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 England, Their England (A. G. Macdonell, 1933), and The Ante-Room (Lovat Dickson, 1959), and The Countryside Companion (Tom Stephenson), and The Factory Floor (Carolyn Polizzotto), and The Oatmeal Ark (Rory Maclean), and Vesper Flights (Anon).
To contact me, you can email me, find me on Matrix as '@samwilson:matrix.org' or Telegram as @freosam.
This site is on webring.wiki; explore other sites: [ ←previous | next→ ]
Below are my recent blog posts, and you can jump to the bottom to navigate to other posts from earlier times.
S1450
Frankfurt
· RedirectManager · MediaWiki · identifiers ·
I've been working on adding a system of redirect 'patterns' to RedirectManager. (I'm not quite sure 'pattern' is the right name, but they've got to be called something.) The main thing I want at the moment is a way to create a redirect to a page that I'm currently editing, with an incrementing ID value suffixed with a letter or three. So, this blog post for example is S1450 because that's the next available ID here, but actually it's not the next ID because that number just comes from counting all blog posts (and adding 1). It'd be neater to be able to just increment from the last S-prefixed title.
The patch I've got also adds dates and times, and a random string generator.
GLA→FRA
Frankfurt
After an early start in Troon, and with a wonderfully clear and warm (or at least Scottish warm) day, I caught the train, then bus, then plane to Frankfurt.
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Portland Street, Troon -
Troon railway station -
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Bletchley Park
Milton Keynes
· museums ·
This was my second visit to Bletchley Park, but everyone kept saying how much they change things and that multiple visits are worth it. I'm not quite sure that's the case, but it was interesting and I did see stuff that I'd missed ten years ago.
The buildings are interesting, and I always find that being in places-where-things-happened is really good and makes it easier to feel something about history. There have been lots of changes of course, restorations and a fair bit of recreations and artistic license, but all up if it doesn't feel 100% authentic it does feel representative (although who knows if that's just an illusion).
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They have dressed much of the site with furniture and documents and things to make it feel more like it was in the 1940s. Very cleverly nothing looked particularly stuck down, but none of it was moveable.
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The tour guide we had was amazing, she knew so much and (despite battling the sounds of a wood chipper and chainsaw that were running much of the day) told the stories of the place in a very interesting way.
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Archiving my bits of the Internet Archive
Fremantle
· Internet Archive · backups · MediaWiki ·
I now have a fresh 10 TB on my desk to fill up with various things I've been uploading to the Internet Archive. I'm not really sure about keeping all the annual dumps of wikis, but then I might as well. I do want to think about a better way to get MediaWiki images/ directories onto IA, because at the moment each dump contains a lot of stuff that's in previous ones.
I'm pondering some clever system of splitting images/ into 500-file chunks (as the limit for individual items). The problem is that it'd be nicest if new files could be appended to the most recent item (rather than having to shuffle files between items).
Or maybe the duplication just doesn't matter, and a new one- or two-hundred gig dump every year is acceptable. Just feels inefficient to me.
Invent your own memex
Fremantle
· linkblog ·
From David Edgar, 19 April 2026:
I keep plugging away at this application I write in my spare time to build myself a memex. But every noe and then I remember Obsidian already exists and Vannevar Bush would be beside himself to have access to it.
I don't think there's anything wrong with building your own memex. Everyone should do it. Although I do know the feeling of spending more time building it than using it!
Canberra airport open day
Canberra
· airports ·
I seem to have timed it poorly today at Canberra airport. There's an open day, but I've not got time to go and look at the Hudson they've got on display.
Not as poorly timed as this suitcase, lost on the apron:
Heading to Perth on this:
Afternoon at Chifley
Canberra
· ANU ·
I spent this afternoon at Chifley library, working on watchlist labels.
Then carried on with the same, at the hotel bar. I'd rather have gone to a nicer place, but free beer (in exchange for not wanting fresh towels every day) is a pretty good deal.
Mt Ainslie
Canberra
I went for a walk up Mt Ainslie today.
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The ABC's test pattern mosaic -
Ainslie shops -
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At the top of the hill
ABC podcast feed URLs
Fremantle
· ABC · RSS · feeds · podcasts ·
The ABC seems really worried to share the fact that you don't have to use their Listen app to listen to postcasts. As James Cridland pointed out last year, they do have a general structure to their RSS news feeds:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/feed/<id>/rss.xml
And for podcasts it seems to be:
https://www.abc.net.au/feeds/<id>/podcast.xml
This is despite them saying that they "increasingly require greater control of our content and its distribution, RSS feeds are no longer being updated."
The trick is to find that <id> value.
You can do that by going to a programme's home page,
and searching the source of the page for something like coremedia://program/7711104.
For example, for Conversations
it's https://www.abc.net.au/feeds/7711104/podcast.xml
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