to back up the Spaces buckets.
Each wiki has a config section in ~/.config/rclone/rclone.conf, such as the following:
[digitalocean-wikiname]
type = s3
provider = DigitalOcean-wikiname
env_auth = false
endpoint = sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com
acl = private
secret_access_key = SECRETKEY
access_key_id = ACCESSKEY
This means that the backup script can use that config (and also avoid backing up the thumb/ directory, because that can be re-built for these wikis):
echo "Downloading wikiname"
rclone sync --progress digitalocean:wikiname \
--s3-endpoint=sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com \
--exclude="/thumb/**" \
"/var/backups/digitalocean/wikiname/"
Spaces in rewritten URLs
Fremantle
· Cargo · MediaWiki · Apache · system administration ·
The WMAU calendar feed broke after a recent upgrade to Apache. It was returning a 403 Forbidden response, but it wasn't immediately clear why. The logs were showing e.g. "… [rewrite:error] … AH10411: Rewritten query string contains control characters or spaces" where there'd never been an issue before.
The /events.ics URL is a rewrite to a CargoExport URL: RewriteRule ^events.ics$ "/w/index.php?title=Special:CargoExport&tables=events&fields=_pageID,_pageName,start_date=start,end_date=end,location,CONCAT('More information: https://wikimedia.org.au/wiki/Special:Redirect/page/',_pageID)=description&where=DATE(end_date)>=DATE_SUB(CURRENT_DATE, INTERVAL 3 MONTH)&format=icalendar&icalendar name=WMAU&icalendar description=Wikimedia Australia coming events&filename=events.ics" [L]
Turns out it's because of fixing CVE-2023-25690,
and the fix here was to use + for spaces (and not %20 as I first tried):
RewriteRule ^events.ics$ "/w/index.php?title=Special:CargoExport&tables=events&fields=_pageID,_pageName,start_date=start,end_date=end,location,CONCAT('More+information:+https://wikimedia.org.au/wiki/Special:Redirect/page/',_pageID)=description&where=DATE(end_date)>=DATE_SUB(CURRENT_DATE,+INTERVAL+3+MONTH)&format=icalendar&icalendar+name=WMAU&icalendar+description=Wikimedia+Australia+coming+events&filename=events.ics" [L]Just a minute, they're out of order
Fremantle
It's nice that they've added a whole new series of Just a Minute, but why are they out of order?
Dowelling jig
Fremantle
· woodworking ·
I bought a dowelling jig the other day, and made the frame of a box with it on the weekend. It went incredibly well, considering the lack of care I took over accuracy. I just bunged the thing on the corners of the boards and drilled away merrily — no clamping, not even a depth-stop on the drill bit, let alone a ruler or square within sight. But because the jig sets the first hole centred on whatever the thickness is, and then subsequent holes in reference to that, there's not much that can go wrong. I was pretty impressed.
It was also a nice exercise for me in realising that not all boxen need dovetails. This box is for my new angle grinder, so I wanted joints that would reflect the precision and beauty of that machine.First chain re-waxing
Fremantle
· cycling ·
I rewaxed my bicycle chain this morning, for the first time since I switched to wax a bit over a month ago. It was so much easier than the first time! I was less involved than making a cup of coffee. In fact, I made coffee while I was waxing the chain! I had the moka pot and the waxy double-boiler on the stove at the same time.
Taking the chain off was simple, thanks to the new Wippermann Connex quick link. Then I wiped down the chain with a clean rag (there was not very much grime come off), and bundled the chain into the pyrex dish that I used last time, laying it on top of the solid wax in the bottom of the dish. Then that went into a saucepan and onto the stove, and within five minutes it'd all melted and the chain was immersed. I jiggled it around a bit with a wire, and the wax got a little bit grubbier when I did that. Then out to the shed, where I hoisted it out of the dish and hung it on a hook I put in the ceiling, dripping down into the dish.
The most time consuming part of the process was probably waiting for it to cool enough to handle. (Although I did idle over my coffee a bit I guess.) And then getting it back on to the bike is certainly the fiddliest part. That was helped by the hooks of the wear gauge.
All up, I'm still super glad to have switched to waxing. It does feel like cycling on butter!Mitchellcore
Fremantle
· clothes · newspaper clippings ·
I shouldn't admit to it, I'm sure, but David Mitchell's recent column on not sticking out is somewhat relatable:
My mistake had been to confuse my liking for old-fashioned conventions of dress with liking old-fashioned items of clothing. The former provided a virtual uniform for almost all circumstances from work to weddings to funerals to parties to meeting royalty, while the latter involves wearing weird moth-eaten items that make people think you’re a dick.
In light of this, I was puzzled by last week’s comments by the TV journalist Michael Crick about the demise of tie-wearing in workplaces. He described this as “sad” because “in many fields ties are still the only chance men have to play with colour and express themselves”. I’m also a fan of ties and wouldn’t mind wearing one every day, but for precisely the opposite reason. Wearing a jacket and tie absolves men of having to express themselves or show any judgment at all. It provides the perfect neutral look – bland but not noticeably so. Even those with as stunted aesthetic senses as mine find that hard to screw up.
Conversely, in the post-tie chaos that’s been my experience of the workplace, there is a bewildering maelstrom of opportunities to express and thereby betray yourself. Literally any item of your clothing can be any shape or colour, not merely the strip of cloth dangling from your chin. What on earth was Crick talking about?