It's been almost two years since I stumbled across HabitRPG, and I'm still using it. In fact, I'm using it daily. I can't believe it's been this long, and I am often amazed at the difference it makes in my life.

Case in point? Stressful times (like having an editing deadline) usually meant that a lot of the smaller, mundane things fell by the wayside. This includes things like getting some breakfast, or lunch, or putting away used dishes. It also meant long streaks of inactivity on maintenance tasks - getting the picture database up to date, for example, or remembering to defragment the HDD.

Chances of that happening have actually much, much diminished thanks to the "Dailies" column in Habit. Basically, I have a list of those recurring tasks that come up each week, and some of them each day - and they remind me to get my shit together and to get stuff done. For a lot of these smaller dailies, it means a frantic burst of activity towards the evening, but I won't complain about my timing here: they get done, and that is what counts.

For me, it serves as a tool to keep track of things I have to do, helps to motivate me when necessary, and helps me to structure my day. It's not always perfect, but it works very well for me, and it comes with a friendly community and is still growing new and useful features.

I've tried to infect a few of our friends with the Habit virus, more or less successfully so - it's not the perfect to-do list for everybody, or so it seems. I love it, though. (In case you have tried it out - tell me what you think about it in the comments! I'd be very, very interested to hear what you think.)

I'm planning to spend a large chunk of my time today on proofreading - the book has been printed, and I am wielding my Red Pen of Doom and am marking it up. It is always amazing and slightly (or more than slightly) frightening how much of a difference the printout makes. I can proofread someone else's article okay on a screen, but with my own writing or with longer things, nothing can beat a printout and the old-fashioned pen.

While I am reading, you might want to have some words to look at, too. So here are links to provide you with fodder:

First of all, 2015 is the anniversary of the English Magna Carta - and the surviving four copies have actually met for the first time ever. Here's a blog post about their meeting. (And about them.)

Isis at Medieval Silkwork writes about ground fabrics for embroidery. (Those that I know are mostly linen, by the way, with a very few silk ones thrown in. And I've found out that if you are doing counted work, there's a limit to how unbalanced a fabric can be to still have a nice-looking embroidery - distortion, anyone?)

More reading? As in book form reading? Here you go.

Penelope Walton Rogers has her own press now, Pangur Press, and she's starting off with free .pdf versions of some of her earlier publications - including the two volumes from York about textiles and textile production.

There you go. Have fun reading!

I've reviewed my facebook privacy settings this morning. They are not very private, since I use facebook mostly job-related - but it never hurts to check them now and then anyways. So everything was fine. And then I clicked my way through the other possible things in that settings part of FB... and made a discovery.

If you don't like facebook (or others) tracking where you go and what you look at to serve you ads based on that, you can actually opt out of this. It doesn't mean you won't get ads anymore (you will), but the ads are not based on your data. Sounds like a good idea to me!

The site is called http://www.youronlinechoices.com/ - just in case you'd like to opt out, too...

If you've heard one of my presentations about Experimental Archaeology, the chances are high that you have also heard me talk about what defines an archaeological experiment. ExpArch has become a buzzword in recent years, and the term has often been applied to things that are not real experimental archaeology - because it seems to sell well, or excite people, or those doing the description don't know better, or for whatever other reason(s).

Experiments in general are very clearly defined: They are a process that is designed specifically to answer a question. The experiment design has a very great influence on how much of an answer you get, and on how general the answer can be - if you are doing a chemical experiment with, say, helium, you cannot tell things about what would happen with oxygen, or hydrogen in place of the helium.

Experiments, to be called such, also have to be documented clearly, accurately and objectively enough to allow the experiment to be repeated - and the outcome, if things are done correctly in each instance of the experiment, should be the same or at least very similar. This means anybody can, theoretically, replicate a given published experiment to test the reliability of the experiment itself and the answers it gave.

Which means that a proper archaeological experiment needs to be objective, it has to be repeatable, has to be designed to answer a specific question, and the design of the actual process has to be suitable for this  answer - you cannot say something about oak working if you used beech, and you cannot say something about the suitability of old tools if you use modern ones. It also has to be documented accordingly. Everything else is not archaeological experiments - it can be tests of tools and techniques, or archaeotechnic, or playing around, or making replicas, but it's not an experiment.

Now, very obviously, as soon as you go into archaeology, things get a little messier than in a nice, clean chemistry lab or physics facility, where you have controlled environments, controlled substances, and measurable outcomes.

The materials for archaeological experiments are very often natural stuff - and there can be a huge difference between wood and wood, even if it's the same tree species. Plus there's the human factor - craft skills are an important factor, and they are hard to quantify. Many things are also subjective, such as the preference of one style of working over another, or one tool variant over another. Which means that "objective" will, in various instances, turn into "as objective as possible" and "repeatable" into "as repeatable as possible" - since you cannot use the same tree twice. (In some cases, modern stand-in materials can be used to get better repeatability. I've learned about experiments about flint-knapping, for instance, that use specifically made ceramic cores for knapping: similar characteristics for the breaking, and uniform without flaws.)

One of the key things to still get workable results is... documentation. There's no such thing as too much documentation! This is especially important when human factors come into play. It's also important to keep in mind that these human influences may be very significant, and to document (and describe, and publish) accordingly. Even if it's not a proper, full-fledged archaeological experiment, but someone or a group trying out techniques, good documentation of the tests can make a world of a difference when you are trying to make sense of things - or just trying to get an inkling about a single person's skill development.

A very good example of documentation for this can be found on Agata Ulanowska's site. She's lecturing in Warsaw and has been giving courses about old textile techniques for several years, teaching students how to do things like tablet-weaving. For those courses, she's giving out documentation sheets, making it possible to track the progress of each student as well as getting an overview about times for designing, weaving, and finishing projects. The sheets are downloadable from her page (scroll down to find them) - maybe they will be helpful for you as well!

While I've been absent from blogging, interesting stuff has accumulated - plus new things came in, like this note today:

The Guardian: German anthropologist exposed as fraud.

The Rijksmuseum in the Netherlands has made its collection of public domain images freely available on the net, and is very content with the outcome. There's a paper about it here.

And the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremburg is planning an exhibition on early modern dress - due to start sometime this year, as far as I understand the plan.

Something technical to round it up - should you be worried that some spammer might have access to your email and personal data, you can use this handy Identity Leak Checker to find out.

It's time to shower you with links again! So here you go...

Are you looking for a movie to watch on Halloween? Here's a list of 10 horror movies featuring archaeologists.

If you prefer some real-life horror, how about this: the Swedish government wants to close all of the Swedish archaeological institutes in the Mediterranean. No joke. Archaeologik has done an article about this, in German; there is a petition running against the closure. If you want to sign (please do, and please spread the word), there is an explanation at the bottom of the English translation of the letter.

For those of you interested in the history of People of Colour, check out this tumblr "bookshelf" with free downloads - the books are concerning early modern and modern time.

In case you are looking for an excuse to visit Rome, there's a Protolang conference planned for September 2015, with the CfP open.

And finally, a very interesting video on how a seemingly small change in environment can have huge effects: Wolves in Yellowstone.

I just found out that this week is Open Access Week. Yes, it's nice and comfy here under my rock, thank you for asking.

I found out, by the way, from an email sent to me by Maney. The email says they are partaking in Open Access Week - and my first reaction was "yay free access to articles!". Turns out that was wrong, though.

The email tells me about the very generous offer of 50% off the fees if you want to publish an article as OA with them. Yes, that's right - Maney is one of the "author pays for OA" journals, and their fees are quite hefty. Even with 50% off, you'll still shell out between 400 and 1000 USD. Erm... thanks, but no thanks. In my universe, the One Rule still stands: the author never pays. Yes, I know that publishers have to eat, too, and that their money does not come from publishing for free and giving away the published articles, too. It comes from selling what they have published - and I still think that it is fair to pay for what you want to read, provided it is not what Germans call a "Mondpreis" (moon price, literally - an astronomical sum that is totally unrealistic). I'm also convinced that a reasonable pricing of articles, especially older ones, would raise their income far enough that a fair-for-everybody model will be possible. (Or would you hesitate for a second to pay one or two dollars for immediate access to a paper that interests you? Instead of being asked to shell out 30+ dollars, even though the article is several years old and you do not know whether it will really help you on with your research, or not?)

You can laugh about the pricing yourself here. Incidentally, the page also offers the full list of OA articles published with Maney. I do not wonder why there are so few... (There is one about spinners and yarn regulation in 1550-1800 that might be of interest to you, too, written by John Styles.)

If you want to read some more, you can go to Paperity, an article aggregator of OA articles. (I found that via www.openaccessweek.org, by the way. The site seems to try for promoting OA, but also seems fairly small, impact-wise, and it has a layout that is a bit confusing to me.)