Insight of the day? My website is rather large, taken everything together (the years of blogging, with images, have added up, and so do the shop pictures). Which means that if I take backups of the site (a good thing), I should sort of keep an eye on where I put them, and at some point delete them again.

I've been pretty good at doing that on the website/server itself, as there's limited space available there and I would have run out long ago otherwise. Not so good at keeping track of the backup backlog and buildup on my computer itself, where I'll pull older backups (but not so very old) before deleting them from the server, just in case. Or, when there's a larger change on the website coming up or a migration is necessary, I'll pull backups down and do a local install. 

Migrations and larger changes usually mean a generous number of backups, too. And I've been rather happy to close the thing after getting everything up and running when I did those larger changes... which means that the backups stayed in their little corner of my computer. No problem and nothing wrong with keeping them for a month or two, mind you, until it's clear that everything is running smoothly with the new setup.

However... after a month or two, I'd totally forget about having them. Until I've recently come across some, neatly and nicely labelled (as opposed to others) and realised how much space they are eating up, all of them combined.

So I've been doing a bit of maintenance on the side. Just in case you now feel like that might be something you should maybe do, here's my two favourite tools for finding and deleting stuff that has served its purposes:

WizTree - this scans your drive and sorts folders by how much space they take up. There's also a nice visual to quickly show you what you have, and how large individual folders and the files therein are. 

Anti-Twin - this looks for duplicate files and lets you remove them (either by selecting them manually, or by folder, or other criteria). It has not been updated since 2012, but it's still downloadable and does work with Windows 10, and according to the site also Windows 11.

As always, make sure you know what you're doing before deleting things - but don't be like me and hold on to ten year old double backups, just in case! ; ) 

Lead is, as probably everybody knows, a toxic metal - so it's not an utterly good idea to use it where it's not absolutely necessary. 

It was, however, widely used in a lot of places throughout history, because it's not only toxic, it's also very useful for a lot of things. Lead is soft and malleable, it can stand a lot of stress before breaking (it stretches instead), it makes a nice white (lead white), and it has a very low melting point - all things that led to lead being used for projectiles, water pipes, roofing, ceramic glazes, lead crystal, stained glass windows, and a plethora of other stuff (fuel additive, if you're looking for a rather modern example...).

Today, there's good replacements for lead about everywhere. However, in some instances in conservation and restoration, lead can still be a critical element, without a good replacement. Sometimes matching the original materials is crucial to prevent unwanted reactions between the original and the reconstructed parts. 

However, due to the toxicity, there's the plan to ban lead completely from being used, in all of Europe. This has been petitioned against by conservators. One of the issues is the primary ban of lead, the second issue is the very hard limits on lead "pollution" in the workspace. The petition, which is supported by German conservators, is currently running and on the EU portal. You can support it by signing it (that will require you to register, for free, on the portal) - and I'd be delighted if you would do so, and spread the word to other people too!

The petition on the EU portal can be found here, under 0724/2023. You can read more about the petition in German on the page of the Verband deutscher Restauratoren. 

It's finally Friday (though where did the week go so fast?) and it looks like there will be scones, and games, and some general relaxing... which sounds like just the thing.

So... with this random photo of madder roots, let me wish you a good weekend! 

It's still the time of the year for winter foods, and that means... cabbage (or at least includes it). I like cabbage in about all of its forms, including the much-disputed Brussel's Sprouts, and I have a few favourite and go-to preparation types for the different kinds of cabbage.

In case you're looking for medieval recipes for cabbage, Christopher Monk, who's doing research and recipe recreation of medieval recipes, has you covered. Check out his Cabbage Pottage blog post, with a number of recipes for more or less enriched cabbage dishes - spiced up and thickened with egg yolk if you're cooking for a lord, for instance.

I've finally finished my little presentation for the Knitting History Forum conference - of course it took longer than anticipated because there were more and more questions. Which, at one point, resulted in a very nice part of an evening spent looking at the twisting actions made by the needles when I am knitting... and figuring out what exactly is happening there. That was fun!

So I'm quite pleased with the outcome. Next challenge will be to explain it all within the time allotment that I have...

In case you're interested in the conference, you can still get tickets for it; it's online only and will take place on February 3.  

While we're at parallels... if you're asking me about my favourite book, I'd be hard pressed to give you an answer, there's quite a lot of them that I enjoy and like to re-read now and then. Even a favourite author would be a hard question to answer - there's a handful of them as well. (Jane Austen is among them, by the way, and C.J. Cherryh.)

But my favourite playwright? Easy question. It's Bertolt Brecht. He wrote quite a lot of plays, most of them looking at the not-so-nice and not-so-intelligent character traits and acts of human beings. He's the inventor, so to say, of the style of the Epic Theatre, intended to get people to think about what they see on stage, instead of just getting drawn in and getting pulled along.

My favourite piece is the Threepenny Opera, which is one (if not the) of his most upbeat pieces. (Also has great music.) But he also wrote something very relevant to today's developments: "The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui", which is a parable to the rise of Hitler. In case you're interested, there's the full play online, in a version brought onto stage by the CSU Theatre Production:

I only looked at a few of the scenes, but it looks good to me. Brecht-good, which means scary, in this case... There's also music, and dancing, and good costumes, and a lot of very obvious parallels to what we'd prefer to never have again.

If you watch it, I hope you enjoy it - do let me know in the comments what you think about it!  

A lot of people took to the streets the past weekend, protesting against the AfD and their plans to transport us back in time to the Nazi era. Which is a very good thing! You can read a little overview about the rallies here. At least that did go quite well, with lots and lots of citizens standing up and making it clear that we do not want right-wing fascist idiots and arseholes in our government.

It is really, really uncanny to see the parallels between the rise of the AfD now and the rise of the NSDAP back not even a hundred years ago. But apparently, humans are very, very good at forgetting things, especially shitty things. We had a really interesting discussion with some of our friends on the weekend about this. Approximately two generations, one of our friends said, would be the timespan that big impact events would be remembered. Such as, say, World War II.

I was the youngest in the group, and because my gran lived a very long time, I did get to hear some of her stories from wartime, and from after the war. My granddad died when I was five, and I don't remember him talking about the war (he was a soldier, and only did not end up in Stalingrad due to some crazy good luck - he brought his new wife home to his parents, as her family had been bombed out, and when he was supposed to meet up with his company afterwards, he was unable to find them. They went to Stalingrad.) My grand-uncle talked a tiny little bit about his time on a submarine during the war when they visited us, but his wife didn't like that and tried to put a stop to it as soon as she heard it - so there were not a lot of stories from him that I heard.

Even with my own close or close-ish relatives talking about their own experiences, they are very, very far removed from what I can imagine. Some things you just can't conceive of unless you've had a similar experience - and luckily, I've grown up in times of blissful peace and abundance.

And as we chatted about this, the Most Patient Husband of Them All realised that most of the wartime and post-wartime stories that he had heard were from my gran as well, as his grandparents either did not talk about the time, or died too early for him to actually get the first-hand accounts. 

So to me, it's very understandable now that events get forgotten in the third generation, and even the second generation after the first-hand witnesses may have gaps in their knowledge. Because, let's face it, you also need to have an interest in the (hi)stories, and sometimes they are so far removed from what seems important, or worthy of attention, to a child or teenager or young adult with their own problems and troubles and social obligations that they might just not be remembered.

I'm just hoping now that enough of a memory remains here in Germany to stop a repetition of the Third Reich... at least the rallies are a good start, and a good sign. Hopefully the politicians who got the utterly stupid idea that they'd get more voters if they also copy the fascist talk and right-wing strategies are now realising that this is not the case, and they'd better take a clear stance against this inhumane bullshit. 

The next elections, coming up soon, will show us more. We're certainly living in interesting times.

If you listen to what certain extreme right-wing parties have on their agenda, you could feel like we've all been transported back in time. To about, hm, a hundred years ago? Approximately?

Mind you, I'm an archaeologist and as such I do datings just roughly. I won't attempt to pick an exact year to set into a parallel with today, but it definitely feels like the NSDAP has been re-born, and there's unfortunately plenty of people who are on board, and think that going back a century would be the solution to all our modern problems.

I really can't understand how this is happening, and part of me just wants to "disbelieve this illusion". But unfortunately it is no illusion, there's actually politicians saying things about deportation and firing squads out loud, and they are still on their posts and still active. I freaking cannot believe that this is happening here IN GERMANY! Of all places in the world. Goodness, the last survivors of the Holocaust aren't even all dead yet. We still have contemporary witnesses alive. (Oh, by the way, what they are saying is "yes, that's how it started back then".)

So today's work day will be cut short because I'll spend some of it going demonstrating against this fascist right-wing shit. Thank you very much.

Oh, by the way, you can sign about a gazillion of petitions to stop the AfD, and of course if you're in Germany, you can add your warm body to the group on a demonstration near you. There will be quite a lot of them this weekend (Erlangen is a little early, but who cares), and you can find them on this handy map from zusammen-gegen-rechts.org

Please stand up and protest. Write to your Abgeordnete. Say something. Protect our democracy. Because if we're time travelling back to the Nazi Era... we'll all be fucked.

It's really interesting, and a little funny, how sometimes things come back into play that were done for quite different reasons, and a good while ago. Just like today, when I had a phone chat with a colleague and it turned to the topic of looms, and building looms.

That is a topic that I would like to get into a bit more, especially the early medieval horizontal looms. I've had chats with a number of weavers over time, and apparently there's a lot of different loom types, and they will behave quite differently and stress the yarns in different ways, so it would be extremely interesting to try and find out what would be best suited for medieval fabrics.

And now I am pondering how much one needs to know about looms and weaving to be able to build a loom. Is it sufficient to have good, exact plans for a functioning loom? Are there good, exact plans for a functioning loom? Or is it more a project where you'd need to adjust things no matter how elaborate your plans are, and have to know exactly what you are doing, and why, for it to work?

I've had issues with getting tools made before, when the tool-maker was good at their job, but did not know enough about the function of the tool. In my experience, it's unfortunately rather common for craftspeople to make adjustments to the instructions or measurements that you have given them, and that is rarely to the benefit of the tools' functionality afterwards. 

For a warp-weighted loom, there's not too many things that are crucial for the function, and I think I could list all of them without too much trouble. It's a relatively simple tool, after all. But I would not be as positive about knowing what to look out for when building a horizontal loom. And now there's that itch in the back of my brain saying... What would it be? How difficult would it be? How many tries would be necessary to make a good one?

Probably a good thing I don't have the space for a loom here, or the ambition to have one. Otherwise, that woodworking workshop in the basement might be very tempting!

You know that effect when you do something textile-y, and you totally expect a certain outcome, or behaviour of the stuff, and then it just - thwarts you by doing something entirely different? 

Aargh. Yes. And yes, that happened... the knitted test pieces that I made did not exactly what they were supposed to do. So at least it proves the old adage that whatever number of questions you go into an experiment with, you will go out with even more! 

These are two close-ups of knitting, done with plied threads and done with threads held together. Can you tell which is which? And why? 

After washing, they were supposed to look a bit more different... but if there are differences to be seen, well, they are more subtle than what I'd have wished for. So I feel a bit thwarted by my own work, and I'm also wondering why. Was there not enough twist? (There was plenty, I'd have said.) Does it depend on yarn thickness? The last test I did was with thinner yarns, and I had more of an effect there. Or maybe I was knitting too tighly?

Questions, questions, more questions. Well, at least life never gets boring that way!