Alan Edgar (Eggy1948)

@lilbill15 - @Alan dicksonstil a member but hasn't visited the group since July 23rd 2014 - you will find him on the Barrington, Barnt' n memories and stuff!! Facebook group where he is the Admin = https://www.facebook.com/groups/958444760904321 @Canny lass - the photo you were asking about is just before the railway lines where the Choppinton Railway Station used to be. There is a short terrace just before the railway lines and the house + Equestrian Centre in @lilbill15's photo was just built a couple of years ago.

1. What did Messrs Shockley, Bardeen and Brattain invent in1947? Answer = 2. Which is the oldest of the Cambridge colleges, founded in 1248? Answer = Oxford 3. Which song begins “When you left me all alone, at the record hop; told me you were going out for a soda pop”? Answer = 4. Darbies is a slang word for what? Answer = 5. Boo boo is the friend of which cartoon character? Answer = 6. Who made history in 1997 by becoming the youngest ever US masters golf champion? Answer = 7. What can be a box or a part of the body? Answer = 8. Which monarchs preceded and succeeded Elizabeth I? Answer = 9. What do the initials GMT stand for? Answer = 10. Which French word describes a very thick soup? Answer = Potage 11. Hearts and Hibs come from which Scottish city? Answer = Edinburgh 12. Which stretch of water separates the Scottish mainland from the Orkneys? Answer = I’ll bet you didn’t know …. In America there once was a magazine called Chocolate News. It came in a glossy brown cover and actually smelled of chocolate. Answer = I didn’t

ps. forgot to say the last file input to the OCR was a selection from your comments from the Bates album - all converted - nee bovver👌

@HIGH PIT WILMA - I was curious to see how the OCR software that is available for everyone these days worked so I Googled it and went for the free download of the Windows FreeOCR software. I wondered if there would be an interaction with the user if the software couldn't recognise the text input on Pdf/Jpeg etc files. I download a mix of files = hand written & typed to input to the OCR software. The handwritten one I downloaded a one with fade writing and created an enhanced copy and they both copies were input. Unfortunately the original faded written copy failed to have any characters recognised and the enhanced copy only had four characters recognised. In fact it was only the standard typed copy that was totally transformed from a photo to a text document. You will have to hire an out of work typist, that knows pit taak, and has quite a few days free time 🙂 The original input on the left and the OCR output on the right. This one is Foundation text and quite a few letters failed to be recognised by the OCR :- This is the enhanced hand written BLACK text - only 4 characters recognised :- This one the input had upper and lowercase print plus numerous symbols but just a few of the uppercase characters were recognised :- This was the enhanced faded script but nothing recognised :- Faded handwritten letter - nowt recognised :-

HPW -OCR = Optical Character Recognition has been around for years - we had an OCR machine on the Longbenton DHSS site in the 1970's. It was used to read all the 'GIRO's, issued for all Benefit payments, and cashed at the Post Offices. Even though the relevant details were were typed on the GIROs the OCR system still had a few problems identifying all the characters and there were two teams of staff - working 09:00 to 17:00 & 17:00 to 01:00 - to input the details from the rejected OCR input GIROs onto the computer system so that the reconciliation process of all the Benefit payments could be completed. The following are not my words but 'copy & paste' from The Gaurdian online article :- How can I convert my handwritten notes into Word documents? Michael has a large pile of handwritten notepads that he would like to convert into Microsoft Word documents Your handwritten notes would be more useful in Microsoft Word format because you could do lots of things with them. Photograph: Acestock/Alamy Jack Schofield Thu 18 Dec 2014 16.19 GMT 32 The idea of converting written or printed text into digital text is generally called OCR for optical character recognition, and it has similar problems to speech recognition. That is to say, if the input is close to perfect, the output can also be close to perfect. But in practice, it works best when dealing with restricted inputs and/or limited domains. For example, it’s possible to recognise the English names for numbers and the names of major UK cities, especially if you can get people to write each letter in its own little box. The same software wouldn’t have the domain expertise to cope with a Russian-speaking coroner who liked to include Sanskrit quotations in his handwritten autopsies. Handwriting matters OCR works best with high-quality printed materials and worst of all with handwriting, so you’re not starting from the best position. In my experience, you can only get handwriting recognition to work well enough by doing it in real time. That enables you to train the software to recognise your input, while the software also trains you to write characters in ways that it can understand. I’ve had some success with this approach, starting more than a decade ago with Microsoft OneNote (which can also record your voice in sync) running on Windows XP Tablet Edition, and more recently with a Livescribe Echo digital pen and MyScript software. However, all this has more to do with keyboard replacement strategies than with OCR. It’s generally agreed that the best OCR programs are Abbyy FineReader (£99) and Nuance’s OmniPage 18 (£79.99) and Ultimate (£169.99), though neither is suitable for cursive handwriting recognition. Both companies offer free trial versions so you can test them before you splash out. There’s also CharacTell’s SoftWriting ($49.95), which the company says is for students taking notes in class and professionals taking notes in meetings. But it also says it is designed “for recognising non-connected handwriting and machine-printed text” (their emphasis) so I wouldn’t bet on it reading your handwritten notes. Like most if not all the programs in this field, SoftWriting has to be trained to recognise your handwriting. When it is processing a document, it will present you with words it doesn’t recognise, so that you can tell it what they are. If you have 250 words on a page and the program miraculously gets 90% of them right, you will still have to correct 25 words. If you want to try a few pages as an experiment, then you can download FreeOCR for Windows, though be careful not to install any crapware that may be included. FreeOCR is based on the widely used Tesseract OCR engine, which was originally developed by Hewlett-Packard in England in the 1980s. HP made it open source in 2005, and Google now maintains the source code. You can also use FreeOCR online by uploading PDF files to free-ocr.com. Google Docs and various other services also use the same Tesseract OCR engine. Wikipedia warns that “Tesseract’s output will be very poor quality if the input images are not preprocessed to suit it: Images (especially screenshots) must be scaled up such that the text x-height is at least 20 pixels, any rotation or skew must be corrected or no text will be recognized, low-frequency changes in brightness must be high-pass filtered, or Tesseract’s binarization stage will destroy much of the page, and dark borders must be manually removed, or they will be misinterpreted as characters.” PDFs and scanners Your handwritten notes would be more useful in Microsoft Word format because you could do lots of things with them. For example, you could change the typeface, size and spacing, correct and amend your notes, add illustrations, and so on. But unless you have extremely neat, clear and very consistent handwriting, that probably won’t be possible. Instead, think about converting them to high-quality, scanned PDF files that you can store on a hard drive or in the cloud. You can feed these PDF files to OCR software and hope that it will recognize enough words to make your notes searchable. If not, you will probably have to tag them manually. Either way, if someone does come up with an OCR program that can read your handwriting – not impossible, though I’ve already waited 30 years for one – you will be ready with sharp PDF files, rather than curling originals where the paper has aged and the ink has faded. Of course, if you are going to scan your notes then you must already have a scanner, or be prepared to buy one. A cheap Epson or Canon flat-bed scanner should give good results, though it is time-consuming to scan a lot of pages. If you intend to do a lot of scanning, consider a sheet-fed model like the Brother ADS-2100 (from £222). You can also get scanners that include OCR, such as Fujitsu ScanSnap iX500 Duplex (from £352), which scans both sides of the paper at once. (The scanner’s OCR software usually runs on your PC.) Scanning services If you have to buy a decent scanner and perhaps good quality OCR software for a one-off project, add up the cost and divide it by the number of pages of notes to find the cost per page. It’s a boring job, so perhaps you should add the cost of your time. The result might prompt you to abandon the whole idea, or start looking for a company to do it for you. Most of the companies that provide scanning services cater for businesses that need to clear away large volumes of paper records. However, some cater for low-volume and home users. One example is Oxford-based Scanning Geeks, which charges 25p per page for documents up to A3 in size. (One page means one side of a page.) They can do OCR (“Textual Data Capture”) as well. Ideally, find a good local company where you can drop off your notes securely and collect them afterwards. It’s an expensive route if you have lots of paper: it could cost £3,000 to scan the contents of a four-drawer filing cabinet. But if you only have 100 to 500 pages of notes to scan, it could be the best option.

@Tonyp - replies to your question from the Bygone Bedlington Facebook group members :- Allison Jones Joseph miller Tommy's son has the computer shop on glebe road bank above the barbers and chip shop. Jean Hale Gordon died a few years ago but his wife Irene is in a home now after she had a fall. John Henderson Tommy & Vi ran the Greengrocer shop, Tommy started the bingo in the shop next door to the greengrocers. He was a great musician and played at most of the clubs at some time or another but was at the Universal in Ashington for a long time. He often went to the computer shop that his son Joe ran but admitted that he had absolutely no idea how computers worked. Sadly both Tommy and Vi have passed away.

Cheers Tony - let you know if I get any info🙂

@Tonyp = What decade, 1960's or 70's or later, are you referring to and I will ask the members of the local Facebook groups if anyone remembers those two and has any info on them.

👍

There was also a bridge, for the opencast traffic, across the road near the bottom of the Bedlington Bank that led the traffic to the one in the Woodhorn gallery photo. This is the only photo I can find of the one over the road :-

No date given for the colour photo that was displayed at Wodhorn. If we could see the speakers on the bandstand we could work out what year. All I can say is that it is 1952 or later as the first Northumberland Miners Picnic to be held at Bedlington was 1952. As it's colour I would assume it's mid 1960's.

No idea if it's still on display at Woodhorn - haven't been to Woodhorn since the grand kids were small = 25 years ago🙂. This is the only other photo of that bridge I can remember seeing - John Brown posted it on local Facebook group (I think)

Doesn't show the area either immediately either side of the Hartford Road but this is photo, of only a couple I have seen, shows the bridge that was built over the river Blyth for the opencast waste to be transported to the Bedside disposal site.

Photos posted on Barnton group - for Alan Dickson to see. Let you know when he replies🙂

1. What name is given to a joint of beef cut from the breast next to the ribs? Answer = 2. Which English king married Mary of Teck? Answer - 3. Yenisey and Irtysh are both major examples of which kind of geographical feature? Answer = River 4. The Dome of the Rock was built in 691 by Abd-al-Malik. Where is it? Answer = Jerusalem 5. Which Cole Porter song was inspired by a leaky tap? Answer = The Absinthe Drip 6. In boxing, what name is given to a class under 8 stone? Answer = 7. What is the more common name for aquaculture? Answer = Aquafarming 8. Which member of the British Royal family was born on 15th September 1984? Answer = Harry 9. Which US President’s presidency was called the Thousand Days? Answer = 10. In which year was the Wall Street Crash? Answer = 11. Ryeland, Kerry Hill and Roscommon are all breeds of which animal? Answer = 12. Who played the title role in The Incredible Hulk? Answer = I’ll bet you didn’t know …. There are 4,000 different types of knot. Answer = I didn’t https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_knots

Thanks Jack👍

@Ovalteeny - I was searching for anything to do with Bedlington on the RootsChat forum and I came across this posting, Bedlington East End fc completed :- I have searched on all the local groups but I can't find anything about the team thomas1879 has posted info on. Have you found anything on them when you were searching the newspaper archives?🙂

Now don't tell anyone but I have been reading a book - To The Miner Born by Mary Wade. Really I was just looking for any new images to add to any of the albums in the Gallery - unfortunately there aren't any new ones. I must have Google searched for the book after I saw a comment by @Maggie/915 and I found a copy on Amazon - £3.46, free postage, so I sent for it. Chapter Eighteen - Page 87 mentions a Mr Neave, of North Terrace (Doctor Pit pit row). It's the one and only mention he gets in the book. There is no date mentioned but as the author had left school, age 14, I am guessing that it was the mid 1930's when Mr Neave was collecting weekly amounts of money from the miners for Friendlt Society - The Ancient Order of Foresters.

Unfortunately I can't help - @Andy Millne may have a list of Error Codes with what each one means.

Keith - I have searched the site but can't find any photos posted by 'nextstep'. Can you remember if he sent you photos via the personal message system? Have you selected the envelop at the top right of the screen? When selected ithe system shows a list of messages you have been active in. What I can't be sure of is if Messages from back in 2009 are still available as the system has been upgraded a few times since then and messages may have been dropped. @Andy Millne - are Messages from 2009 still available?