Codd bottles

 Codd, or Codd neck bottles were a Victorian invention.

Invented by one Hiram Codd they were a stunningly simple design  - a thick glass bottle with a rubber washer and a marble in the neck. The marble was pressed against the washer by the internal pressure of the the aerated drink inside - aerated drinks were very much a Victorian thing as well, in part due to the temperance movement - to make a seal. A special pointy opener would push the marble down allowing to contents to be poured into a glass.

1915 Codd Bottle - Orbost Historical society

Codd bottles were in common use in Australia but relatively few have survived  due to children breaking the necks of the bottles to get at the marble inside.

Recently, when gardening, I found a small glass 1cm diameter sphere, which I assumed was probably a child's marble that had been lost.

Having spent some time trawling the web, I'm not so sure. Victorian children's marbles were usually either coloured pottery or patterned glass rather than plain glass.

However marbles obtained by smashing the necks are usually plain blue green glass, like the marble I found.

This is where I start getting all hand wavy.

Our house was not built until around 1880, and it's said - I havn't delved into this in detail - that prior to this the land our block and neighbouring blocks are on was an orchard and that Billson's brewery (which is less than 100m from our house and directly opposite on Last Street) would sometimes stable their horses there. Certainly I've found a discarded horseshoe and a set of broken nineteenth century farrier's pliers while gardening so perhaps there's some truth in the story.

There's also quite a lot of broken nineteenth century glass in the soil. I havn't found a complete recognisable nineteenth century bottle, so I don't know if the brewery also used the vacant land as a dumping ground for broken bottles, or whether they just ended up there by chance, or from the householders dumping broken bottles in the garden.

However, I did find an example online of Billson's brewery using Codd bottles for aerated drinks

which again is made of the same blue green glass that the marble I found.

So, still furiously waving my hands, I'm going to hypothesize that the marble came from a Codd bottle from the brewery. Whether it got there by being dumped in a pile of brewery waste, or whether a child smashed the neck of a bottle to get the marble sometime at the end of the Victorian era, is something we'll never know ...

The end of Usenet news?

 Earlier today I tooted a link to a news article about Google discontinuing  links to Usenet news.

Personally, I'd more or less forgotten Usenet news existed.

Over fifteen years ago we killed off our Usenet news service at my then work. The exercise was bit of a hoot as we had an SLA with a couple of other institutions to provide a news feed, and of course needed their agreement.

In one case getting agreement was easy, in the other they'd outsourced their IT provision to a windows based commercial provider, and somewhere along the line they'd forgotten to include NNTP provision as one of the contracted services, and of  course all the original people had moved on, and there was no one left who actually knew what Usenet news was, or even if they still had a forgotten box sitting quietly in a cabinet somewhere...

Anyway, once they understood the problem, they found someone to agree to the termination of the SLA. I don't know if they ever found if they still had an nntp server running.

Because I was interested in Roman archaeology and some environmental science topics I would occasionally check in on Usenet even after we turned off our server via a server at a university in the Netherlands, but eventually everything I was interested in migrated to blogs and the service formerly known as twitter, and in the end I simply stopped using it.

For old times sake I checked in on a couple of the groups I used to follow via google groups this morning.

The moderated ones are simply moribund - moderators retire or get tired of the job and the groups just die and remain there frozen in time.

Unmoderated groups seem to be full of irrelevant porn and posts offering dodgy financial services, and even the mad conspiracy theorists who used to rave on about the fringes of US politics seem to have moved to another echo chamber.

I guess that's how services end, not a bang, not a whimper, but a long drawn out death rattle ...

Technology and me in 2023...

It has become something of a tradition for me to blog about my personal use of technology in the past year about now.

There’s nothing particularly special about this year, I havn’t updated or replaced any of my machines with the exception of my putting my money where my mouth was and building a distraction free lightweight machine for research, which, because I finally finished the pandemic interrupted documentation of Dow’s pharmacy a few weeks later, hasn’t seen as much use as I hoped.

I expect that to change in the new year, but until then I’m enjoying my downtime.

The refurbished Thinkpad I bought in 2022 to allow me to finish the documentation of Dow’s gave excellent service, and will probably see me onto another documentation project.

My now five year old windows 10 laptop that sits on my desk continues to work well, and I don’t yet feel a need to upgrade it.

The only doubts I have are about the very lightweight computer I had bought a few years ago to replace my Macbook Air as a travel computer.

It gave excellent service until we were in a remote area of Tuscany - I don't think being in the foothills of the Appenines had anything to do with it, it was more a case of creeping software bloat - when it started complaining about swap space. 

As a temporary fix I deleted a whole lot stuff, told it to write everything more than a day old to OneDrive, and removed various little used applications.

That worked, but it still gets slow when using chrome with a lot (>5) tabs open.

Various solutions are possible, including converting it to Linux, and using basically the same build as I did with the lightweight research machine, perhaps with the addition of chromium and some basic photo editing software.

However, before I do that I need to check the specification carefully I have an eMMC based model (why it was so cheap in the first place) and linux support can be a bit tricky on eMMC based machines.

I actually don't know this - looking at the blogs and discussion boards some people seem to have had trouble with eMMC machines - of course you never hear of the success stories. I would assume that the eMMC device presents itself as a standard storage device, so it should work. Equally, while the machine is more or less usable, I don't particularly want to brick it - probably procrastination with a purpose is a valid way of dealing with the problem.

(Confusingly Lenovo also sell an SSD based version of the same machine in some markets and as you would expect, Linux works well on the SSD machines.)

The alternative is to buy a refurbished machine as an alternative travel computer – refurbished due to the cost, and also because I don’t really want to carry around anything with a screen size much over 12”, if only because a lot of my backpacks only really support a 12” screen size.

Basic machines tend to some with larger screens these days, making them a non starter.

Or I could just use the lightweight research machine (or indeed my Chromebook, which has the problem of having only a single USB3 port which means that I would need to carry an external card reader around for photo imports.)

All of that’s a decision for the coming year.

Again my pandemic era Huawei tablet continues to perform well as does the dogfood tablet, both doing everything I ask of them.

I still have my old mac mini and keyboard combo as a note taker, but again, since the end of the Dow’s documentation project it’s seen relatively little use.

While it seemed a big deal at the time we went from an FTTC to a pure fibre FTTP connection here at chez Moncur - after the initial hassle of the migration process it faded into the background and totally unnoticeable, as all good infrastructure upgrades should.

All in all the only major change has been my ditching an iPhone for a mid range Android phone, after being so impressed by the performance of my Oppo phone when we went travelling earlier this year.

I’ve always had a suspicion that Apple is not the most cost effective for phone purposes and that there was nothing particularly special about their hardware capability and having swapped from android to Apple’s walled garden and back again, I’m more and more sure that they are over priced for what they deliver – a bit like the early 1990’s mini computer market where Digital was clearly the dominant player, and their hardware was good and highly capable, but there were all these other newer, more cost effective, manufacturers with Unix based machines that year by year became more and more capable and eventually pushed them out of the market. These vendors in turn fell victim to Linux on upspecc'd commodity hardware... 

Another possible skirt weight

 

Back in September I blogged about how I'd found a possible nineteenth century skirt weight while gardening.

Well I've found another, a quite attractive one made of blue glass. I don't think there's anything significant in the colour, I suspect they were typically made of either recycled or waste glass.

But the colour is significant in another way. When I say I found it, I simply picked it up off an empty patch of dirt in the yard.

We've been having a problem with  a native bird (or birds) that has a liking for blue objects. They've picked out all the blue clothes pegs out of the peg basket and scattered them round the yard, and have stolen other blue items from elsewhere, including a pair ear defenders and a bright blue lanyard.

In this case, because the glass weight was lying on the surface of an undug patch of garden I suspect that a bird had picked it out of someone else's garden and dropped it here ...

So why were there no Roman ghosts in the nineteenth century?

My little post about Roman ghosts was not being a thing in the nineteenth century, of course leads on to the obvious question of why?

Well, I don’t know, but I have a theory.

Nineteenth century people loved ghost stories, as much, if not more than we do. Like us they liked being creeped out, so it’s not a distaste for the actual idea of ghosts.

It's more to do with a lack of awareness of Roman remains in Britain in the nineteenth century.

Thirty or so years ago I used to live in the middle of York, near the centre of the old city, in a nineteenth century terraced house, and the standing joke was that if you wanted your garden dug over, all that you had to do was notify the York Archaeological Trust that you’d found something, and you’d get a van load of spade wielding diggers round that afternoon.

Not true, but there’s a bit of truth in the story. Archaeology only achieved any sort of popularity in the nineteen eighties, before that it was seen as an occupation of dotty academics who spent the summer poking about ruins in Greece or Italy, or equally enthusiastically went on about crop marks.

Again not true, but not exactly untrue either.

Lets wind back to the nineteenth century.

There was no archaeology until the latter half of the nineteenth century. There was the odd antiquarian, and some of them were quite odd, who would sometimes investigate the odd bronze age grave mound or some Roman masonry they found on their property, but that was about it.

Some were quite systematic, and some were decided amateurs, and some like seventeenth century antiquarian Edward Lhwyd made valid inferences based on the evidence available.

Archaeology as we know it developed on the back of Schliemann’s mis-discovery of Troy and the discoveries of Nineveh and Babylon, and was something that happened out there, rather than closer to home.

It’s only later, in the early twentieth century that one starts to see something like systematic archaeological investigations in England and Wales.

While local antiquarian societies would occasionally sponsor digs, and finds of  Roman coins and pottery would occasionally be reported in newspapers, reports only start to become common after about 1880 - which is slightly strange as I thought the railway construction boom of the mid 1800s might sometimes  turn up Roman remains, but if they did, they appear not to have been reported widely in the newspapers of the day.

Before the early twentieth century, little was known about the Roman presence, because there actually were relatively few visible remains from the Roman period, people simply forgot about the Romans, and hence no stories about Roman ghosts, because there was nothing to inspire them ...

Roman ghosts in the nineteenth century

 I've been down an internet rabbit hole on this one - I was reading Irving Finkel's The first ghosts about ghosts in early Mesopotamian culture.

In passing Finkel discusses how deeply embedded in our culture stories about ghosts or encounters with ghosts are and I was reminded of the story of the Roman soldiers appearing in the Treasurer's House in York.

For no reason other than it was raining, I wondered about nineteenth century newspaper accounts of encounters with Roman Ghosts and turned to Welsh Newspapers online.

Interestingly, there are none.

Sure, there are plenty of articles about ghosts and encounters with ghosts, but none with Roman ghosts.

Trove is much the same if you search over the long nineteenth century, say 1800-1914.

Yet if you search the Google Books corpus with the Ngram viewer you get a small number of hits

(click to view)

but random sampling some of the links suggests that very few if any items link to stories about encounters with Roman ghosts.

It's not as if people didn't tell ghost stories - a young Charlotte Bronte was reprimanded at school for scaring the purple pussy cats out of her room mates by telling ghost stories after dark, but despite both the interest and familiarity with the classics in the nineteenth century, and the popularity of gothic novels in the first half of the nineteenth century, Roman ghosts seem not to feature ...

Optus

 Yesterday, for causes still unknown, Optus, Australia's second biggest telco, went off line.

While we all had a bit of a snigger about the lady who found out about the outage by her cat complaining to management that the wifi enabled cat feeder was offline and not dispensing cat nibbles as it should, it does show how dependent we are on the internet.

Imagine the following scenario:

A health worker trying to get to work yesterday - the commuter trains in Melbourne stopped because signalling relies on Optus - and of course because the internet was down they couldn't get a cab or an Uber, and if they were lucky enough to flag down a cab old style, they were unable to pay because the cab's eftpos was down.

Oh, and the hospital couldn't text you to say your appointment was postponed due to staff shortages.

That's just one scenario.

I'm sure there's more. And because the internet is pervasive, when we lose connectivity, the world stops.

Equally, it's not just about the ability to make calls or send texts, its about performing basic tasks like paying bills, ordering your groceries. It's how we consume media, be it Spotify, online radio, or catchup TV - it's notable that outside the cities Australia doesn't do DAB - it's internet based radio in one form or another. 

When I was in rural Tuscany in a village which remarkably had no mobile phone signal, life carried on because there was really good wifi. People texted, made phone calls, even put their rubbish out - the dumpsters were internet enabled and you needed a magic card to open one  - because they had internet access.

So, what the Optus outage shows us is that the internet is the jizz that keeps things running. And because of that we need to consider what steps we need to make to give resilience.

And that's where it gets tricky. People are focusing on roaming as a solution, where if your mobile internet provider goes down you fail over onto another network, much as what happens with SOS calls in rural areas.

However, that's not the complete answer - remember Optus went down, not only taking out their mobile services but their fixed infrastructure NBN based services, which is why some businesses had problems, and that is a trickier one to resolve...

Travel in 2023

 As I've written elsewhere we've just been to Europe for a few weeks.

Many things were different from pre pandemic travel - like that the use of cash had disappeared.

Yes cabs and informal market vendors preferred cash, as did cafes in Italy if all you wanted was a couple of espresso lungos, but in the main Europe had gone cashless. Having a low cost debit card such as our ING bank cards proved invaluable, as did having a second debit card, this time from HSBC, for dealing with self service petrol pumps and automated motorway toll stations - I have a paranoia about one of these machines swallowing my card.

In the even all the motorway toll plazas accepted contactless payments and the self service petrol pumps proved reliable - none of the fun and games we had in Portugal a few years ago where selfservice pumps would randomly take a dislike to an overseas card and spit them back out in disgust.

We did use trains and planes, and where possible we preprinted our tickets before we left.

Telstra has this absolutely stupid way of charging a flat $10 fee  per day for roaming which made downloading tickets to our phones an expensive exercise - although we did take a phone with roaming enabled, and installed the various train booking apps on it in case one of the scanners along the way didn't like one of our printouts.

I guess we could have download the tickets over wifi prior to travelling, and stored them in a wallet application, but to be honest, I didn't think of that, especially as I didn't realise that French train stations now need you to scan your ticket prior to boarding - Italy is still old school with train conductors who carry what looks like a modified phone to scan your ticket.

The Oppo phone performed excellently, and Belong's roaming coverage was so good we didn't need to buy a second local SIM card.

In fact I was so impressed with the Oppo's performance, especially with 5G, that when we got back to Australia I decided to ditch my pandemic era iPhone SE and use the Oppo as my phone, and sell my iPhone to a refurbisher, there being a healthy market in old iPhones, even the lowly 4G only SE.

(Incidentally I don't regret the iPhone SE purchase - it did its job, and did it well, but having used a more advanced phone like the Oppo, its limitations were self evident)

Our rental car in Italy for some reason didn't have a GPS, instead you were supposed to pair your phone with it over Bluetooth. Belong's data allowances proved more than adequate for getting us to and from rural Tuscany.

Google maps did get us lost in Siena - I suspect it lost the signal and directed us round in a loop. Restarting the phone cured the problem.

Airports almost universally used self service machines that scanned your passport and then retrieved your booking allowing you to both print your boarding pass and check your bags, and with the exception of Marseilles all the airports had smart gates with facial recognition. In Marseilles we had to line up old style and have our passports stamped.

Interestingly, in Bologna, while they had smart gates they still had a pair of border guards in a booth solely to put an exit stamp in your passport.

Britain and Singapore no longer required any entry and exit stamps, although Singapore did need you to fill in an online form in advance, basically replacing the old arrivals card that you used to have to complete.

The other thing that I found surprising was the pervasiveness across Europe of Whatsapp as a communication mechanism, especially in rural Tuscany where sometimes mobile phone coverage was surprisingly poor, but wifi was everywhere ...

twitter and the enshittification of academic social media

 It's a year (more or less) since twitter was bought by Elon Musk and began its journey to becoming X.

I'm not going to comment on the changes, I jumped ship sometime ago, more because of the gradual change in content, than any inherent distaste for the new ownership.

Basically, what was happening was enshittification where the signal to noise ratio on a particular channel rises to a level to no longer make it useful. It's also why I don't do facebook, or insta, or anything else - too much crap.

Interestingly there's a post going around about how a large part of the academic community has stayed on twitter because of the community - essentially people are staying there because people are there, and none of the alternatives, for example Mastodon, have the critical mass of individuals to make it worthwhile posting.

Now I'm not an academic, or even a retired academic, but I have been a digital archiving specialist and more recently worked as volunteer on a project for the National Trust to document the contents of Dow's Pharmacy, and certainly twitter, with its large community, was tremendously useful when I had a something like a transcription problem on a handwritten label.

Equally, it let me stand on the sidelines and follow my lifelong interest in Roman history and archaeology.

Twitter was indeed valuable.

However, I don't miss it.

Using a RSS reader (I use inoreader) has allowed me to assemble a set of feeds that let me follow my interests in both Roman things and Victorian murders and pharmacology. Likewise mastodon gives me a platform where I follow enough people to get the happenstance effect - like ninety per cent of everything posted is crap irrelevant, but every so often there's something interesting or relevant.

However, what I do see is the fragmentation of communication, with material appearing on SubStack etc, as well as other social media platforms, leading to a loss of universality.

 For a long time twitter was the default because  it was the only game in town, and classic blogging platforms because they've been around for years and provided an established platform for longer more complex posts.

Now things are more fragmented, and that, potentially, is a problem ...

Not posting links anymore ...

 For years, since 2007 in fact. I used to post links of things I found interesting to a certain microblogging site now known as X.

Well, as we know, there's been some changes with X, so on the back of them I took the opportunity not only to quit twitter, but also to abandon all the socials except for Mastodon, and even though I could have started using Mastodon in the same way as I did twitter, I decided to dial it down and post rarely.

That left me with a little problem - my loyal ex followers.

Amazingly, well to me anyway, some people actively followed my feed and used it as an information source, so to provide a bridge I started accumulating links and posting them to a wiki.

This wasn't terribly arduous - it probably took about an extra fifteen minutes out of my day to save the copied URL's to a text document, add required markup and copy and paste them into my wiki's edit window.

But it did demand that I had time every day to do this.

Well in the old days, when the internet was a plaything of academia, and before everything was always on 24/7 you could leave a .vacation message along the lines of 

I am gone from my desk and may be away for a few weeks

and then disappear to the wilds of Anatolia or the rain forests of Laos and no one would care that much.

Well, we're going travelling again for the first time in ages - nowhere terribly exotic - and as I might not have time to post regularly, I decided to can the wiki posting experiment.

How much use it was to people I don't know, as I deliberately didn't turn on many metrics.

Personally, I found it a useful exercise to revisit my  wiki editing skills, and certainly I'll be adding pages to my wiki site in the future.

It also helped me in the process of disengaging from social media by giving me a mechanism to withdraw from compulsively posting anything I found interesting rather than reading it analytically, something I think everyone is guilty of sometimes.

So it's been valuable - hopefully some other people have also got some value from it.

I'm not going totally silent - being a bit of an internet chatterbox I will be posting the odd thing to Mastodon but I'm going to try and keep it dialed down ...

Field Notes

 A few days ago I posted a link about field notes from Christchurch archaeology to my links page for this week.

Personally I find field notes and how people use them fascinating, ever since I first managed botanists.

 Full of scribbles, marginal notes and the rest they record the progress of a survey, or an archaeological dig in the raw, with all the gritty details, mistakes, corrections and the rest.

And there is still a role for the field notebook/workbook/lab notebook in research, even if the final version ends up written up a little more formally and these days electronically.

And it’s the immediacy aspect that governs the use of notebooks.

For example, even when putting together a set of notes for family history research, I find there’s an intermediate stage when one writes down some rough notes and then writes them up in a more coherent manner – probably I ought to maintain a genealogy workbook, but I’m afraid I tend to use scrap paper and photograph any of my scrawls that are potentially useful.

So while the lightweight research machine is excellent for writing things up and putting things together systematically as one goes, I find I need a rough book.

And it is the immediacy factor – it doesn’t matter too much about the weather, one can simply pull out the rough book to write something down.

I’ve tried using an iPad, and while they’re great for a lot of desk based work – recording references and the like – they do need an internet connection for a lot of applications to work.

Paper is immediate.

So, when I was documenting Dow’s, a rough book formed part of the process.

As the various bottles and boxes contained god knows what, and possibly in a dubious condition the use of nitrile gloves to protect one’s hands was a given. Personally, I find it almost impossible to type even on a full size keyboard wearing nitrile gloves, and on a smaller size keyboard well, it just doesn’t work.

So, when examining the artefact I would write a basic description in my rough book

My workbook was more than usually illegible, but as I was the only one reading it that didn’t really matter. Sometimes there were crossings out and correction, but as the object descriptions were fairly well structured, pages tended to follow the same layout: object: separator: object and with aspects listed line by line.

After I’d examined and photographed the object I would upload, review, and edit the object photographs, and then add the image names to my rough book, before adding the object to the cataloguing spreadsheet.

This method is fairly generic, and having a rough book like this allows you to check back on your work to make sure you havn’t miskeyed something or missed something….

House and garden archaeology

 We live in an old wooden house, the core of which probably dates to the 1880's.

Exactly when I'm not sure, but like all wooden houses it has been extended and changed over the years, and while the front of the house looks authentic (but isn't, for example our front door and the Victorian etched glass in the door case dates to 1860 and came from a completely different house) the rear of the house most definitely is not, with multiple extensions over the years, most recently by ourselves in 2016.

I could, I suppose, research the date the house was originally built, but certainly, in 1856, while the block had been surveyed when the town was laid out, the town plan does not show a house on the block,

I've been told that at one time our block formed part of an orchard, and that the brewery sometimes stabled dray horses on it.

Certainly I've found an old horseshoe and a broken set of nineteenth century farriers' pliers, so perhaps there's some truth in the story.

In the course of gardening I've turned up old ceramic electrical fittings, the neck of a nineteenth century bottle, an old flat iron, a couple of 1920's medicine bottles, and a lot of broken glass, mostly from nineteenth and early twentieth century beer bottles.

So turning up bits and pieces isn't that unusual.

Today's finds consisted of a little glass object that looked a little like a glass chocolate button, and what at first sight  looked like the base of a nineteenth century medicine bottle, except that

the glass is very clear and transparent and lacks the thickness and also the little bubbles and inclusions typically found in nineteenth century glass. My guess is that it's a bit of a relatively modern, say post war, bottle that was made in the style of an earlier bottle.

The other find is a little more interesting, a little glass object around 15mm in diameter and shaped a little like a chocolate button

The glass is almost certainly nineteenth century with a greenish hue and little air bubbles trapped in it

My guess is that it is a skirt weight from the hem of a woman's dress in the nineteenth century.

Skirt weights were sewn into the hems of skirts and dresses to stop them blowing about and to help them hang properly.

Unfortunately, while the internet provides plenty of examples of metal nineteenth century hem weights, I've been unable to turn up any images of glass hem weights.

The end of wordpad

 

I recently tooted an article from The Register that Microsoft was killing off WordPad.

To be honest I'd forgotten that WordPad existed, but its demise is symptomatic of the move to cloud centric computing.

Now sometimes you need to produce some minimally formatted text.

Focuswriter, while great as a distraction free editor, doesn't let you structure text. You could, of course, use Markdown and do the whole Pandoc thing, but realistically you wouldn't - we're visual beings, and  sometimes you need something simple to organise your thoughts with.

Solutions that hark back to the days of green on black VT100's and LaTeX really don't fly.

On the lightweight research machine, I must admit to using AbiWord simply because it's not particularly CPU intensive, and despite a few idiosyncrasies it works well enough for making a document with headers, bullet points and a bit of text with inline formatting, and you can save the document in a format something else can read, such as .odt .

This of course doesn't help you if you're on Windows.

Usually I use GoogleDocs, but that, of course, assumes an internet connection, which is not always the case - V/line trains for example, which don't have wifi, making offline working the default. (It's of course possible to use Google Docs offline, but you first need to be online to make the document available offline - not ideal.)

To do most of what you need you probably only need an rtf capable editor that doesn't need an internet connection. Googling suggests a number of  alternative, but I'm hesitant about recommending one until I've tried them ...

So how did I document the contents of Dow's?

 

The actual procedure was pretty straightforward – basically the pharmacy contents consisted of carboard boxes and glass bottles.

The bottles, especially after the consolidation of the Australian glass industry  in the 1920s, were all pretty similar, and the cardboard boxes, were, well cardboard boxes.

Some were interesting in terms of their design

 

But all were much of a muchness.

What it comes down to is that bottles are on the whole pretty boring, but the stories they can tell are interesting such as what the distribution of bottles of Owbridge’s lung tonic tells us about trade in the nineteenth century.

So, the procedure was fairly simple:

The pharmacy was divided into a set of areas, and a thematically named directory was created for each area.

Photographs were taken of each area and a Markdown document was created for each area as a finding aid, listing the locations of the objects.

Markdown was chosen as it is a well known structured text format and can be read without special software.  Filenames were of the format area_name.md

An excel spreadsheet was created for each area. Each spreadsheet has four columns, a sequence number, an object description an image column and a comments field. Filenames are of the format area_name.xslx.

Description fields contain the following, the object type, eg a glass bottle or a cardboard box, the label contents if present and whether the contents are present. If the contents are liquid this is noted as an aid to future conservation work. Colons are used to delimit the individual parts of the entry as an aid to converting and manipulating the data for ingest into some long term preservation solution.

An example entry may read

hexagonal blue glass bottle ~100mm: cork stopper: no label: contents not present

The second image column contains filename of a digital image of the object. Images are always stored in a sub directory named Reference Pictures

If the object is a cardboard box the image will be of the box and any contents, such as a metal ointment tube.

The final column is a freeform colon delimited text field.

If the object is a bottle and has a label, typically the first entry will the filename of an image of the label followed by an image of the rear label if present, then any embossing on the bottle. If a manufacturer is known the manufacturer will always be the last entry.

Information about manufacturers and individual products was researched and saved in a OneNote notebook to assist with the creation of detailed catalogue entries where required.

If the item is a cardboard box, the first four entries will be photographs of the faces of the box, followed by a description of the contents and one or more photographs of the box contents. As before, the final entry will be the manufacturers name if known.

Each object was examined and photographed and the basic parameters recorded. If leakage or damage was noticed, this was recorded in the comments section.

In the case of a cardboard box, it will be noted if the box was judged too fragile to be opened and the contents examined. Likewise it will be recorded if the box was sealed, preventing further examination.

At no time was any container opened due to the risks associated with exposure to the contents.

A variation in this methodology was used in documenting the contents of drawers in the shop area of the pharmacy.

·    Drawers were documented in sequence starting at the top left and finishing at the bottom right

·    Each drawer is to have its label and contents photographed in situ

·    Each drawer is to be treated as an individual artefact and the contents are to be documented as a set of contents within the artefact

o   Each separate artefact’s description is to be added to the comments field and  is to be prefaced with the word contains

o   Where an artefact itself contains multiple objects each component object is to be recorded in the comments field and prefaced with the string item_contains

·       Contents may then be removed, photographed and documented in the standard manner

·       Each drawer label is to be recorded.

·     If the label is damaged or missing that is to be recorded along with the position of the drawer in sequence

So essentially one ends up with a directory with a human readable name that contains a finding aid in markdown format, an excel spreadsheet and a subdirectory containing all the reference pictures.

 

 

                                                                                                         

Standardising my Linux machines

 I'm well pleased with my latest iteration of a lightweight research machine, that I decided that I would rebuild the old Dell 6320 that I used in the earlier Xubuntu based iteration.

This machine sits in a corner of the outdoor studio, really a converted garage, and has been running the Raspberry Pi X86 desktop.

The machine doesn't need to do much - really all it does is let me look at the weather forecast when I'm working outside in the garden, and perhaps write up the odd gardening note.

In part, this is because the outdoor studio is currently a giant junk pile, but we have plans to clean it out this summer to provide a large painting space for J and provide me with a project bench for playing with old cameras etc.

And that of course means I'll need a machine in there to look up old camera manuals etc.

Even though the Dell's battery is not in the best of health the machine has a decent sized screen and a keyboard that is reasonably nice to type on.

So this afternoon I installed crunchbang linux. The network connection in the studio isn't quite as robust as it could be, and my first attempt at an install failed when the wifi repeater reset itself, but the second time installation just worked giving me a usable machine.

As the machine's not going to see serious use in the first instance it's not quite the same as my more serious lightweight machine -  I decided not to set up deja dup, or add my extra applications (kate, ristretto, notable etc - these can be installed later if need be) as for the moment all I really need is a web browser and a text editor for writing raw markdown if required ...

Why a folksonomy?

 When I was cataloguing the contents of Dow’s pharmacy I used a folksonomy rather than a formal controlled vocabulary.

A folksonomy is of course simply an informal controlled vocabulary that is readily extensible, which is a good thing where, as in Dows, there was no clear understanding of what exactly the contents of the pharmacy might be.

So, and object at Dows can be

• a glass jar – jars have wide openings
• a glass bottle – bottles are taller than they are wide and have narrow openings
• a cardboard box
• something else such as a metal or plastic tube

a glass bottle can be

• clear – contents for internal use
• brown – contents for external use
• blue – contains something very nasty

except in very early bottles, blue and brown bottles are usually embossed Not to be Taken, and ribbed to aid identification in poor light. (incidentally it’s because of this ribbing we could say with some degree of plausibility that green pharmacy bottles are an alternative to brown bottles)

So, you get the idea, it’s quite simple to build up a classification model, and because we’re not encumbered by any previous sets of terms used, make up something that is human readable as well as machine readable.

The point about it being machine readable is that the standardisation of terms makes it easy to import and convert object descriptions into a more complex schema (as well as auto generate catalogue entries in the standard house style.)

So why did I use a folksonomy rather than pillaging an existing controlled vocabulary?

Well, folksonomies are simple, make sense to the humans doing the cataloguing – in this case it was only me, but if someone else had joined me on the project it would have been fairly simple to write down a set of definitions so that everything was classified the same way.

I’ve found in the past that using a controlled vocabulary doesn’t really work – the people actually doing the cataloguing tend to find them too complex to work with, and as a consequence you tend to find one person’s bottle is another person’s jar.

So, in cataloguing as in so much else in life, keeping things simple pays dividends...

The costs of citizen science (part ii)

Until very recently I've been volunteering as, what I'm not sure - something between a cataloguer and a curator - to document the contents of Dow's pharmacy in Chiltern.

Back in 2020 I blogged about the costs of being a volunteer.

While they're not substantial, they do exist, but equally I've spent just as much money on my other interests - researching Victorian murderers, old cameras and family history, so I can't really complain.

However, coincident with finishing up on Dow's I filled in this year's tax return. 

I don't work, I'm retired and we live on our superannuation and aged pension payments, but I also get a small pension from the UK Department of Work and Pensions.

The fiction is that this is treated as if it was earned  income and taken into account by both Centrelink and the Australian Tax Office. It normally sits comfortably below the thresholds for tax or being penalised for working while claiming Centrelink benefits, but recently our dollar has not being doing that well against the pound,  its value has increased.

So, I wondered if there was a way of offsetting expenses incurred as a volunteer against tax, just as I did when I was working.

The answer's utterly unambiguous. 

No.

The ATO has the perfectly reasonable viewpoint that if you are a volunteer, you are donating your time freely, and cannot be deemed an employee or self-employed. Interestingly the ATO do recognise that you may have out of pocket expenses as a volunteer and that rather than reclaiming petty cash payments for things like rubber gloves and notebooks, it's perfectly acceptable to be paid as small honorarium, ie an ex gratia lump sum payment in lieu of any petty cash expenses incurred.

In fact it's a pretty sensible approach.

However, we have a little problem here. In both the ATO's view, and  organisation such as Volunteering Victoria, a volunteer is a volunteer, no matter what they do. 

So, if you go along to an archaeological project, say, and wash pottery fragments, you'll have a great time and probably won't have much in the way of out of pocket expenses. If you volunteer as a finds officer on the same project, collecting and documenting these fragments, you'll need gloves, tweezers, magnifying glasses and access to a computer, and perhaps some cloud storage for data backup.

Again the costs are minimal, but may be a barrier to some people lending their expertise.

Having done the whole volunteer thing I think there regrettably needs to be a bit more formality about the process of becoming a volunteer with some sort of dummy contract that as well as rights and responsibilities, covers how minor expenses will be handled, hopefully in a way that does not cause a bureaucratic overhead.

Digitisation - what is it good for?

I'm sure everybody who works on digitisation projects has at some point worked with material so obscure that you wondered 'what's the bloody point?'

I certainly have. Not the big ticket stuff like Trove, but boring stuff like the correspondence of an obscure, and clearly personality challenged Victorian botanist whose private diary includes such gems as 

'Matilda came to tea today and we discussed saxifrages'

Yeah, exactly.

However, I have a personal story to show that all data is valuable.

Twenty years ago, when  I was (just) still living in England, I had an operation for varicose veins.

It's something that runs in my family, like my having slightly high blood pressure, my brother had them, my father had them, I had them.

And it wasn't due to lifestyle. My father swam, went walking, rode his bike well into his seventies and played golf as long as he was able to. My brother played cricket well into his forties. I went bushwalking and rode my bike, as well as running a decent distance three or four times a week.

As I say it's genetics, and unfortunately the cards you're dealt aren't always the best.

So, shortly before I moved permanently to Australia I had quite a radical procedure to strip out the damaged veins. Given the genetic component, it wasn't a guaranteed fix, and there was a 10-20% risk of recurrent varicosities associated with the procedure.

Well, for about fifteen years everything was fine, but one day when were at the beach J noticed a knotty purple patch behind my left knee. It wasn't painful, and if I rode my bike a bit more than usual it seemed to diminish, but it was clear that it wasn't going to go away.

So, I arranged to go and see a specialist. 

Didn't happen, the pandemic intervened and all treatment for non life threatening conditions was postponed.

Now I couldn't remember the precise details of the procedure, or the date. But I had read that you could ask the NHS in Britain for a copy of your case notes as a freedom of information thing.

So I emailed the hospital where I was treated and asked them if they still had my case notes as I wished to pass them to my specialist in Australia.

I fully expected that they would say no, they had long since been pulped, but to my great surprise, they said yes, they still had some of my records and even better, they had been digitised.

So after some to and fro over how I was to prove I was me - we settled on a scan of my passport and my UK national insurance number - they packaged up what they had for me to download as a password protected zip file.

They didn't have everything, but they had the details of the procedure, the results of the pre operation diagnostic tests, and the post operative assessment, which is probably all my Australian specialist will need when I see her next week.

So, key takeaway, digitisation and digital archiving is a good thing - it might just save you some pain and discomfort down the track...

Well we've finally got an FTTP connection ...

 

Well, we've finally got a working FTTP connection.

The NBN technicians came and installed our FTTP box yesterday - unfortunately they couldn't put it where we wanted it so it ended up under one of the study windows on the wall without power sockets and is currently connected to power via an extension lead and to the modem via a 10m cat5e cable I just happened to have.

Ideally this should probably be a cat6 cable, but being country, you can't just nip out and buy a 10m network cable, you need to order one and wait for it to come in the mail. However swapping the cable is incredibly straight forward and the NBN people even give you a little guide as to how to pop the top of the FTTP box to swap the cable, so I don't think it's going to be a drama.

Apart from having to end up on the 'wrong' wall the physical installation was fine. Any confusion in the process came from the NBN and Telstra people using different scripts.

For example, Telstra called me the day before and checked if we were ready to go ahead (we were), and explicitly said that after the physical installation, I should keep everything connected to the (old) FTTC connection.

The NBN people of course swapped everything to the new FTTP connection, which even though physically connected didn't work as there has to be a migration process by Telstra.

Our modem, which has automatic failover to 5G, did exactly that, much to my surprise.

Normally it just complains about a poor signal - I'm guessing we must have finally have got coverage, even if it's not officially in production yet.

Anyway, I swapped it back to the old FTTC wiring for the afternoon and was duly rewarded with a working connection.

In their usual helpful way, Telstra then sent me an email to say that they were going to transfer the service from FTTC to FTTP, but to stay connected to FTTC, closely followed by one say they couldn't see the modem on the FTTP service.

I'd already got the cables in place to swap over between the connections and plugged in the FTTP connection, and hey presto!, it worked.

There's still a few minor details to be sorted out, including what to do with the old NBN FTTC box that has a sticker on it saying it belongs to NBNco and should not be removed from the premises, but we'll get there ...

I might actually have finished ...

 If you've been following this blog, you'll be aware that I've spent the last six years documenting  the contents of Dow's Pharmacy in Chiltern for the National Trust.

Due to the pandemic, the whole exercise has taken longer than it should, but even so, four and a bit years of work has gone into it.

Well I'm finished now. Possibly not finished finished, as there were a couple of ambiguities in the brief that might see me back to document some unprovenanced material, but even so, it's more or less done.

I've had a lot of fun doing it, but now that it's over, I'm strangely relieved ...

An unexpected plus with the lightweight machine

 As I'm sure you're all to aware, a lot of modern software tends to assume the presence of an internet link, if only to sync local filestore contents to a cloud service in real time.

The prime example is Apple's Pages, especially when used on an iPad, but a lot of Microsoft office products are heading that way as well

On the whole this is a plus, but sometimes it can be a pain if you are working somewhere with poor connectivity, such as a hole in a paddock, otherwise known as an archaeological dig.

One unexpected benefit of my current iteration of the lightweight research machine is that it doen't require an internet connection to do its stuff.

Sure it's useful, but not necessary.

I'd like to say that this was a deliberate design feature, but I didn't really think about the zero connectivity scenario, I'd become so used to having connectivity, if only over a 4G modem link.

Dumping everything in ~/documents and then running deja dup when one gets back to base, or even a coffee shop with decent wifi, meets the requirements to back up work in progress, but allows you to work offline when required.

For the really paranoid, or really remote, work in progress data can be written to a usb stick as a backup.

Simples really. 

Hardware reuse and recycling

 I recently boosted a post about how some US school systems have come up against a problem with Chromebooks - the fact they fall off the supported hardware list after about five or six years.

This is a problem.

Often the hardware has more life left in it that the artificial cut off date, and while in the past I've used a chromebook well past its use by date, this is not something that you would want to do in a production environment where you need everything to be kept at (more or less) the same release level.

Now, you might think I would go all precious and point to how I turned a 10 year old refurbished machine into a decent little research workhorse, but I won't.

It's one thing for me to do this, it's another thing to do  this at scale and provide a supported environment, simply because to do it at scale would need technicians to do the installation and troubleshooting, some user training, and a little helpdesk team to support the user community. And that of course costs - human beings are incredibly expensive to employ compared with the other costs involved.

I'm not saying it couldn't be done, but to quote a former colleague 'yes, but you're you', ie I have the experience, expertise and technical skills to put together a solution that works for me.

Not everyone does so, nor should we expect them to.

What one of course needs is an easy to install, easy to maintain, Chromebook like environment with some user support behind it.

Given that most educational services have a set of preferred hardware this ought to be possible to deliver, but other than a few experiments in Latin America, such as Huayra, I'm damned if I can think of one ...

[update 04/08/2023]

One of the problems with the longterm support of Chromebooks is that often they use weird processors rather than the standard Intel range, which complicates the problem of updating them to an alternate operating system for long term support.

However, I've just learned of a new project, LaCros, that aims to allow you to install an updated browser on top of the old ChromeOS monolithic operating system and browser binary.

As the browser component is updated more frequently than the operating system on Chromebooks this potentially provides a way of running a more recent and secure browser on an older version of the underlying operating system.

Some FTTP progress ...

 We've recently moved back to Telstra in order to get our link upgraded to FTTP.

Well we've had some progress, and I'm quietly impressed. 

The Monday after I made the upgrade request Telstra texted me an install date, which is rather sooner than they first said - which is good, and about ten minutes later I had a second text to tell me not to be alarmed if a strange man in orange hi-vis gear came into our yard - it was a pre installation survey so that they could check how to route the cable.

They also sent me a link to an amazingly sensible little video about what happens during the installation to help us prepare.

Clearly, they've done this before ...

[update 20/07/2023]

Well, we got rather more than a single man in hi-vis - we got a truck full of Bengali speaking cable guys. 

I was down at Chiltern working on the Dow's documentation project, but they phoned me as they'd arrived while J had nipped out to the supermarket, to ask if it was ok if they dug a trench, and MMS's me a couple of pictures of the front yard and the wall of our house showing where they were going to dig the trench and bring the cable up.

J talked to them when she got home and double checked what they were doing - they didn't  have particularly good English - with the result that we now have a fibre optic cable and NBN Fibre Optic termination point on the wall of the house - all we need now is for Telstra to install our fibre optic connection module ...

Another iteration of the lightweight research machine

 A couple of weeks ago I put together a post about how you could use an old laptop to make a distraction free writing machine.

That was in part informed by my experience documenting at Dow's and also various attempts to make a lightweight linux machine for research, first with an old Eee PC, and later on an old Dell laptop.

Well, the Eee has long since gone to the recyclers, and the old Dell laptop now sits in the outside studio as a general purpose machine - in practice it proved a little too bulky to carry about.

So, for this exercise I picked up an old Lenovo Edge 11 for around a hundred bucks, which when it booted up showed its origins:

but the screen was nice and clear, the keyboard clean and fully functional, as was the trackpad.The only problem is the battery, which is obviously in need of replacement - basically it gives a bare 30minutes of power, which really isn't enough.

However, that's an exercise for another day - new compatible batteries are around $40-45, so it's not a stretch.

The machine had come with Windows 10 professional but I decided that I didn't need another windows machine in my life and installed the Debian 12 Crunchbang plus plus linux distro in its place.

(I'm a quiet fan of this distro due to its incredibly small footprint and the fact it runs well on older machines. It's derived from Philip Newborough's original Crunchbang linux, which I've used on and off over the years.)

Installation just worked and in an hour or so I had a working machine

Crunchbang comes with a decent set of preconfigured software, including LibreOffice and Gnumeric, to which I added

• Focuswriter for distraction free writing
• Notable for building up little collections of notes
• Ristretto, purely because it's my preferred image viewer,
• Kate, my preferred editor
• Ghostwriter for when I don't want to write raw markdown
• Deja-Dup to back up to cloud storage

My plan basically is to dump all the created content, including Notable's .notes in ~/documents and then use Deja-Dup to back it up to my OneDrive account.

Stuff I've been working on and want to move elsewhere can simply be uploaded via the web or emailed using a service like EmailItin.

There's no mail client installed, deliberately, and nothing that will beep or bong in the background, meaning that it can be treated as a distraction free machine but the browser is there to check email, or indeed anything else. As always, the key is discipline, and for this to work as a distraction free work machine you do need a bit of commitment to avoid sliding into aimless surfing as a displacement activity.

The desktop is OpenBox and satisfyingly minimalist, with little or nothing in the way of annoying widgets. I, of course did have the fun of editing the XML configuration file for the Window manager to add my extra applications to the menu - being old school I edited the raw XML rather than the funky menu editor I've never quite got to grips with.

All in all it probably took a couple of hours, and I'm pleasantly pleased with the result ...

[update 25/07/2023]

Well I cracked and bought a replacement battery - a new one rather than a reconditioned one - for about $45 - fully charged it gives me a nominal two and three quarter hours which is enough for most desk use where there's no access to power, such as on the train or some public libraries.

Well pleased.

Moving back to Telstra ...

A long time ago, just before last Christmas in fact, I had an email from NBNco saying that we could have an upgrade to a pure fibre optic connection, rather than our current FTTC connection.

The only problem was that our current ISP wasn’t part of the upgrade scheme.

I emailed them and asked them if they were going to participate. Naturally, they said yes, and even emailed me a link to an online form to register my interest.

Several months went by, during which time our FTTC connection started having more frequent minor dropouts, culminating in a complete failure one Sunday morning.

I phoned our ISP, who did some tests, agreed the link was dead, and said that they would refer it to NBNco as it looked like infrastructure.

In the meantime our link started working, but nevertheless, a couple of days later we had three NBN trucks outside our house. They poked, they fiddled, they repatched our connection, and it did seem to work better, but we were still getting short duration dropouts.

Clearly our current ISP, iiNet, wasn’t coming to the party, so it was time to change ISPs.

Now, we live in a rural area. While there’s a whole lot of participating ISPs listed on the fibre upgrade website, most of the smaller ones don’t have much of a presence outside of the cities, and will understandably use subcontractors to do all their installation and configuration work.

I’m personally very conservative about infrastructure. Of the three players with a significant local presence, only Telstra has boots on the ground.

So, while it’s more expensive, Telstra seemed to be the logical choice.

So, I contacted them.

You would think it would be a simple thing to change ISPs.

Not with Telstra.

Despite the fact I already have a mobile phone account with them (the joys of rural life) I had to go through Passport, Drivers Licence, credit and income checks.

Then, they found they couldn’t actually order a fibre optic upgrade without me being an established customer, so the solution was that we change to Telstra, and I then request an upgrade, which apparently you can do once every billing cycle – or month as we normally call them.

All in all, it took over two hours to actually sign up with them

Telstra insisted on supplying me with their own modem rather than have me simply reconfigure our existing device.

Now we have been having some very wet weather recently, and I was understandably concerned that it would be delivered and left out in the weather.

They assured me that they would use StarTrack to deliver the unit, and that it would be taken to the post office if there was no one home to sign for it. That didn’t quite go as planned – only when I got a text message from Telstra saying the unit had been delivered did I discover that StarTrack had left it on the mat.

The other problem about changing ISPs is that we have FetchTV service through iiNet.

We wanted to keep our Fetch service, and I needed to find out if we could migrate it successfully.

No one at Telstra knew, and they only wanted to sell us some expensive monolithic FoxTel subscription.

iiNet clearly wasn’t going to tell us, and FetchTV’s own website was singularly unhelpful.

I eventually found a technical support email for Fetch, so I contacted them and asked the question. A very helpful person at Fetch asked me to email them the box serial number, which brought the bad news that it was locked to iiNet, and we would need a new box, which given that the unit is five years old is not a drama. We of course need to configure the box before we can get new subscriptions, and before then we need to get our Telstra link working.

As luck would have it was Judi’s birthday that week, and we’d arranged to go to Melbourne for a couple of nights  to see the  Paul Bonnard exhibition and have dinner out in the city, and she had to moderate a Zoom conference when we got back, so no way was I going to do any installation work until after that was done.

I had told Telstra this at the time of ordering, but of course I got a scad of no-reply text messages asking why I hadn’t plugged the Telstra modem in yet.

I decided that the best thing to do was ignore them unless I got an email or call I could reply to.

Telstra ignored all of this and remotely reconfigured our existing modem, which was not a problem, it meant we had working internet when we came home.

Disconnecting the old modem and plugging in our new Telstra modem took all of five minutes – in fact the modem took longer to boot than it took to swap over.

It was then a case of swapping out our old locked to iiNet fetch box. Again the physical swap took less than five minutes followed  by twenty minutes sat on the lounge room floor with a laptop registering with Fetch and getting various magic activation codes.

In fact the longest part of the exercise was waiting for the box to run various firmware and software upgrades.

We then left things for twenty four hours to make sure that our connection was stable (it was) and then called the number Telstra had given me to call to request an FTTP upgrade.

It was a Saturday, and the call centre that dealt with FTTP upgrades was closed.

However, there’s always an alternative route with Telstra – I used the technical support chat service they provide to ask if they could process an upgrade request.

They could, and after twenty minutes or so of confirming details and agreeing that Telstra could seize and resell various body parts if we did not follow through we had a fibre upgrade request.

In fact, I need to compliment Telstra on their officiousness and thoroughness, they checked about home alarms, medical equipment monitors, if we had a panic alarm, warned us that things might be disconnected and not work during the upgrade process. They even asked if we needed (for a price) a technician to help swap cables. Totally unnecessary, but I can imagine various elderly relatives who might benefit from a service like that.

At the end of it I had a job reference number and we were set.

Apparently, someone from Telstra will call me later in the week to get things scheduled, they say it will take six to eight weeks, but living in a rural area I know that the timescales can be different from those stated, and if they have a crew in the area they might piggy back our job onto one they scheduled earlier.

Here’s hoping …