5 September 2025

A couple of weeks back some pages from The Engineer came up on eBay at was perhaps a little more than I would want to pay, even after being offered a 10% discount, but the quality looked quite good, and it was pages of an article on SS Tynwald, one of the Isle of Man ferries and so of interest to my library of information. Since paying for them I have now found a free source of the same pages via the Internet Archive, and have started to download the rest of the indexes of The Engineer so I can find similar material. The quality of the Internet Archive copies is not as good as the ones I purchased, but would have done me, however if I do find other articles then a search for copies on sale would be worth the effort. One niggle though is that the torrent download of material from the Internet Archive has only completed in 2 out of 11 download. Have manually downloaded the pdf's and that is probably enough, but the text versions have been useful in the past. The text layer in the pdf is much better today so that using the other files is probably now redundant.

Last night I completed adding the phpgedview package to the GitHub code tracking. I am not quite sure where the original fork came from, and I dropped my own as it predated things by a further 5 years. There are several fork of the original SourceForge source of phpgedview but many do not actually include the original source. What does muddy the waters is the move to webtrees and a switch to that may be the logical thing to do, but I did not like the path it was taking some time ago so have not looked at it for some time. With the problems with the report functionality in phpgedview, a look at perhaps merging back some parts may be a better use of time, but I intend to maintain Firebird as the underlying database and I do not think that is possible now with webtrees. At least it does seem that the original style of display has actually been maintained. Spotted that in the latest version 'Fix: compatibility with Postgres' is reported, so perhaps Firebird is not out of the question! Originally only MySQL was being actively supported. Something extra for the roadmap ...