ReedAndWeep

"UK members of this forum get the first opportunity, and also the chance to make an offer ..." After a week of exclusive opportunity for forum members to acquire the Mastertone, I'm now going to list it publicly on eBay.

DaveRo> If you know usenet ... That takes me back .... I'd thought that once google had acquired Deja that usenet had gone the way of gopher and bitnet. Another rabbit hole opens up! Probably emerging at the back of the shed sofa ... I may be some time. Listen for the strains of the concertina

DaveRo> I was trying to understand your reference to 'webcanvas'. Not the most readable, but a useful reference: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/canvas There's a linked tutorial on that page if you want to have a go yourself. DaveRo> If you turn things off in about:config, it will often break something! Indeed! The interstitial page for about:config used to have an image of a dragon! DaveRo> Where exactly are these instructions? mainly on https://support.mozilla.org, but be wary, quite a lot of the discussions are about the way it might have been enabled, and inclusion in nightly builds, before the adoption of the Tor Browser code. Here's a relevant link from some years ago: https://news.slashdot.org/story/17/11/04/0040213/firefox-borrows-from-tor-browser-again-blocks-canvas-fingerprinting Eventually people will just have to make their own compromises between functionality, convenience, privacy, commercial value/worth. Meanwhile it's interesting to watch how it plays out "inside" the browser, and the implications for the user. Uploading to forums such as ours included.

Hello DaveRo, No canvas addons/plugins - though I'll be taking a look at the one you mentioned. ( Whilst I have concerns about the privacy/anonymity/persistent tracking capabilities of using HTML 5 Canvas, the actual technology and potential is of interest) The problem (such as it is ) is entirely of my doing - I have followed Mozilla's own instructions about disabling Canvas, and am discovering the impact of that choice. Currently that includes problems uploading to concertina.net, images.yandex.com, images.bing.com, and sometimes images.google.com. At the moment there is no issue uploading to imgur.com, so one of the many work-arounds is to upload to imgur, and then use that static URL as food for the image search engines, or as embedded links in online forums. Had image uploading broken straightaway I think I would have made the Canvas connection sooner, what has happened is that site managers/developers have been slow to embrace the potentials of HTML 5, as have the developers of the APIs they use. As support becomes more common, more breakages will occur. The clever thing would be for the APIs and host sites to test for Canvas support (trivial) and if not enabled then fallback to a simple HTTP POST, similar to limited jscript functionality handling for embedded devices, phones, ereaders.

Hello Peter ... Would that it had been so simple... I now know the work arounds, if HTML Canvas is disabled, so I can share this image with you: https://imgur.com/a/LXhkViI As you can see, what happens is that just a block of colour gets uploaded, rather than any useful image.

Here's a picture of the whole box, and the lid. The base and top part of the lid are held to the rest of the structure with "L" shaped metal staples.

I have a query running about a particular concertina, and attempted to upload some pictures. This failed as what was shown was a textured block of colour, rather than an image. A very similar outcome is experienced when attempting to upload an image to image search engines such as google, yandex, and bing. I use the Firefox browser (102.0 64 bit) running on Linux. The browser is kept up-to-date, and uses most of the Mozilla authorised and suggested privacy, non-tracking settings. I discovered that GIF images uploaded to concertina.net without problem (as seen on my "hexagon" profile picture). To cut a very long story short - and to help any others who may run into this issue - the problem is with the HTML5 usage of "webcanvas" to upload and edit images. "Canvas" is a major privacy leak, and so is one of the things that can be disabled in the Firefox browser by the user. Switch Canvas support back on for the particular upload/on-line edit - and you should be OK. As you have to be logged in to the site to post or upload pictures, there is not so much of a privacy/tracking issue. Switching it back on for google etc. image searching however is a different matter. I think the way GIFs slip through - not using HTML5 Canvas - is probably a bug rather than a feature, and should not be relied upon in the long term. The format does not support photographic type images as well as JPEG, JPG, or PNG anyway. Another work around (that currently works) is to use a photohost such as imgur, that does not require HTML5 Canvas to upload/edit/trim, and link to that 3rd party hosted image.

Thanks for that - it's more support for the little I've found/guessed. Whilst I've found nothing for Mastertone concertinas that give any provenance, date, there are a few auction house records picturing Mastertone accordions in similar boxes, with similar typography on labels. Those too are claimed to be German, and from the 1930s. I wonder if the factory was destroyed/re-directed during WW2 and never emerged post-war as a musical instrument manufacturer of concertinas?

have a 20 button Anglo. There's no name or logo on the instrument itself, but I have the original cardboard box it came in; hexagonal in shape, and the card is printed to look like wood. There is a label which reads: Mastertone Concertina Foreign and a dotted line following "Nr" which is stamped 411. I know that Gibson had trademarked the Mastertone term in the 1920s, and used it on their banjos, but having opened up the concertina, the quality of the workmanship is nothing like that one associates with Gibson. Extensive web searching, both on "Mastertone concertina", and trawling through 100s of pictures of 20 button concertinas has found nothing. The pictures I uploaded just came out as blocks of colour, so here's a link to the same pictures on imgur: https://imgur.com/a/CnTGCy7 Please can anybody help? Thanks.