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Listener Questions - Ep114
183 Plays6 years ago
That’s right! We sourced your questions from Facebook and Twitter and answer your questions about mapping, canine forensics, open source programs, field data programs, and more! Send them in or hit us up on the socials to ask your questions and help everyone out on our next episode.
Links
- Interris Registries
- Wildnote
- Anutum Geomobile Solutions
- QGIS
- Institute for Canine Forensics
- Collector
App of the Day
- Webby: Archaeology Magazine App
- Paul: Microphone Live by Von Bruno
Contact
- Chris Webster
- Twitter: @archeowebby
- Email: chris@archaeologypodcastnetwork.com
- Paul Zimmerman
- Twitter: @lugal
- Email: paul@lugal.com
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Sponsorship Announcement
00:00:00
Speaker
We're excited to announce that our very own podcasting platform, Zencaster, has become a new sponsor to the show. Check out the podcast discount link in our show notes and stay tuned for why we love using Zen for the podcast. You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. Hello and welcome to the Archaeotech Podcast, episode 114. I'm your host, Chris Webster, with my co-host, Paul Zimmerman.
00:00:26
Speaker
Today, we talk with your tech questions. Get in on the action and email me at chris at archaeology podcast network dot com. Let's get to it. All right. Welcome to the show, everybody. Welcome, Paul. How's it going?
00:00:38
Speaker
Pretty good, Chris. How are you doing today? Not doing too bad. Not doing too bad. I kind
Boating and Technology in Personal Life
00:00:42
Speaker
of wish we were running just like a general podcast on technology because I'm about to, this Friday as we're recording this, we're about to put our boat in a marina in what's called the Delta, which is the Sacramento River that goes into San Pablo Bay, which goes into San Francisco Bay. So we'll have access to basically anything we want for the winter. And it's actually cheaper to keep the boat there than it is to store it in Reno, which is why we're doing it.
00:01:08
Speaker
But so many apps I'm finding to figure out shipping lane schedules and tide schedules and all kinds of different boating apps, anchor alarms, all kinds of neat stuff. But not really archaeology related.
00:01:24
Speaker
But it's going to be fun anyway, I think. Anyway, let's move on to this episode because I think we've got enough to definitely fill out a couple segments here. Paul
Engaging Listeners for Questions
00:01:35
Speaker
and I asked on Facebook and Twitter with varying results over the last few days, again, as we're recording this, in early October 2019.
00:01:44
Speaker
We asked people for their technology questions and I found on Facebook that that people really just They didn't really have questions per se. I mean they kind of did but they were really very general overarching questions I'm not exactly sure what I was thinking of Expecting when I asked for questions. This wasn't exactly it. I mean, I don't
00:02:03
Speaker
I don't think we need to be your tech BFFs where you could just be like, hey, I'm having some problems with this. But I'm thinking of other shows like entrepreneurial type shows where people have business questions and things like that. How do I do this? And I guess I don't know what I was thinking. So Paul, what was your success on Twitter? And what were you expecting when you actually asked the question? What kind of stuff are you thinking?
00:02:24
Speaker
My expectation was basically that people would say, I'm working through X, Y, or Z. Does anybody have any insight? Maybe to use us in the same way that people use Twitter a lot, at least in the parts of Twitter that I'm on, the archaeological parts, which is people are
00:02:42
Speaker
might be showing off some of their work or they might be stuck mulling through an idea and soliciting input from their colleagues, from their Twitter friends. I was expecting something along the lines and instead I got retweets and likes from people that I know on Twitter.
00:03:00
Speaker
and no actual engagement in terms of questions or comments. That's fine. There's only so much one can expect when you chum the water like that and just say, hey, anybody have anything? And that might be a little too much to expect for anybody. And also maybe a little unfair, hey, please come up with content for me. But maybe it's a learning experience for me to think about how I can
00:03:26
Speaker
make these questions a little more pointed in the future the next time I want to try to get a listener question session going through Twitter. Well, I'd
Turning Listener Questions into Public Knowledge
00:03:35
Speaker
like to make every few shows that we do a listener question show. I love answering listener questions. Yeah, I think it's...
00:03:42
Speaker
It's such a nice way to engage with the audience and to get some answers out there. And it's not necessarily, don't think of us as people that necessarily have all the answers, but think of it as asking a question and then we'll do the research and find out the answer. I mean, you might be thinking, well, I could do that. Yes, you could, but I'm seeing it more as a public resource where you have the question that a hundred other people have, but they're not asking. And then we answer the question
00:04:07
Speaker
And we can answer the question for 100 people versus just one person that spent hours doing research, right? So that's how I see it. So if you guys have any questions out there, even seemingly simple questions like, what's the best waterproof phone case out there? What's the best battery? What's the best way to, I don't know, something, get aerial images or something like that? What are some cool things you can do with drones? There, I said it.
00:04:33
Speaker
We had to kind of get the plug in there. So, you know what, just email us those questions. Chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com is the general email for the show. Obviously my email, but then also at any of our pages, you can find Paul and I's contact information. I am at archaeoebbe, A-R-C-H-E-O-W-E-B-B-Y on Twitter. And Paul, you are at? Luke, all L-U-G-A-L on Twitter and email. I'm Paul.
00:05:01
Speaker
There you go. Yeah, I was expecting, you know, also we don't, you know, there are a lot of things that I know I don't have the answers to. I might have an inkling of an answer, an inkling of how to find one, but that's another thing that we can do just like, you know, like I said, people throwing out questions on Twitter so we can amplify. We can reach different audiences than you might normally have access to because there are thousands of archaeologists working around the world and a lot of them are using technology in very interesting ways.
00:05:28
Speaker
And if somebody hears us relay your question on, even though we don't have a good answer for you, then they can get back to us or get back to you and keep a good conversation going.
00:05:39
Speaker
Yeah, indeed. So all right. Well, let's get to some of these responses I got from Facebook. And I basically said, hey, we're recording an episode on your listener questions. So send in your questions about technology and archaeology. And this is what I got. Now, as always, I would just default to not using people's names. I didn't even write them down in our notes here. So I mean, the archaeo field text group is where I put this on Facebook. If you want to see and engage with this, then then head on over to that group and you can
00:06:07
Speaker
you know, comment on these and keep the conversation going. However, unless somebody sends it in and specifically says, you know, you could mention my name on the podcast, it's just not important to us. You know, we're not going
Forensic Canines in Archaeology
00:06:18
Speaker
to do that unless you're a guest of the show, which this may lead to more guests, too. So, you know, send us some information. And if it sounds like you're an expert in something, it might just contact you.
00:06:27
Speaker
So the first response that I got was actually, and I'll give this person's name because he's all over the internet, was from Tom King. And Tom King likes to comment on lots of things on Facebook. Sometimes, well, we'll just leave it right there. He's an interesting guy. I love Tom. But he's done a lot of work with the TIGAR Foundation, or I don't know if it's a foundation or whatever, but the
00:06:50
Speaker
the historical aircraft people, and in the search for Amelia Earhart specifically. And he's no longer with that organization, from what I understand. Tom, please correct me if I'm wrong, assuming you listen to the show, I don't know if you do or not. But he mentioned forensic canines, and we have had people on various podcasts on the APN talking about forensic canines. The Institute for Forensic Canine
00:07:14
Speaker
research, I think it's called, out in Northern California. They've been on a couple times. I've seen them at conferences like the Society for California Archaeology. They're always there. And I'll tell you what, the forensic canine stuff is just fascinating to me because the noses that dogs have and the things they can be taught to smell. It's interesting. Somebody commented on this post after Tom mentioned forensic canines,
00:07:36
Speaker
that the Plumas National Forest, which is in Northern California, has had success locating historical Chinese cemeteries, among other things, in that area just using the forensic canines. So it's a pretty cool use. And it's weird thinking of dogs as technology, but I mean, they're definitely a tool that we could use to find things, but it's kind of odd thinking of them as technology.
00:08:02
Speaker
Yeah, I normally wouldn't think of them, but yes, we would certainly use it in the same way they would use any other, like, subsurface techniques, you know, like GPR or something, right? Yeah. That's kind of interesting, though. Maybe, I don't know if you know the answer to this, but historical Chinese cemeteries. Is it something particular about Chinese cemeteries, or is it an area that they're looking specifically for Chinese cemeteries, that they're specifying, you know, a national group there?
00:08:32
Speaker
Is interesting I'm not sure why that's specified that that's
00:08:38
Speaker
There is a massive Asian component to the Old West. Absolutely. When you look at California and Nevada, the Chinese were a major influence over here because they were essentially brought over to work. The Chinese built the railroad. The Chinese were doing all the hard work in the mines. The Chinese were all over the place. The Chinese and the Japanese basically built San Francisco. You just look at the amazing sushi and Asian food. We still have there today.
00:09:05
Speaker
I would imagine that this person made this comment because in the Plumas National Forest, there might have been some big Chinese settlements or something like that. Somebody's just trying to answer a research question and that happened to be what they were looking for. So I don't know, he just singled out that Chinese because that was what he knew. But yeah, I think other cemeteries as well though. I mean, he did say among others.
00:09:29
Speaker
It's interesting, when we've interviewed the people with the Institute for Canine Forensics before, they said that sometimes the dogs find stuff on the way to where they were supposed to be searching. People didn't even know something was under the ground. They're just like, oh crap, there's something here. The dog's alerting on that. So thinking back to dogs as tools, it really kind of surprises me. And maybe somebody has something like this and dogs are just cheaper. I don't know. But it's surprising me that we can't
00:09:57
Speaker
We can't devise a tool that does the same thing as the dog's nose. And I know the dog's nose have receptors in it that are fine-tuned as compared to say human noses, but it's also partly connected to the brain. So, you know, it's not a very easy thing to figure out, but I wonder if we have something like that that's just as sensitive and just as calibratable to different things. Probably not since we use them all over the place, right?
00:10:20
Speaker
Yeah, I have not heard of any such thing. I'm sure people are working on artificial noses, but yeah, I haven't heard of anything recently. A little outside of my field, so I definitely wouldn't be keeping up on the latest trends in that research, so I definitely will punt on that.
00:10:42
Speaker
I mean, is it outside your field, though, Paul? Because they're using dogs for finding archaeological material. So it sounds like it's right in our wheelhouse. Oh, no, I wasn't thinking of the dogs for it, which is still outside my wheelhouse. But I meant coming up with an artificial dog nose.
00:10:57
Speaker
Artificial sniffers? Yep. Nice. All right. Well, if somebody knows anything about that, send us an email or a tweet about it, because I'd love to know where that technology is right now. I'm sure somebody is working on something like that. We have sensors for everything.
Interpreting Historical Maps
00:11:10
Speaker
I mean, sensors all over the place. It wouldn't surprise me if I have really, really, really good sniffing sensors, smell sensors. I think they're probably just too expensive and not portable. That's probably the problem. No idea.
00:11:23
Speaker
Anyway, all right, so the next question, I'm just gonna read this because it seems, it's gonna lead me into something else too that's probably not in the realm of this podcast, but something that's been in conversation lately. So this one gentleman was talking about mapping technologies, and he said, in California prehistory, the common socio-political organization is called a tribolite, or a tribollet, T-R-I-B-E-L-E-T-E, I'm not really sure how to pronounce that. I've never seen that word before, so. Right, right.
00:11:49
Speaker
He says, however, most maps created by anthropologists of the California prehistoric regions are based on language families. Most of subsequent mapping, however, identifies these language families as tribes. Seems like a small mistake, except that the way we are trained to interpret maps is that large regions on a map show socio-political organizations. Couple that with an actual label that explicitly says tribes, and the interpretation is that these large groups of people
00:12:14
Speaker
we're organized politically, which is what a tribe really is. So he goes on, which we know was not the case normally. There's a disconnect between what we know as a discipline and how we visually represent that knowledge on the maps. And I think
00:12:26
Speaker
I think what he's really getting at here is what he's saying is our terminology that we use on maps and in different circumstances doesn't jive with the anthropology and the way we talk about the anthropology. It's too, it's disconnected and it kind of goes back to this growing conversation I'm seeing. We talked about this on the last CRM Mark podcast, actually a couple episodes ago as you're hearing this for the first time and stuff I've seen all over Facebook and probably on Twitter.
00:12:56
Speaker
is the fact that pre-1492 in the United States is typically called prehistory or prehistoric, whereas in Europe, it's just called the Middle Ages. And we certainly had writing styles. If writing is geometric, there's been writing for thousands of years here in North America. So why is that still called prehistory? It's a very Eurocentric way of thinking. That's not exactly the same thing, but it's along those same lines of terminology and where we're using it correctly.
00:13:24
Speaker
Well, the use of the term tribe is problematic anyhow. Certain natives I know say that we totally misapply the term and that they'd much rather be referred to as nations in many cases where we use the term tribe. There's this term tribe lead that I've never seen before and shame on me.
00:13:42
Speaker
And then the poster is absolutely right in that the prehistoric regions are based on language families as C. Crober. Yeah, certainly. That's what I was taught 30, 40 years ago. Well, not 40 yet, but 30, 35 years ago as an undergrad. We'd look at maps and it was this one-to-one correlation of language families and tribal groups. And that's not right. I think we knew it at the time intuitively.
00:14:10
Speaker
Definitely know it better now, but how do you get beyond that visual representation to something that's a little more on the ground accurate? And can you for the distant past? I don't know.
00:14:22
Speaker
Yeah, it's interesting. I'm just thinking of here in Reno, you see the Paiute. The Paiute, collectively, when I just say the Paiute, I mean all the Paiute, right? The Paiute nation is one thing, but then there's different bands and tribes of Paiutes that identify as separate. I guess families is almost a better way to describe it, right?
00:14:42
Speaker
because locally there's different ones. And when you drive out to say Pyramid Lake, which wasn't too far from here, you see the Pyramid Lake band of Paiute Indians is how their sign even reads, right? So they call themselves a band out there. And then I know people refer to the Paiute as a tribe in general, which also isn't correct. So yeah, it's really important to
00:15:05
Speaker
pay attention to the maps that we're using, especially the historical maps and references, and even more especially when we're creating maps. Don't fall into these traps of using these so-called common terms that are actually just incorrect because we've been using them so long. We think they're correct, but they're actually not technically correct.
00:15:23
Speaker
those old maps of language families too, I've always wondered how much overlap there actually would be. If you see a big orange area that's covering most of a big chunk of North America and it's all one language family, well, how much variability is there?
00:15:43
Speaker
Are there other speakers of other language families that are scattered throughout there? Would various density maps actually be a better way of looking at it if you want to map on a large scale like that? I honestly don't know. These are just kind of idle questions that I have when I look at these things that come up from this question. Actually, it's not even so much a question. It's more of a comment, but it's very astute.
00:16:07
Speaker
Yeah, and you just said when you said density map that made me think of like, I've got an old iPad sitting in the kitchen at our house and it just has like the spinning globe and you can put, you know, it's got weather around it and you can change it from say humidity and temperature to, you know, wind speed and, you know, other things.
00:16:25
Speaker
And weather maps are always displayed with fuzzy boundaries, right? They don't have rich and hard boundaries. And the reason for that is, you're right, the temperature doesn't go from 70 degrees to 80 degrees right here in an abrupt shift. And neither does language. And neither does, you know, culture. Neither does really anything in the human sphere.
00:16:48
Speaker
It's funny that we often present maps that way though. And I think it's just, it's, it's a lazy, easy map making for one thing. I mean, it started out with probably, you know, publications just being easier to draw straight lines than it is to draw fuzzy lines. And now that's, now that's what everybody's been taught on and it really starts to cloud your judgment and your brain into thinking, well, you know, Hey, I hit this mountain range and this stuff actually stops. And then it becomes another thing over here, but that's not actually.
00:17:13
Speaker
I think, you know, the social political organizations, which is mentioned in the comment here is actually hints at another big part of why our maps are drawn like they are, is that it comes from a European nation state kind of of idea where there are lines. There's a frontier, there's a border between France and Germany. Now, it might not be always in the same place at the same time through history and big wars are fought over these things. But but at any snapshot in time, most of those
00:17:41
Speaker
are in fact hard lines. There are very few places that just have the border somewhere in the desert between here and over there. And there have been some like that. I've worked in Yemen and they only in about the last 15 years settled where the actual border was between them and Saudi Arabia through large stretches of the empty quarter.
00:18:02
Speaker
Yeah, I think that a lot of the reason why we see the maps drawn the way they were is because it was Europeans drawing them, and that was their perspective. Right. Would you know the movie quote, I'm not bad, I'm just drawn that way? Do you know who said that? No.
00:18:21
Speaker
It was, oh, what was her name? It was who framed Roger Rabbit? Oh, yeah, of course. I do know that, geez. I don't really remember most of that movie, but I always remember that quote. And I'm going to have to make a t-shirt for the APN with a poorly drawn map showing very inaccurate things that says, I'm not wrong, I'm just drawn that way. So, yeah, I'll have to make that. All right, well.
00:18:45
Speaker
I'll do it for this segment. Let's come back on the other side and talk about a few more mapping issues and some obviously GIS, because everybody has questions about GIS. Back in a second. Chris Webster here for the Archeology Podcast Network. We strive for high quality interviews and content so you can find information on any topic in archeology from around the world. One way we do that is by recording interviews with our hosts and guests located in many parts of the world all at once. We do that through the use of Zencaster. That's Z-E-N-C-A-S-T-R.
00:19:15
Speaker
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Speaker
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Speaker
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00:20:19
Speaker
Welcome back to the archaeotech podcast episode 114 and we are talking mapping and your listener questions. If you want to join in on this conversation and send us some questions, Chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com or any of our Twitter handles and other contact info over at arkpodnet.
00:20:37
Speaker
So let's get to the next question. So somebody chimed in on Facebook and I'm just going to read this out here and then we'll talk about it. She says, geo-referencing historical maps to locate features slash sites and issues with unclear scales.
00:20:52
Speaker
She says, I have a large settlement site that we were trying to locate the specific features of Spanish Fortin village boundaries. The maps were drawn in the 1700s, which is super cool. So we can only hypothesize the exact locations. However, remote sensing may solve the problem in the future. Now, I didn't include this in our notes here, Paul, but we had a little bit more dialogue around this. Basically what she was talking about was unclear scales because some of these historic maps, like you just absolutely could not tell the scale. When I was working on the project down at China Lake Naval Weapons Center,
00:21:22
Speaker
There's very good maps of like military maps of the area, current military maps. And we had just a handful of not very good maps drawn by the early military and then just before that by the USGS when they were there. But they didn't have very good maps prior to the 1940s when the military took over. And then when the military took over,
00:21:44
Speaker
there were no maps, like there were no maps drawn until the military started drawing maps to the area, which was later. So we had this, I remember trying to geo reference these maps because I was using events of PDF maps, just to put them in the background, because we had to drive all these roads and map out all these roads and then figure out, okay, which ones of these roads on this military base are actually historic, and then, you know, do an analysis album and figure out, you know, all the normal stuff you do with roads.
00:22:08
Speaker
And the best way to do that was to try to georeference them. So I had some current, not only satellite maps, but also current topographic maps, and then even just like some street maps that I tried to find that were available online. And then georeferencing those with common features found on the maps, because there was no scale. The one of these maps we were using was actually hand-drawn, and it was like,
00:22:30
Speaker
My God, but if you if you have enough geo referencing points on it, you can stretch that map to the point to where it's actually going to be mostly accurate. And I was skeptical at first because I had like 16 points on this one map where I was just I was like, this thing's going to stretch beyond all recognition. But then we're out there driving it. And you can see because I had an iPad enabled GPS enabled iPad and I had it on a window mount right in the truck there. And you could see us driving on this little our little dot driving on this hand drawn map.
00:22:59
Speaker
right across the thing, which was super cool. It was not super accurate in some areas, and it's probably because they moved the roads later, and they redefined those roads all the time a little bit, like moving intersection or something like that. So that was pretty cool, but I don't know. In the areas you used to work, did you ever have any issues with maps back there? I know you've worked back east, or not back east, but in the Middle East and some of those areas. A little farther east, yeah. What are your memories of working those?
00:23:27
Speaker
There are a couple different issues I've run into. I mean, definitely what you were saying about the rubber sheeting that the maps, that's something that like any intro to whatever GIS program you're going to work on, we'll have an exercise or two that's like that. They'll have a historical map that is
00:23:43
Speaker
reasonably accurate but has certain distortions and then you'll plot it and rectify it with a more modern map so you can find certain waypoints, certain landmarks rather that you can use to stretch that other one until everything else kind of comes along to fit. And that's what you were doing
Geo-referencing Challenges and Technological Evolution
00:24:03
Speaker
with those PDF maps.
00:24:05
Speaker
So that that's one kind of problem. Another kind of problem that you get is I suspect this is more like what the poster is running into where the maps aren't even really intended to be
00:24:18
Speaker
navigation aids like that. You're not supposed to be able to look at the map and say, oh, I've got to go two miles this way and a mile that way. They're more like sketch maps. They're more, what's the word I'm looking for? They're just, they're impressionistic. From here you can see these features. I know that that town is over this ridge.
00:24:39
Speaker
where it doesn't really matter. It's just on the other side of the ridge from where I'm drawing this feature that I'm at. And those you fundamentally cannot rubber sheet to geo reference. You can use them to help you try to find sites, but not in any mechanized way that I would know of through GIS. But yeah, so to answer your question,
00:25:02
Speaker
I didn't have very good maps initially when I started working in Yemen. There were a number of sketch maps, some of them quite good, but of like a tell and the immediate surroundings of the tell. There were some good maps that were hard to get that were done by
00:25:18
Speaker
by oil and gas exploration and those ones were really expensive and like I said, how do you get my hands on? There was a very, very good map done in 1939 by a
00:25:33
Speaker
German and Dutch explorer of the area that I worked in but it was at a large scale so the detail wasn't really there and it was also kind of impressionistic. I mean it would say you know this town is in this part of the in this part of the valley and yes it was in that part of the valley but you wouldn't be able to necessarily measure between that town and the next town and get an exact distance.
00:25:56
Speaker
That map actually got reproduced much later using some of those oil and gas exploration maps as a base map. So I had a much more accurate version of that from I think the early 70s, maybe the early 80s.
00:26:12
Speaker
But I didn't get my hands on that map until after I was mostly done with my dissertation research. But the time that I was doing it, let's say I started going to Yemen in 94. I did most of my dissertation research in 99. So 97, 99 in 2001 were the times I was there in 2004 again to do some wrap up.
00:26:32
Speaker
In that time period, GPS really, while there was none available to civilians in 1994, 1997, it was slow and problematic, 1999, it was pretty good, but it suffered from selective availability. The point of this is that in the time that I was there, I
00:26:50
Speaker
went from being reliant upon these sketch maps that weren't very good to having GPS devices that were more accurate than any maps I had. So I had great points, but I didn't have anything good to plot them on. So I did a lot of rubber sheeting in grass, actually, was the GIS that I was using.
00:27:10
Speaker
And then by the end of it, by the time I finished writing, we had those wonderful Google Earth satellite photography and such that I could look and check very, very definitively whether or not I'd plotted something properly on the map. I was really pleased that my sketch maps were remarkably accurate, but that's probably luck more than any kind of native skill.
00:27:36
Speaker
So I don't even know how to answer this question because I'm not sure which problem in particular it is, if it's having navigation maps from the 1700s that suffer from having been done in the 1700s and the tools available at the time and they have distortions, or if the maps that the poster is using are mostly just kind of sketch maps, in which case you can't use them for the kinds of detailed work we'd like to use as base maps.
00:28:04
Speaker
Yeah, I think with the big thing, the commenters probably just frustrated with the features they're trying to find in these 1700s maps, because she knows they're there. They just can't find them. And there's no obvious expression of them. But I think when she says remote sensing may solve the problem, that's, I think, what's really going to help them out. Not only remote sensing, but probably excavation if they're doing that as well. Because just like that rubber sheeting thing,
00:28:29
Speaker
You know, every time you find something new, you really should head back to your GIS and pinpoint that location and tie it to a real location on the map. And then the more of those you do, the more theoretically, assuming the map drawer back in the 1700s wasn't being totally abstract, assuming they had some sense of scale a little bit, then as you put more points on the map, the other ones should get more and more accurate. You should be able to at least tighten in your remote sensing and your excavation strategies. So one would hope anyway.
00:28:59
Speaker
So anyway, let's move on and talk about the next one. So the next one is a seemingly easy question. However, we could spend and have spent, I think, entire episodes on this topic. So open source alternative programs for the researcher on a budget. Great question.
00:29:16
Speaker
I know, great question. And I'm going to actually tie that to the next question as well. And I'm going to go ahead and read that because I think we're going to be talking open source about both of these. So the next one specifically says, GIS programs that aren't expensive and produce great maps, alternatives to the clunky tremble in the field that don't require excessive post-processing, which sometimes just move sites one county over where they clearly aren't. And
Affordable GIS Software Options
00:29:40
Speaker
Art is in angry capital letters, so I think this person has really experienced this before. Sounds like it.
00:29:45
Speaker
Right. And then absolutely useful for fieldwork that don't kill your phone battery. So I think I'm lumping these together because a lot of the stuff that I think we're going to talk about in both cases are in fact open source alternative programs because everybody knows the common ones, you know, Esri and like, like she even said, Trimble and stuff like that. So, um, so yeah, let's talk open source. Uh, so what, what first comes to your mind when you think open source alternative programs, Paul?
00:30:09
Speaker
top of the list when we think of archaeology feeds right into the previous question, it's GIS and QGIS in particular. Actually, I've got much more experience with grass, which is really old school in its approach and I don't think I'd recommend it to anybody starting out. But also QGIS works beautifully and is much more intuitive, much more sensible, much more like modern program.
00:30:36
Speaker
Yeah. And I'm not really a GIS person. I know enough to be dangerous. And I actually took a GIS course in grad school just to learn some of the fine-tuned stuff that I'd never had formalized training in. And I use QGIS because I run a small business. I don't need GIS all the time, so I'm not going to pay for an ESRI license. And to be honest, I don't know why anyone ever would.
00:30:59
Speaker
What are the benefits of using the Esri program, especially from an archaeological context? I think the Esri database feature and what am I trying to think of? What is it called?
00:31:16
Speaker
ArcMap or something like that? Not ArcGIS. I can't remember the names of their products. I know. They've got so many different modules that all work together and that might be one of the features of the program actually where you have these independent things and maybe just data storage is more reliable. I don't really know. But from just a pure functional standpoint, like actually just plotting coordinates
00:31:36
Speaker
making maps, moving things around, drawing features, all the analysis tools that you need, it's all there in QGIS. And QGIS is free. And most of the keystrokes and everything look similar to Esri products. So honestly, I don't know why people are so beholden to Esri and the amazing prices that they charge for that program when you've got a free one that works just as well. So I'd like to hear from some GIS experts on what the major differences are and why you would actually choose Esri over QGIS.
00:32:06
Speaker
I'm going to throw a couple ideas out, and this is not from experience. This is from experience with other classes of software where I've got a comparison between an open source program and payware.
00:32:22
Speaker
I'm very much a proponent of open source software. I'm very comfortable using most of the open source programs I've used. I personally don't find great differences, but where I do find the differences that might be meaningful to other people, again, not usually to me.
00:32:37
Speaker
is support and that usually when you buy a software license, it comes with a support contract too. So that is definitely a real issue for a lot of people. And then the other one is integration with
00:32:52
Speaker
with other software and hardware products. With open source, it's typically dependent upon the people who are writing the open source software or if it's got a modular plug-in design, people who can write plug-ins for that open source software to integrate it with X, Y, or Z other program or other hardware. With closed source software, if you have something that's a big program like an SRE program,
00:33:18
Speaker
they will work, they'll build partnerships with hardware and software, other programmers and other designers. And so then it becomes a business relationship and there's oftentimes smoother integration than between these different things. Not always. And I think it's often hyped more than it actually is versus open source alternatives. But
00:33:43
Speaker
But being able to know that somebody else has a business case behind supporting the product that you're paying for is comforting to a lot of people, and especially if it does work better. And then the last one that I could think of is now escaping me at a third point. Why don't you say something? I'll remember it in a moment. It was a minor one, obviously, by comparison.
00:34:07
Speaker
Well, just talking about some of the, you know, I mentioned databases with here with Esri and once one piece of software that comes to mind that that's specifically a database software for archaeology built by archaeologists for archaeology is in terrorist registries. And we've had we've had one of the founders on there before on here. And I talked to every time I go to a conference, he's there and I see him. So but in terrorist registries, he's a great piece of software. And it's actually it's actually pretty
00:34:37
Speaker
I don't want to say complicated, but I want to say complicated in a good way, right? It's complicated in a way that gives you a lot of flexibility. There's a lot of different modules and a lot of ways you can use it. And it really is designed for people working on a large scale excavation that can pull in a ton of artifact data and be able to map these, I don't want to say map, it's on mapping program necessarily, but you can bring in GIS data into it, but it's more of a program to like
00:35:02
Speaker
you know, look at your levels of excavation and what was found in there and catalog these, you know, from discovery to the museum or the archives. So, great piece of software and we'll include links for all this stuff in our show notes, all the things we're going to talk about too. So, check those out. Yeah. I would, since we're talking about databases, you know, the obvious ones, database engines are MySQL and PostgreSQL and there's
00:35:27
Speaker
If you're looking for a relational database engine, I don't think there's any reason to look beyond those two for the purposes of what we as archaeologists need. So, hold on. Let's take a step back for a second. I was just going to say, I'm just going to put it in the caveats now. Well, I'm not really too much. I mean, I'm a database guy from the standpoint of I understand basically how they work and stuff, but I'm not like super into it.
00:35:50
Speaker
But with people listening to the show, what do you mean by database engine? And when I see things like MySQL, I have a fundamental understanding of what those are, but not exactly how they're used. So when you say database engine, what do you mean by that? What I mean is the software that actually stores the data and defines the parameters of how the data themselves are encoded.
00:36:12
Speaker
and interrelate to each other. So both of these are fairly old school kind of relational database models, which is that you have each table in your database. You can think of like a spreadsheet, right? And each column in the spreadsheet is one particular measurement, length, width, height, color, location, name, all the way on down. And each row is an individual object of some kind.
00:36:41
Speaker
Site one, site two, site three, shirt one, shirt two, shirt three, however you want to do it. And then the tables, you might have a table of objects that you found and you might have a table of sites and then each object
00:36:56
Speaker
in that table relates to one particular site because it was found on a particular site. And so the engine is a way of enforcing the integrity behind all this but also handles all the more mundane kind of computer tasks of how it stores those data. And these two programs are very much stripped down and there's no real interface
00:37:20
Speaker
There's textual interfaces, graphical interfaces, web-based interfaces and whatnot, but it's not like FileMaker, which is another very big, very popular database engine that kind of
00:37:32
Speaker
blurs the line between that data structure and storage and data display and input, right? So there are big advantages to using something like FileMaker where those lines are blurred because you can get up and running quickly. If you don't need that kind of front end, I think that those are back. Now, the caveat that I was going to say though is that
00:37:56
Speaker
In most cases, and this is going to be do as I say, not as I do, I think that archaeologists probably shouldn't be going down to this level. They should be trying to use other people's products, other archaeologists or commercial products or open source products, whatever it is.
00:38:13
Speaker
not try to reinvent the wheel every time out like we have a tendency to do by going straight down to, okay, I'm going to build this on my SQL, and now what's my front end going to be, and what is my table structure going to be, and what are all the fields, and how are they going to interrelate, and on down the rabbit hole? Because most of us aren't nearly as good at it as we'd like to be. It'd be better if we were, but I think that this is kind of a safety in numbers thing, that if somebody else has done it and it's working for them,
00:38:42
Speaker
see if you can take what they're doing and use it straight out of the box, see if you can use it with some minor modification for what you have to do. But again,
Modernizing Field Equipment with Affordable Tech
00:38:51
Speaker
this is do as I say now as I do because this is what I do all the time as I try to reinvent the wheel. And I've had very little success with it. So there you go.
00:39:01
Speaker
So is that what, are you down with OPP means? Is there other people's products? Are you down with other people's products? Is that what that meant? Maybe, I think I've got a few more years on you and I think I remember slightly different.
00:39:16
Speaker
Nice, nice. Well, let's finish out this conversation here then because one of the other facets of the last question was alternatives to the clunky trimble in the field that don't require excessive post-processing. Now, that's two actually different questions because you've got GPS modules that will read information in the field, right? But then you've got post-processing.
00:39:39
Speaker
And what do you mean by excessive post-processing? He says, which sometimes just moves sites one county over where they clearly aren't. I think that's incorrect post-processing if I'm gonna, if I'm thinking about it right, because
00:39:52
Speaker
If you get the right GPSs that are doing the right things in the field, then you shouldn't have to do much to your data, right? We had on Matt Alexander from Anatom Geomobile Solutions whose ad you have likely already heard on this podcast or will hear soon because he sent me an Aero 100 to play around with because I've heard about him before.
00:40:14
Speaker
It's actually bigger than I thought it was, but it's definitely way smaller than a Trimble, but it's got a nice little case on it. And if you wanted to make it super accurate, there's a little backpack antenna that you can have that can just mount into any backpack, really. You've got the little antenna there. But they go all the way up to the super fancy ones that are as much as, if not way less than a Trimble, depending on the options, because they're so configurable. All these things are, including Trimbles.
00:40:40
Speaker
I mean, you can get a Trimble GPS that's $10,000 or $20,000. I mean, it just doesn't matter. It just depends on your options. But anyway, the point is these things are pretty cool and they require very little post-processing, right? I think if you're doing post-processing right now, like extensive post-processing, it's because you're using a super old Trimble that just doesn't have those capabilities, which is not uncommon in the field of archaeology to be using something that's 10 years old that no one else is using.
00:41:05
Speaker
because maybe you picked one up on eBay for $1,000 versus $6,000 or something like that. So I think it's really just about updating your gear and trying one of those small ones. Now, of course, I said this is a multi-part question because if you have one of those devices, you can't just use it. You have to Bluetooth that or hard link it to a tablet or a smartphone or something like that. And then you need the right app to be able to read that. For example, Wild Note, which I'll talk about in a second,
00:41:33
Speaker
Well, no, it's not a mapping software, but we do have the ability to drop a point. And so since we're not mapping software and we haven't really figured, we haven't really gone down the road of mapping, I used to say, because I thought this was true, that if you Bluetooth one of those Bluetoothable GPS devices to your phone or tablet, that the coordinates within your tablet will now just read that Bluetooth device, it will overtake them. And that might be used to be true, but I think it's gotten too complicated lately.
00:42:02
Speaker
because it's not actually true anymore. And I've proven that over and over again with the error 100, trying to find programs where I can actually switch to that antenna. Because even if it is reading the coordinates of that antenna, it's not giving me any other data, right? It's not giving me any of the position data associated with that point. It's literally just showing me the coordinates and I have no way to verify
00:42:21
Speaker
that it's actually the coordinates from that Bluetooth antenna. So if you're using something, unfortunately, Esri's program, not Survey123, what's the other one? Well, I'll come up with it, put in the show notes. Anyway, the one that everybody uses with Survey123, it's right on the tip of my tongue. Anyway, that one is actually a pretty good app for recording information, but you need an Esri license to be able to use it, right? And there's a couple others out there that you can actually download that will, like Gaia, I think is one of them.
00:42:50
Speaker
where you can switch the antenna to the Bluetooth external antenna. So if you can't switch the antenna, you can't guarantee that you're actually using the coordinates of your $2,000 external antenna. So just keep that in mind.
00:43:05
Speaker
All right, so some of the other apps we'll just go through relatively quickly here.
Fieldwork Efficiency and Battery Tips
00:43:10
Speaker
I mean, obviously, she says apps that are useful for fieldwork but that don't kill your phone battery. Again, that comes down to, well, what are the apps you're using and what are you trying to do, right? If it is a mapping application, one thing you can do to not kill your phone battery is close the application every time you're done using it.
00:43:27
Speaker
they open super fast. So you can also make sure it's not mapping in the background unless you need it to map in the background. And if you need it to map in the background, well, your two solutions to that are A, get a better phone. Obviously, that's too expensive sometimes for people and you can't go out and spend $1,200 on a new phone. Or B, buy external batteries, right? I mean, there's tons of them out there and they're actually getting super, super cheap for really, really good external batteries. And they're not that heavy. They're easy to charge up.
00:43:55
Speaker
And it's really, I don't think with just even from a safety standpoint, if you don't plan on using your phone for the company work that you're doing, but you have a phone, you should probably have an external battery out there. What if you're the only person left and everybody gets picked off by coyotes and you can't get back to the truck, right? You need a phone to be able to call for help once you get to service.
00:44:17
Speaker
just have an external phone battery. I don't know why everybody doesn't have one of those out in the field. It should be part of your safety equipment, just like water, a vest, a first aid kit, and an external phone battery. Anyway, some apps that are good. Obviously, I work for WildNote, but I don't feel biased in saying that because I've also worked for Codify.
00:44:40
Speaker
I went down the road with app development on my own company and I've used a bunch of different things. So far, for my money, for my small business that I run, WildNote is the best value for the money. It's modifiable and you can do anything you want to it and collect any kind of data. It's easy on the battery.
00:45:00
Speaker
We have had some battery issues before with WildNote, but that's usually tied to an older Android device or an older iOS device that actually doesn't have very good battery management with their applications. So it requires you to upgrade your software. Any app will do that. So upgrade your software internally if you can. And if you can't, and you're rocking an iPhone 5S, it might be time to invest in something slightly newer. So yeah, that's my soapbox.
00:45:29
Speaker
You got anything else along these lines, Paul? No, no. Batteries and the newness of the equipment and how you're actually running your software. One other thing might be our laptops here at school, I recommend that everybody restarts them once a week.
00:45:44
Speaker
You know, there's some time on the weekend, just give it a quick restart and it keeps them running better. There are always a few telltale signs when they haven't been restarted in months and sometimes it is. I've had people come down asking why they can't get on the network and it turns out they haven't rebooted their computer in 250 days.
00:46:03
Speaker
That cures just about everything. So that's always worth a try. It's just, you know, if you seem like your battery is dying too quickly on your handheld device, just give it a reboot. See if that clears anything up.
00:46:15
Speaker
Yeah, and keep in mind, I'm not actually sure how Android works on that respect, but on iOS, restarting your device won't actually, it will clear out a lot of memory issues. It will do stuff, and it's always a good idea if you're having problems to just restart, like Paul said. But also keep in mind, if you have an app that happens to be running in the background, that app's not going to stop running in the background when you restart your device. I'll start right back up.
00:46:37
Speaker
It'll start right back up. If you've got one of the newer iPhones, the 10 or up, you have to just hold up on that little tab on the bottom of the screen and then it shows you all your apps and you just got to flip them out of the way. If you've got an older device, you've got to hold down on the one app and then just flip all those out of the way or there's a little X there.
00:47:00
Speaker
Just keep that in mind. You might not know which app is actually operating in the background. So just close them all if you can, and then start reopening them. And if you get to a point where, and then maybe pay attention to it as well, like I would noticed as we spoke last time.
00:47:16
Speaker
that new decibel app was starting to take my watch battery down pretty quickly. And now that I'm not running it in the foreground on a watch face, it's not doing it anymore. So it was clearly the decibel app that was listening all the time and listening for audio events that was taking my battery down. So I was able to isolate it there. But
00:47:36
Speaker
for your phone, best thing to do is just kill all the apps and then start them up one by one, but pay attention to your battery drain. And pay attention to the heat on your phone, too. If your phone feels like it's getting hot, that usually means something's overtaxing the processor and it's doing it in a bad way. So, yeah. Well, I don't think I have anything else. How about you, Paul? What do you got on this one? No, I think this has been a plenty long session. We managed to squeeze a lot out of these handful of questions.
00:48:01
Speaker
Absolutely. So send in your questions. We'll be your tech therapists and send in your questions. And again, they might be simple questions. You might think they're simple questions. You could also do the research and find it out. But even if you want to do the research, send us the question because we know it's something people are thinking about and we can hit our audience of five to seven thousand people per month and and they can find the answer to that as well. So you can help others by asking your question.
00:48:31
Speaker
and helping get it on the podcast. So, all right, well, we will be back in just a second with our app of the day segment. You may have heard my pitch from membership. It's a great idea and really helps out. However, you can also support us by picking up a fun t-shirt, sticker, or something from a large selection of items from our tea public store. Head over to arcpodnet.com slash shop for a link. That's arcpodnet.com slash shop to pick up some fun swag and support the show.
00:49:00
Speaker
All right. Welcome back to the Archiotech podcast episode 114. And this is the app of the day segment. And I'm going to let Paul go first because he's, he's, uh, doing something we've never done on the app of the day segment before, which is actually using the app during the segment. And you're going to hear about that here in a second. Go ahead. Right. So, uh, you can probably tell already that my voice sounds a little bit differently than did in the, uh, the rest of this episode. And the reason is, is right now I'm using my iPhone as a microphone.
00:49:26
Speaker
The program I'm using is called Microphone Live. It's by Von Bruno. It's iOS only. I found this app and downloaded it last week, last episode, just before last episode, because as we were getting ready to record, I realized I had misplaced my regular microphone. I had left it in the country.
00:49:48
Speaker
I wasn't anywhere near it, so if I couldn't find a headset, I was going to use this microphone app instead. I did find a headset, and so I recorded the last episode with that headset, but this time I decided that I'd give this a whack. It certainly seems serviceable. I don't have a whole lot to say about it. You're listening to the results of it. There's not a whole lot that can be done with it. It's iOS only, so you plug it in on your Mac,
00:50:18
Speaker
the MIDI utility for some reason, and then in there you can enable your iPhone, I suppose it probably also works with iPads, but you can enable your iPhone as an external audio device. Then you go into system preferences, make sure that it's actually using the iPhone as the microphone and not the built-in microphone, and then everything else is pretty much the same.
00:50:44
Speaker
And it has one button in the middle to start using it as a microphone, and you can press it again to stop. And it has a waveform, and you can scroll up or down to increase the input volume, the gain on it, or decrease it. And that's basically it. And it looks like in a pinch it works. So you're just plugged into the headphone jack?
00:51:07
Speaker
I am plugged into Lightning, Lightning to USB. Oh, that's right. Yeah. Because you don't have a headphone jack. Because I don't have a headphone jack. Right. If I had a headphone jack, I could have used, and I suppose I probably could have used just a regular pair of Lightning headphones or headphones with TRRS connector. Yeah. And use it like you would a phone through the headphones. But I didn't think of that.
00:51:32
Speaker
And I don't know why I didn't think of that. I just had to go a little more complicated. So here I've got this thing as an external microphone. Now, you can use your phone for recording. That's nothing new. People have been doing that forever. Sure. It's a perfect little field recorder. But I hadn't seen using it as an external microphone on anything. Hmm. OK. Yeah, it's pretty interesting. And it's an interesting thought for people who
00:51:59
Speaker
you know, might be speaking on a Skype call or something like that. And maybe the microphone on the computer just doesn't sound very good, but you have a phone with you at all times. So you may as well try that and see if it works better. It might be able to get closer to your mouth. Also, that might work better if you're in like a noisy environment and you want to bring the phone up to your mouth and use that microphone versus, um, you know, sitting two feet back away from the one on your computer. Yeah, certainly. I did notice, um, when I was testing this just before we started recording,
00:52:26
Speaker
I did a few little recordings directly on my computer just to see what it sounded like differently versus my regular microphone and I didn't realize but the mini fridge in the room that I'm at had turned on and I couldn't hear it at all on my nice condenser microphone that I normally record with but I certainly did hear it with my iPhone. It was a persistent buzz in the background whereas the condenser microphone just ignored it entirely.
00:52:52
Speaker
Right, right. Nice. All right. Well, anything else to say about that microphone app? I mean, I think it sounds pretty decent compared to just the recording on the computer. Obviously, it's not as good as your regular microphone that you use, but that's to be expected. But man, in a pinch, this doesn't sound too bad. Yeah. One last thing I forgot to mention is that it's free. It's got ads, banner ads on it, but they're not particularly
00:53:18
Speaker
intrusive and I haven't seen anything like happen with that game where I was a little bothered by the ads.
00:53:26
Speaker
Nice, nice. All right, well, transitioning from microphones to magazines. So, I was just kind of looking around for some archaeology news and things like that, and just seeing what was in the App Store for iOS anyway, which is what I use. And I saw the archaeology magazine app, and I don't remember if I've seen that before, so I don't know how long it's been out, but
00:53:50
Speaker
It's 100% garbage. I'll tell you that right now. But the app was just not put together very well. Definitely requires an internet connection to obviously access everything. But it looks like you can download magazines back to for $4.99 per issue, which I don't know how that compares to the newsstand price of the magazine. My guess is it's probably exactly the same.
00:54:16
Speaker
You can go all the way back to January, February issue for 2011, as far as downloading it goes. Now they have listed all the way back to, what is this, 2004, I think it is? Let me take a look here. Although, yeah, I think it's 2000. Oh, well, it's even broader than that. So 1986.
00:54:39
Speaker
I'm not seeing here. Now here's the thing. I think they might be scanning in issues going back. Oh, it's actually loading more. It wasn't loading before, which is also a problem this is having. I'm seeing 1981 here. So you can preview all the way back to 1981. You can preview these issues, but you can't download them and you can't purchase them. And I think it's because they don't exist yet, right? I think they're just starting with the covers and the contents and the few pages and then seeing
00:55:07
Speaker
and then getting the rest in as they go along. So anyway, that's pretty cool. The things I don't really like about this, well, let me go back to some more things that I do like. So I looked at the preview of the current issue and I haven't bought one yet, but I looked at the preview of the current issue and you basically using it just like you would normally, you just don't have all the pages. It just gives you like the first six or seven pages.
00:55:28
Speaker
which is nice because you can actually see the table of contents and they've got some little tools to jump straight to the table of contents and search within the magazine, things like that. And you could just see, like, I don't want to subscribe to this maybe, but maybe this issue has some things that I want in it. And I don't know who sells archaeology magazine in my town, right? But I heard of an article in there and I want to check it out. And $4.99 is not that bad to pay for a magazine. You're not contributing to a landfill. You're not doing anything else.
00:55:55
Speaker
downloading it for $4.99 is actually a pretty good deal and seeing it there. I just don't like the way that... This is such an old way of thinking too, like when the internet and I guess capabilities like this really started to come online, magazines were still like page flip style magazines, right? In fact, we created a
00:56:18
Speaker
We created an online ebook for one of the SAA sessions about six, seven years ago, and it was in that format, right? Like where you go there and you download it and you pay, I think you pay like 99 cents for it or something. No, maybe it was free. I think it was free. Anyway, you flip pages and I'm like, that is so,
00:56:34
Speaker
antiquated. I don't need to flip pages, right? I just need to see the content and maybe see it in a little more dynamic way. And so I don't like the interface of the app where you have to flip pages and you can zoom into the page and it's just a little clunky doing that.
00:56:49
Speaker
And also, if you click on the menu icon in the upper left-hand corner, there's a news section. I've literally never got anything to show up in the news section. It just spins and spins and spins and actually locks the app up. I'm doing it right now. And you've got to kill the app and let it come back. I mean, I don't know. Maybe it's the first time I've ever used the news and it just needs to load the entire interface from the Internet. But I've got pretty fast Wi-Fi where I'm at right here. So it should have loaded by now. And it's been loading since I've been talking.
00:57:19
Speaker
Anyway, I would say the app is useful in the sense that
00:57:24
Speaker
They don't sell archaeology magazine everywhere. They often do have some halfway decent articles. And if you're hungry for some archaeology news and you want to see some stuff out of that, you don't have to subscribe to it. You can just download a single episode. From what I can tell, it's going to live within that application, which may be a bad thing because I don't know how long they're going to support it. And it's already trash. So yeah, that's pretty much all I've got. Get your archaeology news at archaeology magazine. You don't have to subscribe, but you're going to pay for it in quality. Now, they do have an iPad app.
00:57:53
Speaker
And I haven't looked at it on my iPad yet. And I have a feeling that the iPad is going to be a way better interface just because you won't have to do as much pinching and zooming because the page will just inherently be bigger, right? So who knows? Who knows? So one interesting thing is, and I don't know the answer to this question, but on Apple specifically, within the Apple News, if you subscribe to News Plus, there's actually magazines in there.
00:58:19
Speaker
And I don't know if archaeology magazine's included with that, but just to meet the Apple standards, they would have to up their game on the quality of that presentation. So maybe that's where they're spending all their resources, and maybe they won't be supporting the app anymore because of that. I don't know. I know it's available for Android, and I don't know what equivalent services Android has for, or Google, I should say, for magazines. So I'm just not aware of that.
00:58:45
Speaker
Anyway, that's pretty much all I've got today. Pretty short app of the day segment. Anything else to add for this episode, Paul? No, I'm curious. And I'm going to have to research this. I didn't know about this app. But I do know, because I am involved in our local chapter of the AIA here, that the AI National has been updating their computer systems. And so I just got emails today about a new membership website that they have.
00:59:11
Speaker
with my new password to get into it. And so I wonder if this app, this archaeology magazine app, has anything to do with an overall directive that they're doing internally at National to modernize their systems.
00:59:26
Speaker
Well, I always do appreciate the, uh, you know, people that bother to put together an app. It's just, I feel like they used probably one of those template app builder kind of things. And it didn't, it didn't quite work out for them because for example, just turning it on on my iPhone 10 here, which has albeit a slightly different screen resolution than most of the other iPhones. It's a little narrower and a little taller. And, uh, the word archeology bleeds off the left and right side of the screen.
00:59:54
Speaker
It's not even, it didn't even size like scale to fit the screen. Like the minute I saw that I knew I was in trouble. So yeah, anyway, I like the, I like the thought behind it anyway, as I mentioned. So, and it does have a subscribe button here too. I haven't pushed that yet to see how much it is and what that costs, but it'll, it'll subscribe. Oh, 1499 for an annual subscription, which is really good. So if you want to get all the issues, you can do that for 1499.
01:00:22
Speaker
It says you can get a monthly subscription for $9.99, which I'm not really sure. I guess if you wanted to quickly download all the back issues, maybe that's what that would be for. I'm not really sure. Sounds pretty expensive. I think I'd be more likely to download individual issues and go from there.
01:00:42
Speaker
Thanks, Paul. And thanks, everybody, for listening. And again, send in your questions for our next listener question episode. They can be about anything. Let us read your questions and help anyone else that might be having a similar problem. And hey, maybe you've got a problem that you had and you figure out a solution to, a clever solution, and you want to let us know about it. We'll talk about that, too, because that's real similar. And take some work off of us, too. But it's nice to crowdsource these ideas and get them out on the podcast. Definitely.
01:01:12
Speaker
All right, well, thanks a lot, Paul, and thanks, everybody, and we'll see you next time.
01:01:21
Speaker
Thanks for listening to the Archaeotech Podcast. Links to items mentioned on the show are in the show notes at www.archpodnet.com slash archaeotech. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com and paul at lugall.com. Support the show by becoming a member at archpodnet.com slash members. The music is a song called Off Road and is licensed free from Apple. Thanks for listening.
01:01:47
Speaker
This show is produced and recorded by the Archaeology Podcast Network, Chris Webster and Tristan Boyle, in Reno, Nevada at the Reno Collective. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com.
01:02:08
Speaker
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