Organising a RAID

This week: Organising a RAID; The end of Autumn; Santa came early to Dol; Reimagining history;

We had one dry day this week! During six wet days, I have recorded 71mm of rain.

This means two things. Firstly I have spent most of the week inside, along with the felines (we don’t have webbed feet) and the soil is now waterlogged.

So there is not much point in trying to do anything which involves digging. Even walking on the soils will compact the clay even more. So it’s a good excuse to do inside jobs.

That said, in one expedition into the Top Orchard during a fine spell, I found that the first Narcissi are in flower. This is two weeks earlier than normal and the earliest ever that I have seen them.

They are a Mediterranean native, coming originially from the Iberian peninsula, but now grown all over the world.

The cool and wet days have meant that I have been lighting the wood stove around lunch time, so have been using more wood than usual.

I have a large supply of things like pallets and wooden beams, so during one brief fine interlude, I cut a few wheelbarrow loads of wood using my table saw.

It is very dry so burns well, but quickly, meaning more frequent refils of the stove are required.

I was down in Jelsa on Wednesday evening, to meet friends who were arriving on the catamaran from Split.

I was surprised at how well illuminated the town was with Christmas decorations and two trees.

Here in Dol we have a measly two street lamp decorations and when I was in Stari Grad earlier in the week, the Christmas tree in the main square was not even up yet. The Stari Grad municipality just doesn’t do “Christmas” lights.

I usually put some LED lights around the terrace, where they can be seen from the lane, so on Friday afternoon fetched them out of the store.

In recent years I have left the mounting posts in place all year, so it is just a little over an hour’s work to set everything up and to make sure the timer switch was working.

Organising a RAID

A very wet Sunday morning is most definitely a time to light the fire, make a hot drink and then do some admin jobs.

One of the things I am careful about is backing up data on my computer.

Especially after I have scanned something, I want to save it for posterity. However I also want to make scans available across my network.

In the past I have burnt files to CD’s then to DVD’s, but that takes time and as files grow larger, you can get fewer on a disc.

There was a concern that CD’s and DVD’s would have a “life” and at some point would become unusable. I have some which are approaching 30 years old and I can still access the discs and read data.

More recently I have bought solid state external hard drives, connected by USB, as a place to back up data.

I decided that I should stop messing about with lots of external storage disks, which require searching to find what you are looking for, and buy a Network Attached Storage device, known as a NAS.

My NAS arrived last Friday so on Sunday I started the process of connecting it to my network.

It is basically a self contained computer running its own software, with two extremely large capacity discs inside. But like all computer it needs setting up properly.

The advice is to organise the discs as a RAID – a Redundant Array of Independent Discs. I’ve know about RAID’s for years but never set one up before.

There are some excellent videos on YouTube about setting up a NAS and a RAID, and after following one of them, I had the system up and running in little more than an hour.

Now I am going to have to backup and archive my files, which is likely to be a much longer task.

The end of Autumn

We did have a little bit of sunshine this week. When that happened, I ventured out looking for damage.

In my drupe orchard, my Morello Cherry, Prunus cerasus, looked truly magnificent in the bright winter sunshine.

Just in front is a Common Medlar (Mušmula) Mespilus germanica, with the fruit slowly being bletted. This makes them soft and edible.

Even in the middle of winter, with the shortest days, there is still colour to be seen.

Santa came early to Dol

One of my Christmas presents to me arrived this week. There were several things I needed and ordered, some tools, soft furnishings, but also I have been looking for a Book Scanner for the past two years.

Like all technology, these scanners have improved vastly in the past 5 years, as cameras but especially software has become more powerful.

Book scanners come in different sizes, with different capabilities, from something costing around €120, to behemoths used by reference libraries costing €12,000 or more.

Mine is more modest, a CZUR 24 PRO

The reasons I want a book scanner are various, but all relate to history. I have for example some 200 year old volumes of almanacs and topographical dictionaries, whose paper is becoming more fragile by the day.

Then there are the more modern, but still old Almanacs which I use as reference tools very frequently.

Having an annual volume which contains vast amounts of data and information is OK, but to search for names individually across a number of years necessitates looking at multiple volumes.

My first real scan was the nominal roll of the Kingston upon Hull City Police, from 1836 to 1974, to create a searchable list of names, collar numbers and dates of joining.

The list of names is a continuous record of the appointment of Constables in Hull from 2nd May 1836 to 31st March 1974, and then from 1st April 1974 to today, in the Humberside Police.

I receive requests every week, sometimes several, asking for help with research into family history and having an alphabetical list of names will help speed up searching.

Scanning the names is the easy task. Once in a digital format, I then need to break the date, first and last names, rank and collar number into columns in a spreadsheet, to make searching easier.

There are around 5,000 individuals who have been appointed as “Constable” between 1836 and 1974. So far I am just over half way through cleaning up the data and separating the elements to make a searchable resource.

I’m working towards launching a new on-line resource for people researching police history, on 1st January 2025. This new scanner will help me with the project and hence help people who are doing genealogical research.

Reimagining history

When I’m not out in the orchards, up on the roof doing repairs, building something in the workshop, walking the green lanes, or doing a hundred and one myriad other tasks, I can often be found studying police history.

I have a small library of books which all relate to police and policing in the UK and commonwealth. So I spend quite a lot of time thinking about history.

One series of books of mine are Police and Constabulary Almanacs.

These were published annually from 1857 until 2015. However there is no complete set in existence anywhere. I have around 45 volumes, however I have also located where other copies are.

They are an irreplaceable resource for social historians, genealogists and individuals because of the granular detail that each volume includes. Not just ranks and names, but the locations of police houses and stations, and later telephone numbers then after the year 2000 email addresses.

I have an idea to digitise every volume and then once in a digital format, group the different individual forces together.

This is a way to reimagine history and to chart the development of policing from the compulsory creation of a police force in every part of the United Kingdom, from January 1857, to the present day.

This past week the British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer announced that there will be a named police officer for every neighbourhood to “rebuild the vital connection between the public and the police”.

This was a founding tenet of policing established by Sir Robert Peel in 1829. In recent years, because of austerity cuts, police have withdrawn from “community policing” and have lost the respect and support of a sizeable section of the population.

Few people outside the service ever knew of the existence of these almanacs or of their successor, the NPCC UK Police Directory .

It will be an interesting project and having never been done before, one which has the potential to change the way police history is viewed. NCG