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 ...