Jerrold Northrop Moore said in the episode on Sir Edward Elgar (2004) in BBC Radio Four’s Great Lives:
Art is the imposition of form on experience.
He seems to be drawing on Alfred North Whitehead, who said in 1943 (Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead (1954)):
Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment in recognition of the pattern.
Robert Fothergill’s Countdown Canada (1970) “is a dramatized documentary of the day when Canada becomes part of the USA” says Anna St.Onge, my archivist colleague at York University, pointing out this digitization (from York’s 16 mm print) on YouTube. It features Barbara Frum, Barry Callaghan, Larry Zolf, Abraham Rotstein and others. The catalogue record has some details, and see also the York University obituary for Fothergill.
York’s Ross Building is used as Ottawa. The Ross ramp is long gone—it was demolished in 1988 so Vari Hall could be built.
I saw The Conversation (1974) again—this time in a theatre, and it was wonderful to see it on a big screen. On the way home, I remembered an anecdote told on a talk show decades ago.
I took the minutes in this week’s meeting of the collections department at York University Libraries. This just a brief sample of what we (and all the other libraries) are trying to start to handle. It followed twenty minutes about Clarivate and how we’re not buying ebooks from ProQuest.
LCSH and the Gulf of Mexico. An executive order from Donald Trump “renaming” the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America” was met with derision and ridicule everywhere in the world outside the US, and by many inside it, but the Library of Congress quickly proposed a change to LCSH to move “Gulf of Mexico” to “Gulf of America.” There was talk around OCUL about changing how this authority record is handled, but nothing has been arranged yet. Managing it manually would be too much work for us to do alone. Thus, the change will happen here (and probably everywhere else, in Ontario and the world), and a Trump diktat will forever affect our catalogues. HC made the point that we have thousands of records using “Indians of North America” that still need to be fixed: an older and more pressing problem to solve. Bill wondered what will happen if Trump “renames” Lake Ontario to “Lake New York”—and whether the Library of Congress will exist next year.
OCUL is the Ontario Council of University Libraries, which had a Decolonizing Descriptions Working Group that issued a final report in 2022: “Recommendations in this report that refer to inaccurate, outdated and/or harmful subject headings, for example ‘Indians of North America,’ must be approached as a starting point for improving catalogue descriptions.” Today there are still over 135,000 results on a subject search on Indians of North America in our catalogue.
This is very useful: Canadian Alternatives, “A collection of Canadian alternatives to common Internet services in the spirit of the various Awesome lists.” It lists Canadian providers of online services such as web site hosting, storage, domain name management, email hosting, VPNs, and more.
Last week I finally got around to upgrading my personal laptop from Ubuntu 22.04 to version 24.04. I’d run the upgrade on two other machines without problems. This time, though, when I rebooted it decrypted the disk (good!) but then only came up in console mode. Instead of a nice GNOME login screen, I saw this:
Miskatonic University PressUbuntu 24.04.1 LTS jenkins tty3
jenkins login:
I logged in and it worked. Phew! My files were all there, the internet connection worked, the machine was okay. There was no graphical interface, but that was fixable.
Something must have gone wrong with GNOME or X or Wayland or whatever, but I was pretty sure reinstalling would fix it, and it did. I ran these two commands. The first brought back the GUI, and the second did a full reinstall of the GNOME environment and everything it needed.
sudo apt install gdm3
sudo apt install --reinstall ubuntu-gnome-desktop
That took a while to download and install, but when it was all done I had the default Ubuntu GNOME working. I’d lost all my customizations and configurations, but it was working. Good! A few programs were missing so I installed them:
sudo apt install mpv vlc gimp plocate
I also had to rebuild Emacs and R, but make maintainer-clean and Conforguration made that easy.
I thought, do I want to reconfigure GNOME to be like it had been? I could. But for a while I’d been thinking about moving to KDE. Now’s the time, I thought. I’m going to be configuring a desktop environment, so why not try a new one I’ve been hearing great things about? If I don’t like it, I’ll just go back to GNOME.
sudo apt install kde-full
This downloaded over 1,000 packages that used over three gigs of disk, which also took a while. As part of the install it asked me about switching the display manager from gdm3 (which GNOME use) to sddm (for KDE), which I agreed to. Again I rebooted, the new display manager came up, I chose “KDE Plasma (X11)” … and it worked!
Right away I liked Plasma, KDE’s desktop environment. (I’m running KDE Plasma 5, which goes with Ubuntu 24.04, but version 6 is out.) It looks good. And it’s very easy to configure. You don’t need to, but if you want to, you can. All sorts of options are easily available that aren’t possible in GNOME.
Here are some of the things I did.
Konsole (the terminal program):
For the task bar, the default panel at bottom (with the Kickoff application launcher and System Tray):
In the end the desktop looks like this. I embedded a widget on it that shows network activity. Usually this is covered by Emacs or Firefox or whatever, but I see it on empty desktops when I pass by.
Widgets! They can go on the desktop or in a panel.
The background colour there is #002b36, from the Solarized Dark palette. Emacs and Konsole and Firefox use the same theme, and other programs pick it up from the system, so everything looks the same.
A few things about Plasma were delightful surprises.
KRunner is a quick application launcher. GNOME’s launcher comes up with Super (the Windows key, which Plasma confusingly calls Meta, but as an Emacs user for me Meta is Alt), but in Plasma that brings up the full Application Launcher, so I use the default Alt-Space keystroke. KRunner has all kinds of nice features built into it, such as a basic calculator and a spellcheck.
But I don’t even need to run KRunner in an empty desktop—I can just start typing! That triggers KRunner. So if I want to run Tor in the virtual desktop window where I keep it, I can just move there and type “tor.” KRunner pops up, grabs the letters, prompts me with Tor in a drop-down list, and I can just hit Enter to run it.
Screenshots with Spectacle are fantastic. The GNOME tool doesn’t have annotation abilities, but this does, and it’s very easy to grab a screenshot and put in circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one.
Widgets!
There is clipboard management with Super-v. This pops up a window with a searchable clipboard history, and you can scroll to what you want and hit Return to insert. I’m used to good clipboard management with Emacs, and this is great to have elsewhere.
I’m not yet sure about Activities, which allow you to have multiple virtual desktops, each configured differently. How to Be More Productive in Linux With KDE Activities has some examples. I haven’t tried this yet, but I may have a couple of uses.
KDE comes with all sorts of tools, games, utilities, and other applications, such as KGeography, a quiz to help you learn maps, flags and geography. It’s fun.
Notifications went strange on me a while back in GNOME. In Plasma they’re small and crisp on the right-hand side of the screen and work perfectly.
LibreOffice Writer looks nice. All the applications look nice.
There are a couple of things about keystrokes that I’m getting used to, or may change. That’s easily configurable, though. I’m fiddling around with small things like what information is showed in Konsole tab labels, and whether some applications should have toolbars and frames, but it’s easy to fiddle, change, and reset.
The passwords for my VPNs were lost in the network settings—I think that kind of stored password problem is to be expected; I saw warnings of other problems having both GNOME and KDE installed, but so far everything has been fine. Maybe the problems come from switching.
I won’t be switching back. I wish I’d moved to Plasma years ago.
I was very happy to be notified today that a bug I reported to Zotero was fixed. Its list of OpenURL resolvers had a North America section, within which were all the United States libraries, plus some Canadian, and then more Canadian libraries were filed under Canada. This was not right. Now it’s fixed, and within North America there are two lists, for Canada and the United States.
I hope Mexico appears there soon—maybe a librarian there, or some Spanish-speaking librarian elsewhere, will send in a URL. And then maybe South America will follow.
This is what it looks like now (shown in operation on my demonstration Zotero account, coloured with a Solarized Light theme):
Many thanks, as always, to all the Zotero people for their work on this excellent program.
I didn’t see any short videos showing how to install Zotero 7 on Windows, so I made one: How to install Zotero 7 on Windows. There are a lot of great videos out there showing how to install and use Zotero (mostly done by librarians) but they’re longer and cover much more than just the installation. I was after something quick I can send out before a Zotero workshop.
Here it is at the Internet Archive. It is licensed with a CC BY 4.0 license, so you can use, share and adapt it, but must give credit.
It shows just the basics in 05:40 and I hope it’s useful to others. It could be better, and if I redo it I’ll record the audio using a proper microphone, but it’s good enough for next week, which is when I need it.
I wish there was one like this for Macs …
For my future reference, here’s how I did it.
I run Ubuntu, so I needed a Windows machine. Library IT loaned me a clean Windows laptop with some basic applications installed but that wasn’t locked down. I installed OBS and used that to record the video. It took a few takes, of course, but I ended up with a recording that was good except for some stuff at the beginning and a short chunk in the middle.
I avoid handling video and I have almost no experience with any editor, so I fell back on the magnificently powerful and arcane command line program ffmpeg. You can do pretty much anything with audio or video with ffmpeg, but by Jove, its incantations can be complex.
From OBS I had saved a video named zotero-on-windows-raw.mkv (the suffix means it uses the Mastroska format, but don’t ask me about video containers). To pull out the two sections I wanted, I ran this to extract them into two new files. -ss means “start at this timestamp” and -to means “go up to this timestamp.”
ffmpeg -i zotero-on-windows-raw.mkv -ss 00:48 -to 05:39 zotero-1.mkv
ffmpeg -i zotero-on-windows-raw.mkv -ss 06:12 -to 07:01 zotero-2.mkv
To combine them, first I made demux-list.txt:
file './zotero-1.mkv'
file './zotero-2.mkv'
Then I combined the two videos into one with:
ffmpeg -f concat -safe 0 -i demux-list.txt -c copy zotero-combined.mkv
There’s probably some way to tell ffmpeg to do all this with one command but this worked.
With the video ready, I made a .srt SubRip subtitles file, and refined it until I was happy. I ran this to watch the video with the captions:
vlc zotero-combined.mkv --sub-file zotero.srt
The subtitles file looks like this:
1
00:00:01 --> 00:00:05
This short video will show how to install Zotero on a Windows computer,
2
00:00:05 --> 00:00:08
and how to connect it with three web browsers:
3
00:00:08 --> 00:00:12
Chrome, Firefox, and Edge.
I looked at Sacha Chua’s subed Emacs mode, but it seemed like too much to be getting into for this simple demonstration. Maybe next time.
The audio track needed work but in the end I decided to leave it as is.
Finally, I wanted to “burn” the subtitles into the video so they would always show. This is supposed to work but didn’t:
ffmpeg -i zotero-combined.mkv -vf subtitles=zotero.srt zotero-with-subtitles.mkv
No matter what I tried it would give errors like this:
Parsed_subtitles_0 @ 0x6174c4ac0e80] Unable to open zotero.srt
[AVFilterGraph @ 0x6174c4abf840] Error initializing filters
[vost#0:0/libx264 @ 0x6174c4acd080] Error initializing a simple filtergraph
Error opening output file zotero-with-subtitles.mkv
Error opening output files: Invalid data found when processing input
I tried all sorts of things, including converting the video to other formats and turning the subtitles into the .ass format, which is a real thing. (Whether ffmpeg had been compiled --with-libass needed to be checked.) Nothing worked. I thought perhaps it was a character encoding problem, so I added a smiley emoji so the file would be seen as UTF-8, but that didn’t help. I even installed Kdenlive, a video editor, but it couldn’t handle the SRT file. It’s a mystery.
Happily, I found this answer on Stack Overflow about mkvmerge and it worked perfectly:
sudo apt install mkvtoolnix
mkvmerge -o zotero-combined-subtitled.mkv zotero-combined.mkv zotero.srt
Lastly, I tweaked the metadata a bit:
ffmpeg -i zotero-combined-subtitled.mkv -metadata title="How to install Zotero 7 on Windows" -metadata language="en" -c copy zotero-7-how-to-install-on-windows.mkv
And with that it was ready. Next time I’ll try a graphical video editor. Many thanks to everyone who understands video and makes these tools to handle it!
I’m listening to The Great Eastern again. It’s not well known now, but it’s a masterpiece. It ran on CBC Radio in the late 1990s and every episode, plus background material and some scripts, is available on The Great Eastern web site. The shows are also available from the Internet Archive, but I realized it should be easier for everyone to get the show, so I made this:
RSS feed for The Great Eastern.
Put that into your podcast program and it will get every episode of the show for you (from the Internet Archive, so as not to put a strain on the site made by Gerry Porter; I was sorry to learn he died in 2016).
I’ve written about the show before, and refer you to this post from 2014 for more background.
The Great Eastern, “Newfoundland’s cultural magazine,” was a show on the BCN (Broadcasting Corporation of Newfoundland), which CBC Radio picked up sometimes to carry across Canada. The show was hosted by Paul Moth and featured book reviews with Kathleen Hanrahan, a political panel, documentaries (there’s a great one on Economology), music, interviews and features on artists such as Ned Brocklehurst and Hugh Kuva, promos for other shows (such as “Look It’s” and children’s program “Uncle Jack’s Shack”), and more. The BCN (“coal-fired radio” built with Krupps-Funkenscheit technology) broadcast in Newfoundland at 520 on the long wave and had a rich history; every episode had a “From the Vault” feature where Director of Radio Ish Lundrigan would play some tape from the station archives, sometimes from old episodes of The Great Eastern when it was hosted by Ron Gellately. The show was firmly grounded in Newfoundland culture and history, often featuring people from the University of Newfoundland at St. John’s (the UNSJ) and in later seasons having a special on Oougoubomba, Newfoundland’s failed African colonial experiment. The listener gets a good picture of life in St. John’s, with its popular local candy Furlong Knobs, restaurants such as Chez Ed, and the fancy Hotel Palmer Hotel. Canadians could participate in the “What’s That Noise from Newfoundland?” contest.
But none of this is real. Well, almost none. St. John’s and Newfoundland are real. There was a Broadcasting Corporation of Newfoundland. The musicians and bands played were real. Pretty much everything else was made up. The Great Eastern writers and performers built a complete alternate Newfoundland universe (one where Canada is treated as a separate nation) and played it absolutely straight. To fully appreciate The Great Eastern you need to be ready to play the game. Accept it as true.
It is incredibly funny, going from very smart and biting satire to rude schoolboy jokes.
If you listen to podcasts and like long-form narrative shows, and are willing to enter an unfamiliar but fascinating world—Newfoundland—you should try this show. It was nineties radio and sounds like it (it’s mono, not stereo) but that shouldn’t put you off, and the sound design within that constraint is outstanding. (Always listen right to the end of a show, for community announcements from Rita Molloy or an update from weather watchdog Erling Biggs.)
It will take a while to go through all the episodes. Enjoy. While I’m at it, I’m enjoying reading Strangers and Others: The Great Eastern by Stan Dragland. I was at the Toronto book launch in 2016 and my copy is signed by Dragland and Paul Moth (“yours in coal-fired radio”).
(Paul Moth was played by Mack Furlong, one of the writers along with Edward Riche and Steven Palmer, both of whom also performed. Steven Palmer is now a history professor at the University of Windsor.)
CBC disliked the show because it was “too dense.” It wanted something that didn’t require so much attention, that was a little “less foreground.” The Great Eastern addresses this. And it does require attention, but it deserves it, and rewards it. Attend to the shows as you would an audiobook or straight radio drama and you will get all the more from it. Dragland’s book brings a lot of this out. You don’t need to catch all the details, but if you do, your appreciation will grow to match the levels of old admirers like me.
For example, the regular political panel is there right in the first episode, with J. Richard Candow, Ariel Flint and Carl Johnson. Johnson is always on the phone from some other location and hardly ever gets a word in. The way he’s a second behind the others, and usually ignored, is hilarious. But there’s an obscure gag: he is “Valdmanis Chair in Political Economy at UNSJ.” This would be an endowed chair at a non-existent university, named after Alfred Valdmanis, the Nazi-collaborating Latvian who was made Director General of Economic Development in 1950 and put in charge of industrializing Newfoundland. By 1954 he was in jail for corruption. (For more, see Alfred Valdmanis and the Politics of Survival by Gerhard P. Bassler.) Valdmanis is real but seems fictional. Ari Uldmanis, BCN’s Director of Engineering, is fictional but seems real, though whether you’re suspicious of his German accent and how he emigrated to Newfoundland after World War Two is up to you.
Librarian and archivist readers will appreciate this, from season four episode two, in a promotion for BCN’s “University of the Air.”
Shhh! This Monday at ten, pay a visit to the information desk when University of the Air presents Dr. Dana Burton’s “Introduction to Library Science:” “The Joy of Reference,” “Put a Hold on This,” and “Mummy, What’s a Card Catalogue?” Dr. Burton also looks at library administration in the current fiscal climate: outstanding fines and the use of goon squads, turning user data into direct marketing millions, and profitable things to do with those old books that nobody reads any more. Lost in the stacks? Don’t get all dewey-eyed and decimal about it. You’re overdue for University of the Air’s “Introduction to Library Science,” this Monday at ten o’clock, only on BCN 520.
Turning user data into direct marketing millions. That is one damned fine throwaway gag from 1997.
If I’m ever in St. John’s I’ll go to Memorial University (which is real) and look at the fonds for the show in the university archives. Notes from the description of the collection say:
The Great Eastern aired until 1999, when, during the Corporation’s cost-cutting process, CBC’s Variety Department offered to move the show to the afternoon as part of Definitely Not the Opera, considered by the creators to be “a soulless program that none of us had any respect for.” The writers decided to move on “after the most rewarding creative experience of our lives.”
It’s all there for you to enjoy.
For background, check The Great Eastern on Wikipedia, and it’s worth looking into the history of Newfoundland and Labrador. The province only joined Canada in 1949; before that it had been a British colony then a dominion of the Empire. In the Great Depression the unelected Commission of Government was set up—I think this is referred to as “the dictatorship” in the show—and stayed in power until a slim majority of people voted in a 1948 referendum to join Canada. The Great Eastern has several references to Joey Smallwood “surrendering to the Canadians.” All this, and the way the show was done with a completely straight face, led to confusion among Canadian listeners about how much of it was real. Who’s to say?