For quite a while now I have been bothered by the tendency of pages making available handwritten documents online, to scatter the pages of those said documents all across their websites. While it is nice and quite wonderful that those things are online at all, and while those things certainly help a lot in accessing at least facsimiles of original documents and manuscripts, the act of organizing those said pages are getting quite painful. Especially when having to deal with loads of different pages, as one often does when examining handwritten letters in greater detail.

Until now I have been neatly organizing those manuscripts that I needed to take a look at into folders and subfolders. At least I have been trying to. It is a kind of tedious process that always seemed a bit too bothersome to me to be taken for granted. Still, there seemed to be no alternative to that problem lately, while I always figured that reading those letters in one single file might be a bt more comfortable, the most obvious of alternatives to the bunch of multiple .jpgs  would have been the everpresent .pdf file format. A wonderful format in my opinion, only very unpleasant to use for larger series of pictures: When used as a way to present facsimiles of graphics and pictures pdfs tend to become uneccessary large and bulky, lose the ability to interact with the pictures inside more directly (like cutting and copying parts of pictures) and are very limited to navigate. Pdf has been introduced as a format which appears on every system just like it is supposed to appear, without any shifts in the documents formatting; the use as a picture archive was not one which was intended.

Then I realized something else last week, when preparing a presentation about the history of sequential art (read: comics) actually: I had had that problem already, a few years before, when first looking into the history of comics. Public domain comics from the 30s and 40s often were made available for free by enthusiasts on the net, only, just as in my experience with the handwritten sources from medieval times later, it was really bothersome to download them and then keep them in different folders just to make sure I could easily find the story I was looking for. Keeping them in one single folder didn’t make it easy either.

A few years later someone found a solution to that: the so called Comic Book Archive, which is basically a bit of a glorified hack. Maybe even using the word hack on it would be kind of glorifying it, but as Lifehackers do that all the time it might be okay. What the people who got the idea for this first did was simple, yet strangely effective (and it actually is so simple even I understand it): they just put a sequential series of comic book pages into an archive (like .zip or .rar) and renamed the resulting file into .cbr or .cbz. What they had then was a file that could be read by a special program (there are a few dozen of those around nowadays) as one single comic book. Basically the program was nothing more than a picture viewer that could decompress achives. Also, because it is nothing more than a zipped archive one can easily open it up with any zip-program,  and use the contents as one wishes.

So, can this be useful? I still am wondering about it. Modern CBR/CBZ-readers have a multitude of different features which are supposed to be help in reading the comics in those archives, in some cases going so far as to actually enable the reader to adjust the colors of the current pages or magnify especially hard to read parts of the pictures.

As something as a proof of concept I hereby present: the cbz-ified Treaty of Tordesillas from 1494, the treaty that divided the world into a Spanish and a Protuguese part, back in the days when those two nations were the ones which actually were powerful and ballsy enough to divide the world amongst themselves. To use this file properly you have to download one of the many CBR-readers [link] and open it. I don’t have any special reason to use exactly this document, it was just the one I came across first after a quick search. The pages of this treaty have been taken from Wikimedia Commons and are lacking the high definition one would wish for real work on such a document.[1] That might not be too much of a problem in this case, as the writing is more or less legible anyway, other documents, especially cursive handwritings or the scribblings of some 14th ct. merchant might need a better resolution to be of use in that case. It works, more or less, but everything depends on the resolution of the pictures used. But the same problem would be there if we just had looked at them like that. Here we can see them in the sequence they were written in.

[1] just as I am finsihed writing this I get the message that the Bibliotheca Palatina in Heidelberg now is online [link] in it’s completeness. How fitting… For many more online documents from the middle ages there is a whole catalogue of online sources out there…

The whole idea of what seems to be postblogging appeared to me a few times before, and Ihad some ideas of how to do it and some ideas of what to blog, yet I realized in the end that none of them were really feasible. None of these ideas though were as interesting as Brett Holman’s take on the phenomenon of Scareships, phantom airships appearing over Britain in the early 20th century. Brett is blogging appearances of those airships over Britain in 1909 on his blog Airminded in chronological order.[1]

A fascinating concept and something one might keep in mind for other historical events. As I said it has been done by others before, like Holman’s own description of the Sudeten Crisis in that form, David Silbey from The Edge of the American West describing the Boxer Uprising day-to-day or Ross Mahoney taking on the battle of the Mareth Line. I suppose history is full with stuff one could use to that effect.

So, what could be the use of blogging stuff that is long gone? Isn’t that stuff in history books anyway?

Yeah it is, but (aside from the fact that historians need to look at the sources anyway to make sure everything the books say is correct): It actually might give a whole different view on the subject than any history book or other media could convey. Breaking down the course of events in daily or maybe weekly parts, whenever the news would have appeared back then, we could have better insights into the point of view contemporaries might have had.

I think if used right one could use this idea as quite a good tool to teach and research certain historic topics. I wonder if I could maybe do something similar in this blog as well… The problem would be the topics I woul choose for that. As I am a medieval historian I would be more interested in developments from the Middle Ages. Only back then there was no such reliable source of information as the newspaper turned out to be in the 19th/20th century.

[1] he also has a whole subblog only on scareships complete with sources and maps of their occurrences

When I logged into my Facebook account earlier I found a friend of mine in the “people you might know” box in the right upper corner. I clicked myself through to her profile, noticed that it was indeed this one friend I had with that particular name and sent a friendship request.
So far nothing out of the ordinary.

Then I realized that the both of us didn’t actually have anything in common. At least nothing which Facebook should know.

At least nothing I could put my finger on.

She is living in a completely different part of the country now, never went to school or university with me, we didn’t even meet until we both workedtogether for a NGO a few years back. The closest that we actually got in our profiles was that her high school was about 40km away from mine.
Neither me nor her actually put the occasion where we met online.
So how come she appeared as the top suggestion all of a sudden? A place which for the last few days was held by a girl from my Uni that shares two  of my friends with me.

Now, I know that one or two years back, when I started to use Facebook a bit more extensively, I did a search on her name in Facebook. I didn’t find her back then and actually didn’t think about that too much anymore. Does Facebook really save all those searches I did for people I knew over the last few years? And do I really want them to remember all that stuff for such a long time? Keeps me thinking what else they have on me…

A Greasemonkey script for your Facebook pleasure: removing all those damn Quiz updates.

North Korean Anti-U.S. propaganda posters: They are offensive towards the U.S. of course, but they also show that North Korea seems to be stuck in the 1960s even in terms of propaganda. Of course when you have the highest percentage of the population in the army AND the bomb you might not actually care about that. Although lately what they seem to do is pissing against the legs of everybody they can.

A collection of links to Medieval Cookbooks: I really have to go through that at one point. Still, I suppose there are far more than just those linked somewhere.

And: a Lifehacker guide on how to build a computer from scratch for people who never have done that before. Something I might try as soon as I have some spare money to get the parts. I always wanted to have a computer I built myself. I’m such a geek. Even though being a history student.

Anna Etmanska from the Transparent Language Polish Blog in her latest post points out some facts that have bugged me as well for a long time:

Take any random phrasebook (any language will do) and look inside. You will see a whole bunch of very useful expressions that, no doubt, are essential to your survival in a foreign land. Phrases such as: “Where is the national museum?” (Yeah right, like you are really going to understand the answer. A lot easier to look up the museum on google maps before you leave home) or “Can I have it in red, please?” (at H&M you can find it yourself, and if you’re the type who frequents high end stores, chances are the staff will speak some English, even in France) or “I’d like to exchange these traveler’s checks” (just use a bank card, will you?).

So it’s not only me! Other people ask those questions as well! What audience are all those sentences in phrasebooks (not only Polish ones but all of them) actually for?! In any of those books there will be loads of sentences which might be important in everyday communication, but you basically can’t use them. Because you won’t understand the answer the other person will b giving you. The way to the museum might be shown with hands and feet if nothing else helps, but ask the lady at the ticket counter when and where the bus is going from and you will have a problem.

I remember one Polish phrasebook in particular that had a page on relationships. Phrases were going from: “Do you want to go out with me?” up to “Do you want to marry me?” and my personal favorite in this list “I think it doesn’t work with us two anymore!”. A whole relationship condensed onto one single page. Only: who will ever need that?

I mean, what are you even doing in a relationship where you have to break the bad news in a language you don’t even speak? I mean, how did you talk to each other before?!

I have to admit, I am a sucker for good old analog communication. In other words: letters.
I really like to write them and receive them. My girlfriend agrees with me I think, she seems to like getting them as much as I enjoy writing them.
There are of course situations in which I wonder how much writing letters actually fits into this modern world I was born into. Today I noticed again that the whole service concept the german postal service have is rather, well, lacking. Once we had a post office in the village. I remember that pretty well.
Our village is the main village of our whole commune (for lack of a better word…), so even after they closed down the offices in all the other villages, we still had one.
Of course that was in the mid-nineties.
With time came the privatization of the postal service, and with that the need to make money. With that came the cutting of costs. And with that came the integration of service points into the local supermarket.
Luckily the village still has it’s own supermarket.
So nowadays all the letters and postcards I write at my parent’s place is taken in not by someone who knows about postal rates and whatever arcane knowledge there is to a post lady’s job (I really really appreciate the work they do!), but by the girl from behind the meat counter.
And as it always is more important to get the latest village gossip this can lead to rather long waiting times until someone manages to look for the people who want to post something. The service point, by the way, meanwhile has been transferred from the entrance to the backside of the shop, right next to the beverages.

At least the girl knew what I had to pay for a letter to Poland.

It was kind of shocking to me a year ago, when I sent one of my first letters from Germany to Poland, how much ignorance I could encounter with those people.
“Poland?” the girl asked back then. “That’s not in Germany, is it?”
I thought she was joking. “Well, no.” I said.
“But is it in Europe?”
She wasn’t joking.
She didn’t know our neighboring country.
What are they teaching kids nowadays?
Oh wait, that girl was in school with me.
Help? Seriously…

GetACoder is a freelancer marketplace. People can post job offers for small software projects they need to get written but don’t have time or patience enough to do themselves. Coders can bid on these offers, seeing as to who can do the job the best with the least cost.
That said the concept is perfect for people to get some code they need, and for coders to get some direly needed money (although they normally are at a slight disadvantage).
Of course some people somehow misunderstand how much work actually goes into programming, as can be seen with this pearl of a job offer:

I need someone to program me a new OS (Operasting System) that looks different than Ms Windows XP etc. but has the same style. It does not need to run on a mac but all the other PCs. It’s supposed to have a stylish look with clear edges etc. And ITS NOT SUPPOSED TO BE JUST A REDESIGNED WINDOWS as I’m going to sell that operating system later on.
These are some important points :

It should have ALL THE FEATURES that Windows Xp Professional has.
ALL the files that run on Windows XP ust also run on the BlueOrb OS.
It must have a very user-friendly interface (like MS WINDOWS XP)
When it gets Installed, the user needs to insert a serial number.
It HAS to be HACKER SAFE!
It must be quick and good looking.

This, of course, was posted with an offer for 20$ to 100$ to complete the task. How could one even dare to demand more for this basic kind of programming work? An operating system? Don’t coders do stuff like that all the time?!
Interesting that nobody really bothered to respond yet…

I don’t know if I should laugh or cry: Over the last two years there has been a big hunt for a female police officer killing criminal with mob connections based mostly around southern Germany and Austria.

In 2006 an officer was shot in Heilbronn and the DNA traces which were brought in from the crime scene showed the presence of a female person at the car the officer was shot in. I still remember that case, a friend of mine was in Heilbronn that day and he told me that the police was frantic searching for the murderer and never found him/her.

The same DNA as in Heilbronn later was found in samples from crime scenes from all over southern Germany, and spreading over to Austria, from small burglaries into garden cottages to acts of violence and vandalism. They even started a whole special department trying to find this queen of crime who managed to elude the authorities somehow, and whose presence never actually could be verified by witnesses, only by DNA samples… and who is more trustful, a (maybe even criminal) witness, or an unbiased DNA sample? After all, even though all of the criminals, burglars and car thieves and whatever, told the police they didn’t know anyone like that, and even though the criminals were as multi-ethnic as possible, the genetic samples were there! She had to exist! A queen of crime. A phantom.

They actually went so far to postulate that this unknown female person maybe only was female in her genetic image and would appear as a male person to everyone else including herself. That actually can happen, rarely, but still would have been rather odd.

And they had to wonder why, if this person was travelling all over Southern Germany and Austria to commit her crimes, she never actually once committed a crime in the Free State of Bavaria (which is in the middle of the whole area she worked in).

So, after about 20.000 hours of paid work those police officers put into this case, and a few millions of Euros pumped into this investigation, someone actually thought about looking at the things which all of these crimes (40 all in all) had in common.

Turns out they used cotton buds from the same factory to take the genetic samples.

And all of these buds were spoiled by some careless employee working in that factory who got her DNA traces all over them. Maybe she just handled them without gloves. Maybe she just had sneezed at the wrong moment. Her DNA was on the cotton buds.

The reason why Bavaria was left out of this crime spree was kind of obvious now: they just had used cotton buds from another manufacturer.

2 years of work, unreasonable amounts of money, 40 crime investigations… and the investigators couldn’t be bothered to have a closer look at their own methods.

I bet something like that never is going to show up in CSI.

Source: Stern.de

Image: Wikimedia Commons

The Catalogue of Digitized Medieval Manuscripts actually cares about a problem which I have found to be quite serious in digital scholarship: Loads of manuscripts are digitized and available on the net, yet if you don’t know they are there you also can’t work with them. A problem which I have encountered rather often lately when thinking about actually working with the original sources. I just can’t afford a short trip to London just to look up a 10-page apocalypse in the library there… as much as I want to. So having a way of FINDING any of those documents available on the net is like a gift from heaven.

Not really something historical, but fascinating noneteheless… a Russian artist made medieval looking woodcuts of various fantasy and science fiction movies. Oddly fascinating to look at, even though I can’t read a word of what is written there. Makes me wish he actually made a book of these things. Or maybe illustrate one.

People interested in photography and addicted to caffeine (or anyone with the lack of funds for digicams and a professional photolab) might be interested in the fact that one actually can develop films using freschly brewed coffee and a dash of fresh orange juice. Only black and white (even with color film), but the pictures still look fantastic.

If one might not be that interested in photography but rather, let’s say, fashion, coffee obviously also can get used to dye clothes, for example to give jeans a nice vintage look; although of course the REAL jeans affectionado would never actually do that: there is  a trend of wearing dry/raw denim in by just wearing it. Raw denim means jeans which never have been treated (stonewashed or otherwise altered) before being sold. And people try to fade them naturally themselves, meaning they wear them down themselves to make them look good and wear comfortably by only having the natural wear and tear of daily use have an effect on their trousers. This includes in some cases wearing them for half a year, maybe a year, without ever washing them (some of them actually have a phobia of ruining their effort by that). Which just might be a bit too much if the only reason for that is to get a jeans that fits and suits only it’s owner. But then… they have their own forums in whih they actually post pictures of the progress they are making, and some of them look, well, pretty fantastic…

Sometimes I wonder if there is really a fetish for everything, and on other days I just believe there is.

Jason R. Briggs, Snake Wrangling For Kids, [Link]

A nice little book about programming in Python. Written in a try to be easy to read and understand by children (although failing to be in some of the later chapters), I think if I will ever have kids they will get this book printed out together with their first computer. It might be helpful for them. Most likely I think that because I always would have liked to have some skill in programming my PC when I was a kid.

Jeffrey Elkner, Allen B. Downey, Chris Meyers, How to Think Like a Computer Scientist. Learning with Python, [Link]

Something like the former, just with an emphasis on a more mature crowd. I will definitely try to use the book to understanding  some of the concepts of programming. Somehow even after years of using these machines like a pro, I never understood some of the most basic concepts in theit programming.

bookn3rd has a howto on making your own quill [Link]. Now, where do I get feathers? She says it is harder than it looks to master it, but how would I know if I would’t try?

And lifehacker has the idea to use vintage calendars as new ones [Link]. After all the Gregorian calendar is repeating itself every 14 years or so, and some of these old calendars just look really, really good. The lazy breed of course finds another lifehack in that: just put up 14 different calendars on your wall and you will never have to buy a new one.