Category Archives: Uncategorized

Cast marks on nineteenth and early twentieth century bottles in Australia

Nineteenth and early twentieth century Australia were perpetually short of medicine bottles. Even though Felton and Grimwade, who were originally a specialist medicine bottle importer, started bottle manufacturing in the early 1870’s, Australia was always short of bottles. This is … Continue reading →

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Life drawing and prurience

J, my partner in crime, is an accomplished artist. While she does do the occasional landscape, what she really likes doing is drawing people and doing portraits. And like everything, while innate talent helps, you have to practise, one of … Continue reading →

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The Edinburgh Bristol sleeper

Earlier today I tooted about how the Scottish government had taken back control of the Caledonian sleeper from Serco. There’s an obvious parallel here with the Melbourne Adelaide train service, but that’s not my topic here. For along time the … Continue reading →

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21st century espionage fiction

It’s no secret I like crime novels. In fact one of my favourite forms of relaxation at the end of the day is to read some decent well written crime fiction for half an hour or so before dropping off … Continue reading →

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A winter walking trip

It was the end of Autumn, and one of these weekends where the garden turns from a golden symphony of reds and yellows to a mess of sodden rain soaked leaves and bare branches. When we had gone to Apollo … Continue reading →

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Another legacy of nineteenth century migration

A long time ago I went down an internet rabbit hole while researching the use of Linux in education in Latin America, and instead came up with something else entirely – a story of the legacy of Anglo Irish migration … Continue reading →

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John Harvey of Caithness (or not)

This morning, when I was scrolling through my RSS feeds, I came across an article on the ABC website, about how John Harvey, one of the founders of Salisbury in South Australia had African heritage, yet had been born in … Continue reading →

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Postcards and encryption

While I was down the Charles Babbage and the Crimean War rabbit hole, I came across a couple of coding cribs designed to allow people using postcards to encode the message written on the cards. You see, when postcards were … Continue reading →

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Codes, the Crimean war, and a hint of incest

Today’s been wet. Too wet for a walk or gardening, and of course a bike ride is out of the question for a day or two until a replacement tyre arrives in the mail. So, I’ve been off down an … Continue reading →

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Digital and retro photography crossover

While we were down in Apollo Bay last week, I didn’t bother taking any of my film cameras, instead taking my old Fuji digitsl SLR and my little Canon iXus – the Fuji is bit heavy to carry around all … Continue reading →

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